Riviera Maya, Q.R. — More than 1.2 million people have attended Mexico’s Mesoamerican cultural exhibition at the Liaoning Provincial Museum in China.
The exhibition addressed the symbolism of the jaguar in Mesoamerican cultures over three millennia. During its exhibition at the Hunan and Liaoning Provincial museum, it attracted over 1.2 million visitors.
The international exhibition The Jaguar, A Totem of Mesoamerica, is composed of 154 archaeological and ethnographic objects from various Mexican museum collections.
Residents in the city of Shenyang visited the Mexican exhibition from October 26, 2023 to May 6, 2024. The Liaoning Provincial Museum has reported 1,123,761 visitors to the exhibition, according to the National Coordination of Museums and Exhibitions (CNMyE).
“Given that the exhibition proposal balances the playful with the aesthetic, the attendees have seen, touched, listened to and tasted the exhibition. This has generated a comprehensive experience in which they have learned about the figure and symbolism of the jaguar in the cultures Mesoamericans over three millennia,” says the CNMyE.
Among the archaeological objects presented, a tombstone with a low relief of a jaguar of Mayan affiliation, and a Zapotec urn stand out, protected by the national museums of Anthropology and World Cultures, respectively.
The sculpture called The Prince from the Museum of Anthropology of Xalapa, a zoomorphic Olmec sculpture carved in basalt stone from the Regional Museum of Chiapas, and the mural Reticulated Jaguars discovered in the Archaeological Zone of Teotihuacan.
The tour is divided into four modules: the first is an introduction to the monumental pre-Hispanic figure of a jaguar with human characteristics, which explains the sacredness of this feline, the most important in Mesoamerica.
The second covers the symbolic relationship between this animal and water in the different Mesoamerican religions. The third is dedicated to this animal and corn, and to the ceremonial life of the indigenous peoples, which was marked by agriculture.
To close this ancient journey, the last section exhibits various plastic manifestations in which the bond of this feline with the human body is represented, in a religious sense that, in turn, is combined within a system of values and beliefs that give meaning to his worldview.
The exhibition was organized by the federal Ministry of Culture, through the INAH and the Beijing Kunyuan Culture and Museum Exhibition Co., Ltd., under the curatorship of the ethnologist Natalia Gabayet González, the anthropologist Alejandro Alfredo González Villarruel and the archaeologist José Luis Rojas Martínez.
Other museums that collaborated in the exhibition include the Templo Mayor, Anthropology Carlos Pellicer Cámara, Guillermo Spratling and Amparo.
The exhibition is scheduled to continue its journey through the People’s Republic of China.
The next headquarters of The Jaguar, a totem of Mesoamerica, will be the Chengdu Museum, located in the province of Sichuan, where it will be from June 8 to August 26, 2024.
It’s first exhibition was held at the Hunan and Liaoning Provincial Museum.
