Nicholas Thomas is the director of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. He likens museums to regions and nations in which all sorts of disparate elements are brought together [...] The thrust of his ruminations on the nature of collections is that, like collections of people, the sum is greater than the parts because of the dialogues, conversations, connections and interactions between inanimate objects as well as people.

In the context of this fraught historical moment, Tehran’s new exhibition is being promoted as a bracing act of cultural diplomacy. The exhibition is a collaboration between the government-owned TMoCA, the commercial Mohsen Gallery, and the Emirati Barjeel Art Foundation. It encompasses work from a variety of Arab countries 

This ongoing humanitarian crisis is also a crisis of cultural heritage [...] Amid such senseless destruction and despair, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto has launched an encouraging and thought-provoking exhibition, Syria: A Living History, celebrating Syria’s “cultural diversity, historical continuity, resourcefulness, and resilience.”

Mexico City announced Thursday it would open a new tourism route called "The China Experience" to promote Chinese culture and cuisine. The route, offered by the city's leading tour bus operator Turibus, is built around two exhibitions currently on show at prestigious downtown museums, namely "China's National Art Museum Masterpieces" and "The Memory of Hands: The Splendor and Color of Guizhou's Heritage".

Young Chinese, including those in Hong Kong, must learn from history if they truly want to make the world a better place, says the founder of Shanghai’s first “comfort women” museum that opened at the weekend. “It’s always important to learn from history,” said Professor Su Zhiliang of Shanghai Normal University, who spent more than two decades researching the issue of comfort women 

At the time, the field of mosaic conservation and documentation was still very much in a nascent phase both at the University of Damascus and at Syria’s museums, and digital archiving [...] gradually replaced the antiquated system of index cards. It was an ambitious initiative that was moving apace until the sirens of war brought it all to a halt in 2011.

It’s been 70 years since the Korean peninsula was divided into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea (South Korea). It is a story of divergence in almost every realm imaginable: political, economic, social, and of course, cultural. American University’s Katzen Arts Center’s parallel exhibitions highlight the artistic dimension of this split.