Crown China Welcomes Fine Arts

2005 has been proclaimed the French year in China. This is great news for the Crown Fine Arts team, as they have already worked on, and are still working on, several exhibitions traveling between the two countries.

At the end of last year, Crown Fine Arts worked very hard on the arrangements for the transportation of an exhibition called “Nouvelle Vague” (New Wave). After four estimates and three days spent at the Centre Pompidou, Crown Fine Arts finally won the job in November. And that’s when the real challenge began.

Carefully Preparing a Work of Art

This exhibition is organized by the Centre Pompidou (a famous museum in Paris) and the A.F.A.A. (Association Française d'Action Artistique), which depends on the French ministry of foreign affairs. “Nouvelle Vague” was to travel first to Shanghai, then to Peking and is planned to return to France this June. This exhibition presents a selection of contemporary art.

The Crown Fine Arts team only had four weeks to:

• Build 42 crates, some of them more than five meters long and 2.20 meters high
• Obtain phytosanitary certificates, and all the export permits
• Organize everything for the entrance into China with the agent chosen by the CIEA (China International Exhibition Agency)

Artwork Being Packed

Bruno Feissat and Alain Bova (one of our packers) spent two days in the Centre Pompidou storage facility to measure all the art work and discuss the packing process with the museum’s curators. Packing took place during Christmas and New Year (five days) and the shipment was ready to leave on January 6.

“We worked with Air France, the only company that could provide a cargo flight on January 6, at 7 o'clock. Two climate controlled trucks (one of them with 100 cbms capacity) left our warehouse with the 42 crates - 58 cbms - 40 square meters, and we spent the entire morning in the Air France warehouse with two couriers to supervise the palettisation on five pallets (1x20' + 4X10' pallets),” said Sylvie Fournier Hausherr, Manager of Crown Fine Arts in Paris. “It was quite an undertaking.”

The cargo left the same day with the two couriers on board, and delivery took place in Shanghai the day after late in the evening. Because of the size of the trucks, they were not authorized to enter into Shanghai city before 9 o'clock PM.

The week after, another exhibition from the Centre Pompidou was shipped to China, the “Paris des photographes”. It's an ideal approach to introduce the Centre Pompidou’s willingness to participate in the project of the new modern art museum on the Western Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong --scheduled for opening in 2012.