Finnish museum design for Chinese tourists

The Joensuu Art Museum is one of the Joensuu museums partnered in the KA9021 project Museums in Focus: Development of Cultural Services for Chinese Tourists (as part of the KareliaCBC Programme, funded by the European Union, Finland and Russia). The Joensuu Art Museum is currently undergoing renovations and some exhibition redesign processes. The exhibition of Chinese art located in the 3rd floor of the art museum is being redesigned and re-exhibited into a more convenient location. At the same time, project staff are working on the implementation of the new navigation systems and producing the audio guides for all three of the Joensuu museums.

For both the implementation of new cultural services for Chinese tourists as any exhibition redesign, museums usually benefit from outside expertise in addition to their own curators. The project team asked Jessie Chen, a researcher on tourism marketing and management from the nearby Joensuu campus of the University of Eastern Finland as well as a tourism industry actor herself, to sit-in on the meetings on the redesign of the Chinese exhibition and introduce her expertise to how to present the exhibitions of the Joensuu Art Museum to Chinese tourists.

In addition, since the art museum exhibits a collection of Chinese art, Jessie was able to give valuable advice on which interesting topics and themes to present in the exhibition to non-Chinese people as well. The stories and themes about the different periods of Chinese art which are especially appealing to Chinese tourists can often also interest Finns and other tourists, if they are given the opportunity to experience them.