Since I started to be a journalist, I was always fascinated by the diversity of Chinese cultural heritage. But from my interviews experience, I noticed that many traditional heritages had become obsolescence and disappearing in our lives. So it bring me a question, can we make a better change for cultural heritage conservation?
Nowadays, cultural heritage is affected by numerous degradation processes, caused by environmental factors, anthropic actions (pollution, wrong conservation practice), and microorganisms. Even local and national government’s made efforts to preserve ‘heritage’ most deals are exclusively with physical assets, such as historical sites and buildings – Palaces, temples, churches, mosques, tombs, and similar sites. This is particularly true in countries and regions that have a long history and many historical public buildings. But heritage is more than that.
But heritage is in fact more than just physical buildings. The true heritage of an area is to comprehensively look at not only the tangible assets, and intangible ones as well. This includes public assets, and private ‘domestic’ assets such as dance, music, art, festivals, dresses, food, and more form part of the area’s heritage.
Based on such understanding of cultural heritage, I would like to put more attention on intangible cultural heritage, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts. To narrow down in more specific area, I will make further research about traditional artefact inheritance and conservation.
References:
1.Heritage Critical Approaches, Rodney harrison
2.Securing The Past, Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature, Paul Eggert
3.INTANGIBLE HERITAGE IN CONSERVATION MANAGEMENT PLANNING:
THE CASE OF ROBBEN ISLAND, Harriet Deacon, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2004
4. Heritage Conservation & Regeneration ,FP9 2021-2027 POSITION PAPER,Contribution from ECHOES Cluster