8th edition of Paris Asia Week, Guimet+, from 2024 to future exhibitions:

Anne Yanover, Guimet Museum's Director of the Programming and the Audience Engagement answered our questions !

Mythical city of Angkor, iconic world of Japanese manga’s, Asia photographs by Marc Riboud and Michael Kenna, the year 2025 is a promise of a wonderful exploration of universal heritage, contemporary creation and pop culture.

The major Guimet+ project is also an undeniable feature of 2025. The Guimet museum has launched an innovative four-year program in several French cities, offering the public an introduction to Asia through the masterpieces of its artistic productions.

In May 2023, you joined the Guimet museum as Director of Programming and Audience Engagement. Could you tell us a little more about your position, and your background?

The Programming and Audience Department is made up of 5 divisions: temporary exhibitions, publications, museum outreach and signage, cultural outreach and audiences, and the auditorium. In short, we are responsible for managing the Guimet Museum's public offerings in Paris, France and abroad.

In Paris, this extends over three sites: the Guimet Museum on Place d'Iéna, which is the main museum; the Hôtel d'Heidelbach on Avenue d'Iéna, which will soon house “La Villa Guimet”, an international research center on Asia; and finally the Ennery Museum, a private mansion on Avenue Foch, which presents the rich Japanese and Chinese collections of Clémence d'Ennery and offers a journey back in time through its 19th-century museography.

Since this year, our offer has extended nationwide with the opening of Guimet+ in several French cities ! We've already opened Guimet+ Clermont-Ferrand and Guimet+ Digne-les-Bains, and this year we'll be opening Guimet+ Montpellier.

And internationally, in Asia and the United States, with exhibition and symposium projects. Next March, for example, we are co-organizing a symposium in Hong Kong on the major issues facing museums today.

So it's a broad and exciting spectrum, which enables me to deploy the same vision in all our actions, with the entire Programming and Audience Engagement team, and in liaison with the museum's other departments.

Previously, I was director of the Paul Eluard's Art and History Museum in Saint-Denis, where I arrived in 2014 as head of the collections department, before taking over as director of the establishment from 2019 to 2023.

Before that, I had worked in a network of public collections of modern and contemporary (Western) art. I spent 7 and a half years on the road, visiting museums all over France and Belgium, providing advice on documentation and collections management. I helped museums with complex projects that required methodological advice, such as inventory checks, computerized regulatory inventories, moving storage facilities, and joint publication projects involving several institutions. I also worked on more scientific issues relating to contemporary art and restoration, to collectively define good professional practices for new cases that arose.

This gave me the opportunity to discover an important number of museums ! After a while, I felt the need to get involved in one of them rather than 60, to be closer to its projects and public.

The next edition of Asia Week Paris will take place from June 5 to 12, and the Guimet Museum’s program promises to be particularly rich. Could you tell us more about it?

The 8th edition of Printemps Asiatique marks a particularly important moment for us. The Guimet Museum would have just opened an exceptional exhibition on the royal bronzes of Angkor, the fruit of international cooperation with the Cambodian Ministry of Culture. Cambodia has entrusted us with one of its finest treasures: the great reclining Vishnu, which the Guimet Museum had the honor and responsibility of bringing to France for a study at the C2RMF (Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France), followed by a restoration at the Arc'Antique laboratory in Nantes, and its pedestal for presentation at this major exhibition opening on the 30th of April. This exceptional sculpture will be presented in majesty in the museum's Khmer courtyard! The Guimet Museum is also responsible for organizing the touring of this exhibition in the United States before these masterpieces will return to Cambodia. It's a huge project, which will be accompanied by a rich artistic and cultural program.

We can already announce a major symposium to be held on Saturday June 7 during the Paris Asia Week festival on the theme of bronzes !

Another exhibition particularly close to our hearts, opening on June 11, 2025 during the 8th edition of Printemps Asiatique, is “Haïkus d'argent, l'Asie photographiée par Micheal Kenna”, curated by Edouard de Saint-Ours, curator of photographic collections at the Musée Guimet. This will be the first major retrospective of Michael Kenna's work in Asia, for which he has a deep attachment. The exhibition will also reveal the secrets of Michael Kenna's meticulous technique, in a section devoted to the making of these images.

Vishnu, Khmer art, Angkorian period, second half of the 11th century

Western Mebon, Angkor, Siem Reap province, Cambodia

Bronze

Michael Kenna, Huangshan Mountains, Study 1, Anhui, China, 2008.

Gelatin-silver print.

Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie

How did the Guimet Museum fare in 2024 ?

The year 2024 was marked by great momentum, reflected in a very positive attendance record, rising up to 80% in two years ! Despite the Olympic Games of Paris 2024 which consequently had an impact on attendance in most museums, this was not the case in Guimet Museum nonetheless grew by 22% on the previous year. We crossed the 300,000-visitor mark, which has not happened since 2008 (171,608 visitors in 2022, 251,342 in 2023 and 307,281 in 2024). A very significant increase, which we hope will be amplified and sustained. To achieve this, we have a very proactive visitor development and communication strategy, with a rich program designed to appeal to a diverse audience. A survey carried out in 2022 showed that visitor numbers were driven by people who were loyal to the Guimet Museum, connoisseurs with whom we still hope to satisfy. But our aim is to expand, to open the museum to a public less familiar with Asian museums and cultures. As a national museum, it's part of our mission to reach out to wide audience, and to share the treasures of our collections.

With this in mind, we have embarked on a project to improve the mediation of the permanent galleries for this year. Our aim is to better guide the visitors in the museum. This attention to all audiences extends to our temporary exhibitions and publications, as well as to our artistic and cultural programming, which must be both rich and diversified.

The auditorium's attendance figures are quite emblematic. While we had 4 344 spectators at the auditorium in 2023, in the course of 2024 we reached the 15,558 spectator mark. The number of events has also increased, from 72 to 100. We're determined to keep up the momentum and make our program as attractive as possible.

During the summer of 2024, the Guimet Museum presented a major exhibition on the Silk Roads in Draguignan. Last December marked the opening of the Guimet+ Project, through which masterpieces from the Guimet Museum will be exhibited in the regions. How did this project come about?

Guimet+ is the project for the regional deployment of our collections. The starting point is that a national museum has a vocation to reach out to all audiences nationwide, and not just those lucky enough to pass through the museum's door in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.

Traditionally, national museums are present in the regions through loans of works, deposits of works, temporary or traveling exhibitions (presented for 3 to 5 months on average) or through artistic and cultural actions outside the museum walls. Our idea with Guimet + was to imagine a project combining all the benefits of these types of action in a program that was both ambitious and long-lasting. Time is of the essence, since it takes time to forge links with local cultural players, with the educational community, with associations – particularly those working in the social field – and with different types of audience (or non-audience).

We wanted to embrace an in-depth approach : how could we make a deep impression on the audiences in these areas in which the museum would be investing ?

The museum's strong commitment is to remain in each regional museum for 4 years, while seeking to renew content to maintain its appeal. Guimet+ thus proposes each year, the discovery of a different cultural area.

How does the project pay particular attention to its carbon footprint ?

We know that temporary exhibitions have a significant carbon footprint, first with the scenography that is built and often destroyed at the end of the exhibition - although at the Guimet Museum we require our scenographers to recycle some of the furniture used, while remaining very creative. It's a point to which we attach the utmost importance. Nevertheless, even with this particular attention to detail, there's still a lot of construction, and therefore a lot of destruction. The strong, innovative approach we've adopted is to create a permanent scenography for 4 years. We'll come back to this point, as it's very important to us.

Transportation is also a major issue, especially when it comes to international air transport. Here, we're talking about transport within France by truck, which represents a lower carbon cost. Public transport is also a major issue in terms of environmental impact. Guimet+ is designed for a local scale, that of the city, metropolis or department. Of course, we hope that it will arouse interest on a regional scale, and even attract tourists, but our audiences will essentially be local, so here too we are contributing to a reduction in the exhibition's carbon impact.

As we were talking about the scenography, how did you go about presenting the pieces to the public ?

To have the same scenography for 4 years, with a different exhibition every year, we had to find some tricks. I have to say that the process was extremely intellectually rewarding. With the help of a formidable design and production team, and some very creative and innovative scenographers, we were able to come up with a powerful scenography that could be adapted to the different content.

Each year, we renew the content by presenting a different cultural area: China, Japan, the Indian World and the Himalayan World. The idea is to have Guimet+ simultaneously in different French cities and to circulate the content.

These Guimet+ “contents” present masterpieces from the national collection, accompanied by ambitious mediation tools. We have built the project around a standard exhibition: an introduction followed by 4 sections, plus a territorial section enabling our partners to present pieces from their collections. For example, the museums of Clermont-Ferrand have very interesting collections of Asian textiles, which until now have not been presented to the public at all.

In each of the four sections of the tour, we have introduced a mediation module aimed at all audiences, including children and the disabled. These modules include olfactory, sound and visual devices (deciphering iconography with a touch screen). One of the sections is equipped with a more playful device.

In addition, an immersive space offers visitors the chance to immerse themselves in an emblematic location from one of the proposed geographical areas. For China, it's a scholar's studio; for Japan, a tea pavilion. For the other two geographic areas we'll be designing this year, it'll be a music salon for the Indian world, and a chapel for the Himalayan world.

The tour's themes have been designed for audiences unfamiliar with Asian cultures: the beauty, the sacred, the prestige and the transgression. These are universal themes, with which everyone can identify. It seemed to us that this was a way of facilitating encounters with these cultures, which can seem remote to many visitors.

"In the scholar's studio"

Guimet+Chine at Roger Quillot Art Museum, Clermont-Ferrand

"The sacred" Guimet+ Japan at the Maison Alexandra David-Neel in Dignes-les-Bains

How did you work with the various regional museums ?

Guimet+ was designed by the Guimet Museum, in close collaboration with our regional partners. Our museum was in charge of selecting the works, in collaboration with the entire curatorial team and in a spirit of co-construction with our regional partners.

From a budgetary point of view, the Guimet Museum and its sponsors are responsible for the design and production of the system, as well as its installation at the various sites. Our local partners are responsible for preventive conservation, surveillance, cultural mediation and programming.

What other project(s) can you announce for 2025?

2025 is a very important year at the Guimet Museum, with the exhibition we mentioned earlier on the royal bronzes of Angkor. Another very large (since it will occupy all the museum's exhibition spaces) and ambitious exhibition will open on November 19, 2025, on Japanese Mangas’. The two forthcoming photo exhibitions are also very close to our hearts. First, Marc Riboud and Vietnam next March, then as I mentioned, Micheal Kenna's photographs of Asia on June 11, during the 8th edition of Printemps Asiatique.