The performative space for city identity narrative: A case study of Suzhou Museum

Introduction

In the field of communication studies, it is not very common to take museums as a specific object for research. Many scholars, to be sure, have noted the nature of the museum as a kind of communication medium. Silverstone (1992), for example, believes that like other media, museums entertain and inform, tell stories and construct arguments, aim to please and educate, define an agenda, translate the otherwise unfamiliar and inaccessible into the familiar and accessible, and, in the construction of their texts, displays, and technologies, offer an ideologically inflected account of the world. Seen in a broader perspective, the museum, which evolved from the rise of the modern city, has in fact been woven into the fabric of city communication systems. For example, taking the city of Shanghai and Shanghai’s Bund as media for interpretation, Sun (2011, 2012) of Fudan University depicts forms of communication that are embedded therein and interact with each other and reveals their inherent and represented traces of culture and history.

Museum as a mediaspace is open and public; it is both a public space in itself and participates in shaping a vaster public space (Yang, 1999), which can be seen as a stage set for performances by a variety of exhibits, where visitors, wandering and immersing themselves, constitute part of the performance. Meanwhile, the museum’s spatial display always indicates a time dimension of the exhibits, which “frame objects and audiences to control the viewing process, to suggest a tightly woven narrative of progress, an ‘authentic’ mirror of history” (Marstine, 2006, p. 5). As a kind of collective cultural memory, visitors’ experiences both draw on self-identified resources and project new meanings. Thus, the mediaspace of the museum constitutes an open and uninterrupted narrative text in the interactions between different subjects. In other words, this mediaspace is not merely a place for cultural performance and aesthetic appreciation, or a specific platform for social interactions and construction of meaning, but also a constructed narrative itself, participating in the community’s narration of its history and identity through regulating the display and exhibition activities. This undoubtedly fits in with the cultural model of communication, which sees “communication as the construction of a shared space or map of meaning within which people co-exist” (Grossberg, Wartella, Whitney, & Macgregor Wise, 2014, p. 21). Given that cultural experiences in a museum make up an important part of social interaction, meaning construction, and an empirical phenomenon, museums deserve great academic attention as an object of communication research.

We can start from the narrative analysis in carrying out the investigation of a museum because, as the British media and cultural scholar Kidd (2012, p. 81) points out, “the museum—physically, architecturally and institutionally—has a story to tell.” The narrative of a museum unveils a collective memory couched in a particular system, that is, “a group’s historical narrative based on feeling and identity” (Gedi & Elam, 1996). This narrative is reflected not only in the museum’s building and physical exhibits but also in visitors’ cultural experiences such as visiting, appreciating, and relaxing. Thus, both the “imagined community” and “imagination of community,” in Benedict Anderson’s terms, achieve their materialized presence. Therefore, the importance of the visitors throughout the museum narrative should not be neglected. In recent years, as Kidd (2012) states, there has been an “acknowledgement of multiple viewpoints, understandings and ‘truths’ in the ways such narratives unfold on site, and an interest in working with the subjectivity inherent in visitor response” (pp. 74–82). Bakhtin’s (1992, p. 160) dialogic theory points out that the truth “is generated in the process of dialogue” between different subjects. De Certeau’s (2009) “practice of everyday life” theory reminds us that the visiting subjects develop their own “tactics” through their daily practice to challenge the “strategy” model that reflects the will of power and the rational design and to complete a rewriting of a given space. All these provide theoretical support for us to analyze visitors’ narratives.

As a mediaspace, the museum, either national or local, is constructed through narrative activities. The museum plays a very important role “in the affirmation of local identity and pride” (Macdonald, 2006, p. 113). How museum narrative contributes to a local identity becomes a question worthy of special attention. To this end, we take Suzhou Museum as a case, analyze its multidimensional and constitutive characteristics about the Suzhou city identity, and examine the interactions between subjects and the generation of multiple meanings.

Founded in 1960, Suzhou Museum has been defined as “a local comprehensive museum of art history.” In 2003, the Suzhou municipal government invested 339 million yuan in a new museum next to the old one located in the Zhong Wang Fu (or Prince Zhong’s Mansion), a complex of 19th-century historical structures. The new museum was built in 2006 and was opened free to the public in 2008. It is also set out in its “12th Five-Year Plan” (2011–2015) that every effort by Suzhou Museum “should be conducive to inheriting traditional and local civilization, to promoting the city’s image and educated taste, to meeting the needs of public cultural enjoyment and the enhancement of community livelihood.” ¹ This plan encapsulates three basic aspects of Suzhou’s city identity that the Museum attempts to help construct: the regional cultural tradition, the modern image of the city, and the citizens’ cultural life. Centering on these aspects, the narrative of Suzhou Museum produces meanings of city identity and constructs a communication space for the meanings.

This article studies the Suzhou Museum narrative from three aspects, that is, the museum’s architecture, its exhibitions, and visitors. Empirical materials for the study include (1) documents of the new Suzhou Museum on architectural design and construction, the related internal information provided by Suzhou Museum, and my multiple onsite observations of the exterior, inward structure, and the collections on display of the Museum; (2) interviews with the curator, deputy curator in charge of information technology, and head of the editing and publishing department of the museum; and (3) information gathered from the museum’s official website, its microblogging Weibo, public account of social networking services WeChat and mobile APP, one scheduled visitor interview, and random interviews with six visitors.

This article regards above-mentioned materials as open and diverse narrative texts for analysis so as to carry out a multifaceted study of the Suzhou Museum narrative, from the exterior to the interior and from the physical to the activities. It addresses the following four questions: First, how is the Suzhou Museum narrative composed? Second, how does the narrative construct the city’s identity? Third, how do museum visitors participate in the narrative and act on the city identity? Fourth, how does new media technology, as the infrastructure and virtual platform for exhibition and exhibitors and a means of communication, enrich and transform the museum narrative constitution and lead to diverse experiences? This article will apply the analysis of narrative structure, narrative time, and narrative voice to the interpretation and reconstruction of those data so as to extend the case study of a local museum to a general discussion of how such a unique urban space is constructed as a venue, participates as a medium in the construction of city identity, and makes it possible as a materialized meaning system where citizens obtain diverse experiences through new media technology.

The museum’s architectural narrative: inspiring an integrative imagination

Analysis of the museum narrative starts with the museum architecture which can be regarded as a primary narrator because “it is precisely the architectural configuration that gives the museum meaning. The architecture determines the viewing conditions both conceptually and physically. It not only frames the exhibits but also shapes our visitor experience” (Giebelhausen, 2006, p. 42). As far as the new Suzhou Museum is concerned, its architecture is of particular significance.

In 1999, Suzhou municipal government invited Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei to design a new Suzhou Museum, to be located in the northeast section of the historic quarter of the city, adjoining the Humble Administrator’s Garden (Zhuozheng Yuan 拙政园), which is a United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, and Prince Zhong’s Mansion (Zhong Wang Fu 忠王府), a national heritage site and where Suzhou Museum was originally located. Across the street is the Lion Grove Garden, which is a well-preserved classical garden in Suzhou dating back to the 11th century. Site selection means the determination of spatial location, and with it, a spatial meaning-communicating structure will then take shape because space in the museum is “a phenomenological reality, a set of perceptions subject to constant structuring and restructuring in the imagination and experiences of all those involved in the museum’s mediation of the world” (Silverstone, 1992, p. 40). It is obvious that site selection for the new museum poses a huge challenge: the new modern building is not supposed to destroy the original layout of this historic quarter or to undermine the original style of the world’s cultural heritage. Much of this indicates that the invitation of Mr Pei by Suzhou for the design of the new museum is very different than selecting a master architect for an ordinary project.

The unique significance of the new Suzhou Museum lies first and foremost in telling a story of how tradition and modernity merge together. Born into a very prominent family from Suzhou, Mr Pei spent a memorable time in his childhood at the Lion Grove Garden, a private residence of the Pei family at the time. As Pei accepted the invitation for the design, the emotional link between his life experience and the traditional Suzhou gardens naturally eased the possible tension between protection of cultural heritage and a modern architectural design. It also partly weakened the perceived contradictions in the minds of many between tradition and modernity. Media reports said that Pei regarded this historical and culturally significant piece of land as a “holy place” (Gao, 2007, p. 33). All this seems to have been confirmed by what actually happened later: experts and ordinary people alike can all feel at first glance that the new museum’s design integrates the traditional architectural style of Suzhou by placing the museum among the courtyards and keeping the entire building’s height low, with white walls and gray roofs blending seamlessly with the surrounding ancient architecture. So, in the eyes of Suzhou residents, their sense of familiarity with the new architecture exceeds their unexpected surprise (Gao, 2007, p. 47). The division of functional areas inside the museum building features the elements of traditional culture without rejecting modern culture, with the west wing housing traditional cultural relics and the east exhibiting modern art.

This architecture is also a story of how user customization dovetails with designer personality. Pei’s architectural design has his distinctly personal style, characterized by abstraction, unique pattern, and the use of stone, concrete, glass, and steel. People might wonder how the emphasis on traditional local culture by Suzhou Municipal Government, the proprietor of the new Museum, will be materialized in the hands of such a master architect. As it turns out, everywhere in the new museum we can feel the elements of traditional Suzhou gardens—the Jiangnan-style multi-pitched roof, ² the dormer window on the very center of the rooftop of the central hall, the clearly recognizable axis through the atrium lobby, a pool of clear water reflecting rockery and tall bamboos, white walls, and dark gray lines, all a fitting tribute to the Jiangnan style or, more specifically, the southern Anhui-style architecture. However, once in the museum, one can immediately see the straight lines, supports, and corners throughout and feel its impressive modern features of a distinctively I. M. Pei style: the metal beams, structural glass eaves, modern geometric sloped roof, diamond-shaped granites in what is called Chinese black for rooftops replacing the traditional brick tiles. Pei’s iconic element of light is also reflected here in the triangular light filter plate, natural light from the dormer window penetrating the filter plates of different shapes, and the traditional lotus pond where the first- and the second-floor halls and the underground join with its water coming from a tank built on top of the towering black marbles.

With such a blend of tradition and modernity, personality, and customization, the new Suzhou Museum echoes Pei’s design principle for this project, that is, “Chinese style with innovation and Suzhou style with creativity.” This blend also means that Suzhou Museum is a piece of architecture not only symbolic of Suzhou’s local culture but also ranks among the great oeuvres of I. M. Pei as cosmopolitan cultural symbols, including the John F. Kennedy Library, glass-and-steel pyramid for the Musée du Louvre, National Gallery East Building in Washington, DC, German Historical Museum, Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, and Miho Art Museum in Japan. Thus, with this piece of architecture, the urban image of the Suzhou city and its cultural characteristics have thus linked up with the rest of the world, showcasing the city’s charm to the world and the cosmopolitan imagination of the local. Seen in this light, the new Suzhou Museum also tells a story of how the local connects and relates to the global.

Such narrative discourse is undeniably a result of choice inasmuch as discordant voices, if any, must be avoided or weakened. There was considerable opposition when the proposed site selection was announced to the public (Zhang, 2003). In September 2003, Suzhou Municipal Government organized a high-level feasibility meeting at which well-known experts of the field such as Luo Zhewen, Wu Liangyong, and Zhou Ganzhi were present, and they eventually confirmed the current site selection plan. ³ To accommodate the construction of the new Suzhou Museum, both Zhang’s House of Charity and the Benevolent Hall, originally seated in the ancient architecture protection quarter, were relocated to Yuanlin Road, which involved 10 ancient buildings and 1 modern building totaling 2834 m² (Gu, 2013). This means that the emphasis on the protection of cultural heritage in the new Suzhou Museum is achieved at the expense of sacrificing some traditional architectural space, but the paradox is clearly not included in the dominant narrative of the new Suzhou Museum building.

As mentioned above, the new Suzhou Museum’s division of the functional areas highlights the traditional culture but is inclusive of modern culture. The western half of the space there exhibits traditional culture, while across the courtyard in the eastern half lie the gallery of modern art and the classical oriental Tea House. This spatial assignment shows the dominant position of classical arts and culture. From the main hall westward, the ground floor presents a collection of exhibits on the ancient Wu Culture, ⁴ and near the end of the corridor stands a secluded courtyard, which is the Gallery of Paintings in Song Dynasty (Song Hua Zhai). This gallery, according to the museum curator, was designed by Pei in strict accordance with what it should be like in the Song dynasty more than 700 years ago to show that cultural prosperity in Suzhou dates back to Song. Such a design also serves as a welcome counterweight to the exhibits in the main hall of artifacts, which are predominantly from the Ming Dynasty. This also shows that in Pei’s design one motive in the museum’s spatial narrative is representation of Suzhou’s cultural tradition through the architecture itself. Although hidden in low profile, the architectural space of the characteristically classical Song Hua Zhai is diametrically different in texture from the surrounding architecture and independent of the other exhibition space of the museum and therefore receives a very sharp visual presentation. From the Song Hua Zhai eastward and across the courtyard of wood, rockery, and pond stands the Gallery of Modern Art. Such a spatial layout implies the passage and continuation of time and naturalizes the highly artificial design.

Here lies another paradox. Following his words of praise for the ingenious design of Suzhou Museum, Professor Cheng Pei-kai of City University of Hong Kong’s Chinese Civilization Centre complains that it is “deliberately and laboriously crafted” and “it is a letdown, very unnatural and far from works of nature, although it is based on the traditional style” (Zheng, 2014). It goes without saying that it is simply impossible to attain the consummation of Professor Cheng’s “works of nature” in the strictest sense of the term, yet such criticism does remind us that however much the narrative of Suzhou Museum highlights the traditional elements, “tradition” is always narrated by “modern” means with a distinct mark of “this moment,” so the fusion of tradition and modernity constructed by the narrative is in essence a kind of imagination in modernity. In a sense, this imagination is linked to the earliest imagination when China brought in museums as public space from the West after China’s evolution into modern society. First of its kind in China, Nantong Museum built by Zhang Jian in 1905, for example, is a built environment which combined the Western museum with the Chinese garden. This is not for us to imagine a resurrection of tradition but to witness the reconstruction of tradition.

In summary, the three stories contained in the narrative of the new Suzhou Museum building indicate that the narrative discourse of architectural design incorporates the cultural tradition and modern society and fuses the community and personality so that, in the words of Setha Low (2003), an anthropology professor of City University of New York, “the global is integrated into the inscribed spaces of everyday life where attachment, emotion, and morality come into play.” If such architectural narrative provides a framework for the whole museum narrative, then much richer specifics will come from the internal exhibition space of the museum.

The exhibition space narrative: constructing local tradition

As a public and service-oriented building, a museum must usually follow some specific exhibition flow in organizing the space. While determining the continuity of the museum’s space, this flow also transforms a spatial representation into a temporal sequence to sustain a coherent narrative. Therefore, we can take each exhibition space as a particular node in the temporal narrative sequence where the museum’s narrative voice, along with the significance of culture and ideology it seeks to highlight, pervades here and is released to the public.

Lanser (2002, p. 17) classifies the narrative voice into authorial voice, personal voice, and communal voice. Each mode of narrative voice “represents not simply a set of technical distinctions but a particular kind of narrative consciousness.” According to Lanser, authorial voice articulates a “heterodiegetic” narrative, similar to the third-person narration; personal voice articulates a “homodiegetic” narrative, similar to the first-person narration; and communal voice refers to a collective voice or a collective of voices, similar to the “we” as the subject in a narration, paying more attention to voices in the social and cultural systems. Being closely associated with the complex cultural system, the museum’s narrative text is clearly the result of the communal voice. In the narration of Suzhou Museum’s exhibition space, one can indeed “hear” different voices from different stories. Among its 103 exhibitions held between 2008 and August 2015 in its temporary exhibition hall in the basement and the gallery of modern art, 6 were on foreign art, 48 on Chinese modern art, and 49 on Chinese ancient art, among which 26 were indigenous to Suzhou. Similarly, among the 95 academic lectures hosted by the museum between 2007 and 2014, 39 were related to the local traditional culture and art of Suzhou. However, the largest space for more or less permanent exhibitions in the museum still focuses on the local traditional culture in Suzhou. If the above 26 exhibitions and 39 lectures exclusively on Suzhou are taken into consideration, one would see that the main theme and the strongest voice in the museum are still the indigenous traditional culture of Suzhou. This is prominently reflected in the exhibition narrative discourse featuring the Wu Culture, which forms symbolic cultural resources of Suzhou’s city identity. Here, it also justifies Suzhou as one of China’s first batch of historical and cultural cities identified by the State Council in 1982.

Based on local history and culture, the permanent exhibition space of Suzhou Museum is divided into four sections: Wu Relics, Wu Pagodas, Wu Artifacts, Wu Paintings, and Calligraphy. As De Certeau (2009, p. 214) noted, space is a linguistic system that distributes places insofar as it is articulated by an “enunciatory focalization,” by an act of practicing it. The assignment of the four sections means the Wu Culture is chosen as the narrative object for the museum narration. Through location assignment, the history and culture of Suzhou acquire symbolic identification and, as the true nature of the city’s urban culture, will act on community identity.

As can be imagined, there are subcategories of items subsumed under the four sections. The “Wu Relics” section includes four subcategories: “Cracks of dawn” displaying prehistoric stone tools, pottery, and other archaeological finds; “Splendid Jiangnan” displaying ceramics, gold, and bronze wares unearthed in Suzhou from Han to Tang dynasty; “The Contending Spring and Autumn” displaying bronze and jade wares in the Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 BC); and “Cosmopolitan Yuan and Ming” displaying the grave goods in the tombs of an empress in the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and Wang Xijue in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The “Wu Pagodas” has two subcategories of “Tiger Hill Treasure” and “Ruiguang Auspicious Rays” exhibiting Buddhist relics found in the pagoda in Yunyan Temple on top of Tiger Hill and the one in Ruiguang Temple. Among the four sections, the “Wu Artifacts” contains the most items, further divided into nine subcategories covering furnishings of the study in the Ming dynasty, porcelains, jade wares, carved artifacts made of wood, bamboo or horn, sundry collector’s items, stationeries, folk decorations, embroidered clothing, and paintings in the Song dynasty. Finally, occupying two exhibition halls on the second floor, the “Wu Paintings and Calligraphy” section displays the works by Suzhou’s great masters in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Through neat integration and connection, these many subcategories represent various nodes of the museum narrative and construct the narrative for the daily life of ancient Suzhou, revealing the artistic recreation represented by the literati and rich in Ming and Qing dynasties.

If the four sections constitute four paragraphs of a passage on Wu Culture by analogy, then more concrete presentation of the culture will come from those sentences in each paragraph, with words in each sentence as specific objects on display, so

the stories that are told about them and the larger stories in which they are the actors provide a particular form of closure that may or may not be followed or recreated by the visitor. Visitors literally walk, or are propelled, through the stories that museums provide for them in their displays. But in so doing, within the limits of the varying degrees of freedom they are given, they create their own versions of the narratives on offer. (Silverstone, 1992, p. 37)

In fact, it is not so much that stories are told about various exhibits here in Suzhou Museum as the objects are integrated into the rhetoric of the larger story, that is, the local history and culture of Suzhou, where there is a large degree of overlap between the closed framework within which visitors are situated and the larger story. For example, displayed in the “Contending Spring and Autumn” section are mostly pottery and jade articles, with only two swords. To what extent are these individual and apparently unrelated exhibits able to reproduce that Spring and Autumn Period, or to what extent can they match the exhibition texts? Artifacts can be made relevant and related to each other through those textual descriptions, by means of which the two swords, for example, not only become a feature in the exhibition narrative but also serve as a temporal/historical metaphor, indicating that a distant part of history witnessing the lives of a community and a political entity established in that area have been partially reconstructed and fully integrated into the grand narratives today of the political and ethnic history of the nation. Statically displayed in the space of the museum, these objects, however, make themselves active historical genes, so to speak, for city identity by means of exhibition narrative, so that, in the words of Marstine (2006), “In the museum, things are more than just things; museum narratives construct national identity and legitimize groups” (p. 2).

The time frame of the exhibition space narrative is set from the ancient age to the glorious era in Ming and Qing in the cultural history of Suzhou. Assignments of each node are made roughly according to the historical sequence so as to form such a narrative order that starts with the ancient age, followed chronologically by the subsequent periods or dynasties. ⁵ Considering the specific time when those exhibited artifacts were originally created, it is even more unlikely to have them presented strictly according to the historical sequence; instead, within the framework of historical narration, the narrative sequence has replaced the historical one. The spatial trick here is that themes of Wu Culture dominate the flow of exhibition instead. This reminds us once again that “the elements (historical events) in the history field are arranged in a certain order and become a sort of chronicle which is converted into a kind of story that gains some meaning by plot setting” (Herman, 2002, p. 179). As we know, exhibits of a museum can be associated with individuals, community, and history, so it can be said that each display item is associated with a network in which it is a node. The reconstructed narrative sequence directs where visitors are led to and provides a temporary reality context that replaces its real historical context so as to eliminate the interference by the latter with the dominant discourse. In so doing, Wu Culture unmistakably becomes the resounding theme of the narrative. Seen in this perspective, it makes great sense, therefore, that Suzhou Museum has in recent years held a series of special exhibitions of the Wu School of Painting of the mid-Ming dynasty such as the works of Shen Zhou (沈周), Wen Zhengming (文徵明), Tang Yin (唐寅), and Qiu Ying (仇英), featuring the characteristics of the traditional local culture of Suzhou. Thus, spatial narratives become important components in identifying and understanding the urban image of Suzhou and construct the “collective memory” of the city.

Although historical geographical names of Wudi, Wuta, Wuzhong, and Wumen, which correspond to the above-mentioned four sections (Wu Relics, Wu Pagodas, Wu Artifacts, Wu Paintings, and Calligraphy), all start with “Wu,” each does not mean exactly the same thing. Historically speaking, Wudi generally refers to the area of current Nanjing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou across Taihu Lake and Yangtze River Delta. Suzhou was once called Wuzhong (literally “Middle Wu”) because of its central location in Wudi. Originally referring to a city gate of Wu Kingdom in the Spring and Autumn Period, Wumen (literally “Gate of Wu”) later became synonymous with the city, now known as Suzhou. Yet we notice that the museum narrative on the exhibition space here skates over the specifics of historical evolution and geographical areas; instead, it almost equates the indigenous culture of Suzhou with the culture of Wudi or Wu. In recent years, there have been academic controversies over the origin and geographical coverage of Wu Culture as well as the extended Wu Culture. There have also been archaeological excavations and textual research on Wu Culture in Zhenjiang, Wuxi, and Yangzhou, cities not far from Suzhou. Therefore, it can be seen that the narrative on the exhibition space in Suzhou Museum is intended to have the indigenous culture of Suzhou cover a culture of a much broader geographical region, through which the reconstruction and presentation of Suzhou cultural tradition can be materialized.

The temporal sequence in narration and the naming practice indicate that the collective memory as city identity presented through the narrative of Suzhou Museum is not so much objective cognition as imagined reconstruction, a “myth,” a “metaphor,” “some property attached to some generalized entity such as ‘society’” (Gedi & Elam, 1996). This property of generalized entity can even be seen throughout the Wu-dominated historical narrative. Intended to highlight the local flavor and to help shape and provide resources to the city image and city identity here and now, this narrative also entails some potential tension, that is, tension between the local and the national. Under the influence of this tension, the historical narrative of the local has to be subjected to that of the State and nation in order to be granted legitimate status for its existence. “Confronted with an arrangement of objects and artefacts, it seems there is a natural motivation,” therefore, for the museum visitor “to begin to piece together a human story” (Hale, 2012, p. 199), a story that at once belongs to the local Suzhou and is inherent in the Chinese nation.

However, if “museums are powerful agencies for defining culture to the public, and for the public to define itself through the viewing relations they embody” (Dicks, 2004, p. 146), the final completion of the museum narrative has to be done in the visiting activities. What is more, city identity constructed by the museum narrative, the resources for such identification, and the inspired imagination of city identity will all depend on the visitor’s reception and acceptance. Therefore, throughout the museum narrative, visitor’s narratives are indispensable.

Visitor narratives: broadening the boundaries

In the narratives for museum-like institutions, visitor as the subject has not been absent, although it merits more attention. Incorporating the museum visitor into his analysis of daily life practice, De Certeau (2009, p. 176) points out that the walkers realized the possibilities and limitations of space but, through the “walking tactics” of bypassing, crossing, impromptu transformation, caused the displacement of space and invention of other possibilities and limitations. In this way, “walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it ‘speaks’.” With such pedestrian activities, visitor narratives join the museum narrative.

“Walking” by visitors is greatly facilitated by the application of new media technology to museums, and with their own new media terminals, they have a rich variety of channels and better capabilities to carry out their own narration. Then, the issue of subjectivity makes itself prominent. Casey (2003, p. 19) argues that new technology plays a pioneering role in promoting the function of the museum in terms of its psychological and social effect on cultural memory because it “provides an opportunity to challenge cultural authority and redirect dominant cultural narratives.” This opportunity clearly beckons more toward visitors and challenges the museum’s conventional condescending role of being an educator and mentor to the public, thus helping establish a relationship of consultation and dialogue instead between the museum and its visitors. It then generates a more diverse discourse of visitor narratives as part of the overall museum narrative.

In its “12th Five-Year Plan,” Suzhou Museum decided that “information technology is one of the engines for its rapid development.” ⁶ It was approved by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage as one of the first batch of nine museums nationwide for fast-track digital construction, which means an annual investment of RMB 900  million by the State. With six professionals on board, the IT Department of Suzhou Museum takes care of lighting current engineering, software development, website maintenance, and public information broadcast. It has built its management information system for library collections, completed modeling for 80 Category A cultural relics, and was ready for their three-dimensional (3D) demonstration. The application of new media technology by Suzhou Museum follows two tracks. One includes digital equipment used throughout the actual tour such as APP/APK, WeChat QR code scanning, 3D display for exhibits, and voice navigation. The other includes equipment providing supplementary information or services such as the official microblogging Weibo, WeChat, and the online store. In their actual application, these two types of equipment function in a mutually complementary manner, thus creating a new media context for visitors.

Let us first take a narrative look at the official website of Suzhou Museum. The layout and contents clearly highlight its linkup with the physical space and its delivery of various services. On the front page, information categories such as “message board,” “site map,” “online store,” “contact us,” “reservations,” “events calendar,” “recommended collections,” “all exhibitions & displays,” “museum APP,” and “WeChat account” are provided to offer practical assistance for visitors in their physical tour of the museum. In that sense, all those digital technology–enabled means still serve and consolidate the narrative framework and contents for the museum in its physical space.

In addition, the official website provides opportunities for interaction between museum staff and visitors, visitor and visitor, and experts and non-experts, thus enhancing their connection and communication. Through the interactive threads of comment, albeit not in great quantities at this stage, “Suzhou Museum Forum” with its four topic-based sub-forums provides a narrative that is closely related to but quite different from the narrative of the museum in its physical space. For example, on 22 May 2011, one online reader shared his own (and well-received) interpretation of the architectural features of the Gallery of Paintings in the Song Dynasty after he found the exhibition text difficult to understand due to too many technical terms there.

The online message board of the museum also merits our attention. It reported over 1500 message threads from May 2007 to September 2015, and each message there received a formal reply from the museum. Compared with more than 1 million walk-in visitors and over 2 million visits to the website, the number of messages left there is deplorably paltry. Nonetheless, some of the messages provide information about the differences and interactions between visitors’ narrative, on one hand, and the narratives from the museum architecture and exhibitions, on the other hand. The following are taken from the board for illustration.

Here is one message complaining about the museum environment:

Attracted to have a visit to the museum last week. Master Pei deserves his reputation. The new museum building is full of poetry, but the garden’s freshly planted tree branches up very straight and seems not so vigorous and not coordinated with the surrounding architectural environment, far from good as the previous tree … (Posted on 20 April 2007)

Reply from the museum: Hello, thank you for your comments.

Here is a message asking for help:

I bought a long-handled black umbrella in your shop with bronzing words on it. The calligraphy is very nice but too cursive. Please tell me what is written, thank you! (Posted on 18 April 2014)

Reply from the museum: Hello, the umbrella text is Zhu Yunming’s cursive writing of “On the book of Music.”

Here is a message pointing out some error:

In the Weapons Exhibition the copied bows have problems, bowstring is wrongly installed. Change back as soon as possible, so as to avoid misleading the public. (Posted on 5 March 2015)

Reply from the museum: Hello, the installation error does exist, the exhibition management already knows. Since the exhibition ended on March 1, we will pay attention to this problem in the future related to the exhibition, thank you.

And finally, here is a message for some suggestion:

Suzhou is a tourist city, often in the rest of our weekend, so many people come to the museum, you need to make reservations in advance. If the phone APP also has a reservation function, it would be the better! (Posted on 6 April 2015)

Reply from the museum: Thank you for your suggestion, our APP is currently being revised, and will add the admission reservation function. You can also make an appointment by logging our mobile site.

Of course, there are other messages that online readers left on the forum, concerning reservations, event participation, volunteer application, valuation on private collections, and donations. Unlike the above examples, some of those messages involve information of a private nature. They constitute discordant voices in the museum narrative and sometimes, with those personal interests, opinions, and emotions involved, go beyond the narrative framework prescribed by the architecture and exhibition space of the museum. Some constitute revisions and improvements on the framework, thus posing a challenge to its authority. At other times, the messages are about personal entertainment, consumption, or games to play, in effect constituting abandonment or even destruction of the narrative framework. Although rare and weak on the museum’s website, those discordant voices still prove that, thanks to the Internet and digital technology, visitors’ narrative can participate in the museum narrative in a more direct manner. Thus, “it is possible to combine different voices, not merged into one voice, but into one kind of chorus” (Bakhtin, 1998b, p. 356).

Moreover, in the new media context of participation/dialogue, the unidirectional and unique nature of the conventional narrative sequence has been undermined; instead, visitors are offered more options and able to create more diverse meanings.

It is generally understood that public architecture such as the museum includes the design of visiting route in its construction of meaning and often lays out a closed loop for visitors to complete the tour. In other words, the process in which visitors are expected to follow the designed route is the one where they receive inspiration, intimation, implication, or education from the museum narrative. De Certeau’s “walking tactic” mentioned above can be considered a kind of resistance against this process. In this regard, Suzhou Museum takes some adaptive measures to ease visitors’ possible resistance by means of new media technology. An earlier edition of its APP recommended four different routes, ⁷ which contained guidance to visitors including time, space, and meaning for the visitor, presupposed by the museum. On one hand, however, once recommended to the visitor, those presuppositions provide multiple interpretations on the museum narrative because there is a lack of clear correspondence between the nodes on the route and the originally designed narrative framework, resulting in a loose, free, and even independent relationship between the two. This means that even if visitors take one route, they can change their mind anytime they want to. On the other hand, digital facilities, mobile terminals, and portable equipment can better enable them to make a choice that fits them the best. With wireless connection available anywhere in Suzhou Museum, many visitors use their mobile devices such as iPad and phone, to check the route, watch APP, browse their Weibo or WeChat, or share the pictures taken at the museum.

Thus, thanks to new media equipment and technology, visitors as the subject share a physical space but at the same time construct their own versions of the museum narrative. Some visitors prefer to browse the museum’s APP beforehand so that they will know what they are going to look for, such as the rare items on display. Some compare its digitalization with the exterior and surroundings of the museum buildings and conclude that despite its classical and ancient flavor, the museum has a modern and cozy touch because so many digital devices are available. Others are attracted by the information released by the museum about Suzhou-style fans, for instance. Still others love 3D demos, touch screen, and self-paced experience so that they can use the mostly visual tool for a better understanding of the artifacts on display.

This way, visitors can escape from the logic of the architectural and exhibition narrative and quietly initiate a rewriting of the museum narrative based on their self-experience and self-interest. This corresponds to Bakhtin’s (1998, p. 27) “polyphony.” Therefore, the resources for meaning, knowledge, and imagination that the museum narrative provides for city identity are not necessarily unique, all-covering, authoritative, or self-evident but more likely to be diverse, fragmented, interactive, and consultative:

Thus, new media enables the exhibition to become like an interface, through which visitors may access different objects in the collection, according to preference, and make their own comparisons. This relates to the arguments about access and democratizing put forward by the advocates of new media in museums. (Henning, 2006, p. 309)

To some extent, therefore, visitor narratives enter into the mechanism for construction city identity.

In fact, visitor narratives may affect the context in which the overall narrative of the museum is constructed. Museums today cannot assume an authoritative posture and perform the sole function of education and publicity; activities such as entertainment, leisure, and tour on the part of visitors help create a polyphonic community. A visitor survey by Suzhou Museum in 2013 showed that 37% of visitors came to the museum for “leisure travel and relaxation,” while 43% came to “see exhibitions/artifacts and increase their knowledge.” ⁸ There were only 6 percentage points in difference between the two. During the special exhibition of Wen Zhengming’s arts in 2013, Suzhou Museum developed a production named “Wen Zhengming (文徵明, 1470–1559) personally-cultivated wisteria seed.” In 2014, taking the porcelain lotus bowl, the most valued collection of the museum, as the prototype, Suzhou Museum started to sell its “national treasure cookies” in imitation of the lotus bowl. The museum has developed 66 cultural products with total sales reaching RMB 5.12 million yuan. The museum has also organized a host of cultural events about wisteria tea, art sessions, handicraft, and hand-painted letters. All these reflect the idea of “letting the museum become a part of everyday life” (Dong & Jiang, 2010). Thus, museum narratives create a more communicative context in which city identity is constructed.

Conclusion

The narrative analysis of Suzhou Museum in this article has shown that the imagination that integrates tradition and modernity through museum architecture and the construction of local historical cultural tradition through exhibition space both work together and constitute a meaning-generating space by Suzhou Museum as a communication medium. This specific narrative framework, narrative logic under the framework, and the choice and interpretation of the items on display and the systemization of knowledge about those items all reflect the effort by the museum narrative in exploring, deploying, and presenting cultural resources of city identity. While all these may be considered as predesigned, structured, and ideologically regulated, once visitors come in, they are transformed into something momentary, dynamic, deconstructive, and anti-ideological by their participation and experience. By means of new media technologies and through their own narration, visitors actively edge themselves into, integrate themselves with, and reconstruct the museum narrative, verifying and acquiring the meaning of city identity during the process. This in turn makes city identity via museum narrative more diversified and routine, thus expanding the narrative expression and meaning generation of the museum as mediaspace.

The past few years have witnessed the growth of public museums in China along with its urbanization process, and the total number of museums in mainland China reached 4165 in 2014 (Li, 2014). As public urban space, museums play an increasingly prominent role for exhibition tour and leisure travel; they also play an increasingly prominent role in delimiting, absorbing, and communicating city identity. This case study of Suzhou Museum provides an empirical platform for one to make some more generalizable theoretical observations and to gain a better understanding of urban museums.

First, the architecture and exhibition space as composition of the museum narrative indicate that the museum as a medium in the urban communication system proves to be a unique existence in its dealing with the relationship of narrative space and time. In discussing the history of painting exhibitions, Assmann (2016) remarks that here “time becomes space, more specifically, becomes a space of memory, within which memories are constructed, manifested and learned” (p. 45). It is exactly this constructed collective memory that not only creates the museum’s cultural resources for communicating city identity but also determines the way in which the cultural resources are used. When referring this modern space such as museums as “heterotopia,” Foucault (2006) also emphasizes allocation and constructing forms of spatial resources by means of narrative timing:

the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages. (p. 54)

When we wonder how the museum narrative constructs age-old and scattered artifacts (including the building itself) into an entity with apparently coherent meanings, we will find that such a “heterotopia” as the museum enables a co-existence of the reality and the imagination by connecting the present with the absent. It builds up a network of meanings.

Second, as Foucault points out, “heterotopia” is a closed space and open space at the same time, and it is never fixed. In this regard, Low’s (2003) concept of “the built environment” may be more concise and straightforward in describing such a space. As she points out,

planning, design, funding and construction as well as the flow of global capital, labor and ideas encompass the political economic forces of social production that shape the built environment, encoding it with intentions and aspirations, uses and meanings that are themselves contentiously appropriated, produced and reproduced by users and residents.

Seen in the same light, the mediaspace of the museum as “the built environment” can also be made open, dynamic, and inconsistent as a result of its appropriation, production, and reproduction by visitors. The narrative analysis of Suzhou Museum throughout this article clearly shows that either in the form of Bakhtin’s “polyphony” and “chorus” or de Certeau’s “walking tactics,” the narration of museum space by visitors as “users and residents” breaks the closure and stability of the space, releases their “objections,”; and, in turn, affects the overall mediaspace of the museum.

It has to be admitted, however, that when applied to the context of the present case study, Bakhtin’s narrative analysis of fiction would be overly idealistic in asserting that dialogue, polyphony, and chorus all point to the multiple-subject freedom. By the same token, de Certeau’s discovery of the power of dormant subjects in everyday life and his construction of their discourse of resistance in appropriation and challenges against the control by powers that would also be questionable due to his overestimation of the strength of the weak. Rather, our study shows that visitors can construct their own narratives and express their own existence through their touring experience and enable city identity to act upon the public not by means of authoritarian didactics but through participation and integration. It is a negotiable and inclusive mechanism for identity construction through dialogue and interaction.

Third, digital technology in the museum is tilting toward visitors because it not only enables visitor narratives to get more directly involved in the museum narratives but also pushes back the boundaries of the museum narrative, thus making it possible to “transform the structure and ideological system that shrouds and restricts us all the time, or at least remold the form of structural relationship between us and them” (Pan, 2014). This is to say, new media technology as a constructive force shows its specific “affordance” (Juris, 2012) by acting upon the construction of the museum narrative space, highlighting the mediating nature of the museum, and facilitating the connection, intermingling, and interaction among different spaces of meaning. In this way, the hitherto submerged or ignored visitors may resurface as the subject and change the museum’s structural existence.

Thus, in a sense, the digitalization effort by the museum and the application of new media technology by visitors have transformed visitors from being anything but passive and subordinate. In this regard, we agree with Jenny Kidd’s view that when we regard visitors as museum narrative co-producers, we need to accept the fact that between the narratives projected by the museum and those constructed by the visitor, there can be wide discrepancies. However, we do not fully agree with her idea that “in participatory practices, the museum becomes a witness to the heritage as understood by the individual” (Kidd, 2012, p. 74). As a matter of fact, the museum as an institutional narrative is never absent in the production, regulation, and direction of meanings, nor will it revert to the role of a mere “witness.” The inner drive for digitalization by the museum is obviously not to deconstruct its own authority or abandon its cultural hegemony. On the contrary, it is to strengthen its capacities in the allocation of cultural resources and the construction of meaning, while politics, technology, and capital always stand ready to consolidate its dominant position. In the meantime, the positive side of the digitalization effort by the museum is that it accommodates the latent need for democratization, evokes the subjectivity, and encourages participation, thus making construction of meaning in the museum narrative more open to interactions among various subjects.

Fourth, all of the above constitute the communicative characteristics of the museum as a medium. Just as Carey (2005) has observed, culture communication by museums is “a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed” (p. 12). The museum narrative construction that this study has analyzed can be regarded as a concrete implementation of the process. In Carey’s (2005, p. 60) view, this kind of communication is not limited to “transport” but also has the value of “ceremony,” a ritualized human interaction, during which people take part in the processing and creation of one or multiple symbols so as to establish social relations and order, to confirm ideas and beliefs shared by others, and to create “institutions of public life through which a public can be formed and can form an opinion.” It is as such a venue for interactions that the museum can perform its communication function. This can be better explained via the concept of liminality.

Originally proposed by Belgium-French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, liminality refers to the fuzziness and uncertainty of a ritual in its intermediate phase. British anthropologist Victor Turner further developed this concept, using it to indicate the “between states”—neither exactly this nor exactly that, and both this and that, when someone is involved in two types of structures or two survival conditions. The idea of liminality sheds some inspirational light on human cultural practices, including museum studies. It has been argued that differences in the sense of time, changes to the daily life pattern, rediscovery, and re-appropriation of the public space and private space may turn art festivals into liminal events (Esther, 2011). Similarly, the museum may create liminal experiences which will enhance historical memory and establish the relevancy between collective memory and responsibility (Prosise, 2003). Others suggest that as a ritual the museum encourages individuals to gain liminal experience, wherein “they are spaces in which communities can work out the values that identify them as communities” (Duncan, 1995, p. 133). Still other scholars apply liminality to the mutual construction between the city and communication and to the process in which human beings make themselves active subjects in their communications and interactions, emphasizing that “the liminality of space (place) is achieved through actors’ excavating and exploring the capacity of the space; it embodies the agentic initiations of space users and consumers” (Pan & Yu, 2015, p. 153).

These studies help us better understand that museum as a mediaspace enables interconnective practices through narrative construction in urban communication and, because of the intervention of the visitor as subject, endows such a space with “emerging social relationships” (Pan & Yu, 2015, p. 153). What is more, the space makes possible visitors’ liminal experiences that are at once ideologically constrained and point to the significance of city identity, thus forming the basis of community life. Only on such a basis can the “planning space” and the “living space,” two terms differentiated by Alan Hudson, be unified into one and can “Citizens create their city” (Hudson, 2011).