A Taiwan museum plans for the first time to lend a major painting for exhibition in the Mainland, reports Kate Taylor for the New York Times via Agence France-Presse. The National Taiwan Museum plans to lend a seventeenth-century portrait of a Chinese general, along with other artworks, to the Hubei Provincial Museum in the central of the Mainland and another museum in Fujian Province for exhibitions next year. In exchange, the museum in Hubei will lend more than one-hundred objects to the National Taiwan Museum for an exhibition in November.

Taiwan has been hesitant to send important artworks to the Mainland, fearing they would be confiscated. But this painting does not belong to a group of artifacts that is the subject of particular contention between the countries: thousands of the Mainland imperial treasures that were shipped to Taiwan in 1949 by the Mainland Nationalists, who were being routed by the Communists. Those objects now form the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The National Palace Museum maintains that it will not lend objects to China until the Chinese Mainland government formally agrees that it will not seize them.
 

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