30 Years, More In-depth Research

NSM adheres to conducting original research on the origin of silk, cultural exchanges on the Silk Roads, traditional weaving and dyeing, textile protection and restoration and so forth, and strives to build a "research-oriented museum" and continue to lead the international silk culture research.

Simultaneously, NSM takes silk as the research object to promote international cooperation in cultural and scientific exchanges in a comprehensive way. It also intends to provide technical support for the research on textiles unearthed from national sites along the Silk Roads by setting up overseas workstations and carrying out project cooperation. The research results are published in multilingual forms. Now, the research team has comprehensively sorted out the silks scattered in the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes from Britain, France, Russia, and other countries, and published the "Textiles from Dunhuang" in multiple languages, which fills the void of Dunhuang Studies in silk research. The study is an important support for research in the fields of the Silk Roads, textile and clothing art history and other related fields. At the same time, the team started the "Chinese Silk Art Series" project, which will comprehensively collect, organize, research, edit and publish 100 volumes of Chinese silk cultural relics collected in museums around the world.

NSM is also actively exploring and constructing knowledge content from a global perspective. In 2020, the museum launched the "World Map of Silk" which is a cooperation project with scholars and universities from many countries abroad. The project is based on the silk heritage from a global perspective and the identification of silk cultural relics, dating, geographical traceability, technical restoration, modelling analysis and so forth. As a cross-language interactive map of world silk, it aims to conduct correlation analysis on the silk heritage information in it, to help carry out cooperative research on silk cultural exchanges, develop real-time interactive, growable and evolvable knowledge service technologies, and visualize the research results, to improve the World Silk Heritage Framework and build a global knowledge community.

30 years, Build a fashion museum

As the first national silk professional museum in China, NSM mainly focused on displaying the development achievements of China's textile and silk industry at the beginning of its establishment. At the same time, through the analysis of its own advantages and the observation of the world's top art museums, NSM decided to take fashion as the entry point to build a fashion museum in China, in line with international standards.

Upholding this belief, NSM launched its first fashion exhibition "Discovery· FASHION: 2011 Annual Fashion Review", presenting the 2011 annual fashion trends from clothing and fabrics, home textile fabrics and finished products, clothing, and fashion information, showing the fashion side of China and directly introduced the concept of fashion into the museum exhibition. Today, the Fashion China Annual Review Series of NSM has gone through 11 years and has closely focused on sorting out representative fashion weeks, events, exhibitions, and other similar activities in the country, sifted and collected the most influential designer works and textile fabric products of the year, and held a series of fashion forums, fashion shows, and other series, that has attracted much attention in China.

At the same time, NSM further extended its fashion vision to the world, cooperated with ROM and V&A, and launched "Dior by Dior (1947-1957)" and "Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion" in 2019 and 2020, which attracted widespread attention.

In 2022, NSM adheres to the tenet of "making cultural relics alive and making life better” and joins hands with Hangzhou Tower to jointly create the "NSM· Fashion Museum", bringing the fashion collections of the museum into the most fashionable place in Hangzhou’s shopping mall. On February 26, the first exhibition of "NSM· Fashion Museum", titled "Fashion Silhouettes" raised its curtains, and new exhibitions will be held every quarter. Director Zhao Feng said: "The National Silk Fashion Museum is a cooperation between Zhejiang cultural institutions and Hangzhou commercial business. This is the first state-owned museum in China which enters the commercial space in the city center and holds a long-term special exhibition in it; Hangzhou Tower has also become the first large-scale commercial space in China that introduce exhibitions from national museums on a long-term basis; finally, this is the first fashion museum to be opened in fashion space. Therefore, it is of great significance and has a long-lasting influence.”

30 Years, Further Down the Silk Roads

China is the birthplace of silk in the world, and the long-standing Chinese silk culture has written a profound chapter in Chinese civilization. The ancient Silk Roads connect the East and the West and have become an important trade and cultural exchange channel, making outstanding contributions to mutual learning between Eastern and Western civilizations.

To this end, the National Silk Museum has held the "Silk Road" themed exhibitions for seven consecutive years since 2015, showing the profound cultural heritage and superb silk technology of the oriental country of silk in an all-round way, becoming a golden symbol for Zhejiang to carry out cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries. Among them, in 2020, the exhibition "The Silk Roads: Before and After Richthofen" won the Top 10 Exhibitions Awards for all the museums in China.

The rapid development of the museum is inseparable from the painstaking efforts of the leaders. The director, Dr. Zhao Feng, was appointed as the deputy director in 1991 and served as the director in 2010, now it is his 31st year working at NSM. He is not only a top expert in the field of Chinese silk and textiles but also an important force in the field of international textiles and museums. He has visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the British Museum in London as a visiting researcher. He is also member of the ICOM Ethics Committee (ETHCOM), member of the Centre International d'Etude des Textiles Anciens (CIETA), and chairman of the International Association for the Study of Silk Road Textiles (IASSRT). While attaching great importance to the internationalization of national silk, he will also devote more to promoting the voice of Chinese museums on the international stage. "In the next 30 years, I hope that NSM can adhere to the consistent concept of 'Broad vision, Solid foundation, High specificity, Exquisite craftsmanship', take the wind of the times, condense social aspirations, gather the strength of the whole museum, and build a comprehensive, research-oriented, internationalized and fashionable Chinese silk museum.”