Through a chronological and geographical approach, the exhibition brings together a group of 109 works illustrating the history of the human figure across the major cultural regions of Africa, the Americas and Oceania, in relation to objects from the Taiwanese collections of the Pingtung County Art Museum.

We will never know how the idea of creating a statue first arose: a three-dimensional figure resembling a living body. Could the idea have originated, as Alberti believed, from an image glimpsed or observed in a “game of nature” — a stone, a branch or a cloud in which the mind, through its instinct for recognition, identified a familiar image? A human disposition towards similarity and association undoubtedly led to the desire to produce and appropriate an image in turn created by human hands.

Yet unlike the Western sculptural tradition, which sought similarity to the point of illusion — mimesis — many cultures chose, although they were equally capable of producing likeness and resemblance, to express themselves differently through the art of statuary. The publication is thus organised chronologically and geographically around the major cultural regions of Africa, the Americas and Oceania.

In connection with this exhibition, the publication Statues, dans les collections du musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac is currently available in French.