CANBERRA, Oct. 28 (Xinhua) -- "One part of me will be sorry to see them go, but most of me is very, very happy that they're going home," said Carol Cains, a senior curator at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), on Wednesday, referring to the two Chinese cultural relics returned by Australia to China.
The NGA handed over the heads of a military official statue and a civil official statue to China's National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA) in Canberra on Wednesday. Both relics date back to the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127).
A DECADE OF PROVENANCE RESEARCH
According to Cains, the two relics went into the museum's collection through donation in 1995. But the museum didn't investigate their provenance at the time. In 2015, one of the museum's volunteer guides, Janet Smith, noticed a 1991 book by Anne Paladin that investigated the sculptural figures along "the spirit roads" around the imperial mausoleum in China. The book contains photographs of works that seemed very similar to the two sculptural heads. That's when Cains and her coworkers began investigating the background of the two pieces.
In 2025, NGA received notification through the Chinese Embassy in Australia in Canberra that the NCHA, working with China's Ministry of Public Security and cultural heritage and public security authorities in China's Henan Province, had submitted a memorandum and supporting evidence, formally requesting the return of the two relics.
"We found that the style and the features of our heads here in the national collection match those of the twin pairs of some of the heads that were still intact on the mausoleum," she said. "At that point, we were finally able to pinpoint the place of origin of the sculptures here in the collection, the date of their creation, and their cultural significance in an absolutely firm and incontrovertible way."
That was when they started discussions in depth to try and really move towards repatriation, she said.
"The heads were no longer suitable to be held within the national collection at the gallery, because they didn't belong to us," she noted.
CULTURAL AND ARTISTIC SIGNIFICANCE
As a senior curator who has long studied Asian and Pacific art, Cains said that now that she really understands their context, she can "understand their significance."
"Initially, I appreciate them artistically because of the fineness of their carving plus their size. They're very impressive. The thought of them attached to their original figures is just so overwhelming as an artistic creation," she said.
Cains said the two works must have been extremely artistically impressive and culturally important, because they're part of the whole Chinese respect for ancestors and the structure of Chinese society.
Noting the fact that the two heads were part of pairs, she said there was an identical pair across the "spirit road" to them, adding that hopefully they can be reunited one day.
COOPERATION BEYOND REPATRIATION
Cains said it is a great opportunity for her and her coworkers to collaborate with their peers at the NCHA as well as the Chinese Embassy in Australia to make sure that the relics can be returned to their rightful owner, adding that she is glad to see the process is "very efficient and quick."
Calling the UNESCO 1970 Convention on the means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property "an evolutionary process," she said it has formed an ethical framework for collecting and shaping the way the art market works.
"The whole ethical framework is now part of an institutional transformation that is happening internationally, where cultural institutions like galleries and museums are working from a kind of colonial acquisition and ownership model towards a much more collaborative, ethical and culturally sensitive model where we seek to learn from each other rather than just impose a framework," she said.
Cains said, as a curator, she is just a temporary steward of the works. "The way forward in the future for sharing cultural antiquities and sharing culture is through loans, mutually agreed loans, because that's a great way to exchange works of art and inform each other about our cultures."
It is a very rewarding process, she noted. ■