In the spring of 2018, art will bring the Holy See and China closer to each other by means of several joint exhibitions that will be held simultaneously at the Vatican and in Beijing.

The joint announcement was made in the Holy See Press Office by the director of the Vatican Museums, Barbara Jatta; Zhu Jiancheng, Secretary General of the China Culture Industry Investment Fund; and Monsignor Paolo Nicolini, administrative delegate for the Vatican Museums.

Some forty works of art will be exchanged by the two cultural institutions. Among those lent by the Vatican, most will come from its Chinese antique collections from the “Anima Mundi” Museum.

Among the works lent by China and that will be exhibited next spring in the Ethnological Museum of the Vatican will be twelve pieces by the artist Zhang Yan.

With relations at a standstill between the Holy See and China, this joint event will be an opportunity to establish informal contact based on beauty, “an extraordinary vehicle for talking at every latitude and longitude, physical or temporal, without fear”, explained Barbara Jatta.

This project is another example of this art of diplomacy being accomplished through the “diplomacy of art”, along the same lines as the exhibition on the Church in Korea in September of 2017, and the Russian icons planned for 2018.