Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 23. (Budapest, 2004)

BETWEEN THE EAST AND THE WEST On 17 November 2003 (the first anniversary of Pál Miklós's death), on the initiative of his onetime colleagues at the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts, the Museum of Applied Arts organised a conference to commemorate the valid message of its former Director's work and activity. The preparation and organisation of the one-day conference was mainly the work of Zsuzsanna Renner, Director of the Ferenc Hopp Museum and her colleague, Krisztina Szabó. The lecturers of the morning section discussed certain remarkable and interesting issues of Sinology in general. Their choice of matter was characterised by unusual manifoldness and variety. Issues of the early period of Chinese Buddhism, more specifically, its history of philosophy (or history of mentality, as it were), certain noteworthy phenomena of recent Chinese art and contemporary Chinese literature as well as topics of the history of the reception of ancient Chinese art in Europe and Hungary were considered. Regardless the fact that the topics were variegated and differed in many respects, between the lectures there was a special correspondence or correlation to be discerned. As for the approach and the method of dealing with the topics, all lecturers were able to make good use of the explicit and positive encouragement they received from Pál Miklós's works or from him personally - at the beginning of their research. The lecturers of the afternoon section of the conference dealt with another aspect of Pál MLklós's activity, namely, the work he conducted as an expert on theory of arts, art critic and museologist. Some of them - Márta Kovalovszky and László Beke -, being younger contemporaries, gave an account of the writings and theoretical standpoints of Pál Miklós, scholar and expert, who from the 1960s on exercised significant influence on current intellectual life; others recalled their personal memories and experiences. The latter had the opportunity to work as Pál Miklós's immediate colleagues between 1975 and 1985, when he was the Director General of the Museum of Applied Arts and the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts. Unfortunately, for various reasons we were not in the position to publish two of the lectures given at the conference "Between the East and the West": Xunzi's Notions on Human Nature as Mirrored in Some Recently Discovered Written Sources (Sándor P. Szabó) and Pál Miklós and Theoretical Issues of Contemporary Art (László Beke). This volume contains the edited version of the other lectures.