First signs of normalcy: museums in China, South Korea and Japan begin to reopen

China, South Korea and Japan glimpse the end of the Covid-19 coronavirus emergency and attempt a slow return to normalcy, which begins with a gradual reopening of museums. In China, museums had been closed since late January, and nearly two months later, some are beginning to reopen their doors to visitors: this is happening in Shanghai, where the Power Station of Art (the home of the Shanghai Biennial) and the Shanghai Museum reopened their doors on March 13.

It is not yet a normal reopening, of course: before the doors were thrown wide open, a massive disinfection effort was carried out according to official protocols, plus at the Power Station of Art a special quarantine area was set up on each floor in case of emergency. In addition, visitors can only enter the museum by presenting their health card and after undergoing temperature measurement, and the visit can only be conducted at the safe interpersonal distance of five feet. Visitors are also required to wear a protective mask, and in addition, entrances are restricted (500 per day, but there are still many fewer visitors). Similar measures are also in place at the Shanghai Museum, which limits the contigent to 2,000 visitors per day (but only 300 can be inside the institution at the same time). In any case, each visitor cannot stay inside the museum for more than two hours.

In South Korea, the reopening of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul has been planned for March 23: here the museum has set up an online booking system to make sure that visitors do not crowd in and here, too, respect the safety distances (in South Korea it is two meters). The museum will also provide hand sanitizer. In Japan, too, people are thinking about reopening dates for major museums: the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, for example, will most likely reopen on March 31. In any case, it seems clear that the return to normalcy will be gradual.

The three countries in the Far East have kept contagion to a minimum. In China, 80,000 contagions have been exceeded but for the past week growth has been continuing at the rate of 0.02% per day, which means new contagions in the range of ten to twenty (yesterday, the last day for which data are available, thirteen were recorded). In South Korea, the situation has also settled below one hundred new cases per day, with the curve growing at a rate of 1 percent and the number of infected moving just above 8,000. It is even better in Japan, where 873 cases have been confirmed so far (although 44 were recorded yesterday alone).

Pictured: the Shanghai Museum (Ph. Credit David Stanley)

First signs of normalcy: museums in China, South Korea and Japan begin to reopen

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