The East Asian Museum was newly inaugurated - but threats of closure and a canceled exhibition overshadow the party

Saturday's reopening of the East Asian Museum was a day of celebration with free entry to updated premises and new exhibitions, accompanied by Japanese taiko drums, K-pop and Bollywood dance. But this at the same time as a threat of closure hangs like black clouds over the museum on Skeppsholmen and it echoes desolately in the voids after the canceled main investment.

In the airy stairwell and large sculpture hall, the legendary Chinese artist Qi Baishi (1864 –1957) was to be honored with an immersive and interactive presentation, as well as 40 ink paintings. But the museum was forced to cancel the exhibition after the delivery of works from China froze inside. DN was able to reveal a background in diplomatic pressure, when the Chinese embassy expressed strong criticism of a work by a Taiwanese artist that was also part of East Asia's opening program (see DN 24/8).

Letting outsiders control the content of a Swedish museum is out of the question (especially since the principle of "arm's length distance" has been included in the Museum Act since 2017). Now "The sun of Zeelandia" is the first thing the audience encounters, placed next to the museum entrance.

Kao Jun-Honn's work is based on a 400-year-old shield, acquired by the Swede Fredrik Coyet, who took a position in the Dutch East India Company and was governor of Formosa (now Taiwan). The artist has researched the shield's history and had 19 Taiwanese children draw its plant motifs – plants derived both from the indigenous Makatao people and imported from the Netherlands.

The work is part of the government project "Bringing the objects to life and challenging the museums' colonial histories". The artist's intention is to "decolonize" the shield, by transforming it into a sun adorned with the aforementioned children's drawings. With its sheer floral motifs, it is a beautiful work, but there probably the vast majority miss the underlying point against war and colonialism. It is a mystery to me that this subtle work could endanger a large-scale exhibition of Chinese art.

Inside the museum, most things are the same, apart from the empty spaces and a new lift, a new cafe and a renovated workshop, Ateljé ginkgo, which has been equipped for more creative activities. The base exhibits are largely unchanged, though with some news.

In the Japan collection, it is possible to closely study the aforementioned magnificent shield from the 17th century, whose lacquering on animal skin has been identified as Japanese craftsmanship. Here you can find everything from skillfully carved miniature sculptures, so-called netsuke (belt buttons) and an antique samurai armor, to rustic mingeike ceramics and a kimono with war propaganda from the 1930s-40s.

A new small exhibition, "Stitch after stitch", contains about a dozen so-called boro-textiles, based on a Japanese poor man's technique of carefully patching and mending worn garments. There are both older textiles that have become collectors' items and contemporary designs inspired by boro and the sashiko sewing technique. It both extends and beautifies the life of textiles, particularly visible in a deep indigo blue furoshiki (carrier or wrap) from the 1870s-80s, with decorative white fan-shaped stitches.

East Asian owns one of the world's finest china collections, with objects that are several thousand years old. The basic exhibition "Mittens rike" is in itself worth a return visit and has received a new audio guide.

In subdued lighting, everything is exposed from the bronze lid with the world's oldest known inscription (testifying to the collapse of feudalism) and wooden grave figurines, to the finest blue-and-white porcelain from the Ming Dynasty and the Gripsholm service that the Swedish East India Company probably gave to Gustav III. The importance of the devoted amateur archaeologist Gustaf VI Adolf as a donor is also highlighted.

The Korea Gallery is a bright hall where the oldest objects are dated to the 4th century. But here I am stuck with two contemporary works: the magnificent porcelain urn with a flying dragon and a stoneware pot decorated with a crowd of people, some of whom have symbolically fallen off.

Among the museum's new exhibitions, the largest is "In our lives", with stories by and about the Swedish-Asian diaspora. It opens with Louise Sinaga Helmfrid's photo series "North", which makes visible how Swedish traditions are partly renegotiated in meetings with Asian cultural expressions. Subsequent rooms highlight five practices that have become part of Swedish everyday life: yoga, meditation, Indian dance, Asian food culture and Thai boxing.

Within these fields, the audience can encounter stories about and by prominent individuals, via text, photos and moving images, supplemented by roughly a dozen museum objects. Of course, the intangible cultural heritage is interesting in several ways, but here East Asiatic is more of a cultural history than an art history museum, as before.

My greatest experience is a small room with original cherry wood furnishings from 1963 and the exhibition "Four Perfections" (poetry, calligraphy, painting and seal art). It was intended to provide a background to Qi Baishi's artistry, with the works of old masters he admired.

Here now also hangs an ink painting by himself, "Against the current", with fish so expressively caught that I am even more saddened by the canceled exhibition.

The East Asian Museum has a fantastically fine and valuable collection in an atmospheric old building and since the 1990s has been part of the authority World Culture Museums - in Stockholm together with the Mediterranean Museum and Etnografiska. The latter museum has to wait for a rent increase of 57 percent (!) from the State Property Agency, which in the spring caused the superintendent to warn of a financial crisis and a possible termination of the East Asian and Mediterranean Museum's premises (see DN 3/3).

The bourgeois government then ordered an investigation into three possible ways forward – stay in existing premises, co-locate in fewer places, expand Etnografiska. As early as October 1, the analysis should be ready, hardly a thorough examination in such a short time. We can only hope that a future government is prepared to protect our ancient museums for the future.