Bowers Hopes to Host Chinese Exhibit : Art: The museum’s executive director will travel to the Asian country to begin talks on bringing items from emperors’ palace here.

Peter C. Keller, executive director of the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, leaves Tuesday for a 10-day trip to the People’s Republic of China, a trek he hopes will result in a Bowers exhibition of the imperial “treasures” of the Summer Palace sometime in the late 1990s.

The exhibit would be organized in cooperation with the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

During his preliminary visit to the palace near Beijing, Keller will be accompanied by Ronald Iverson of the private, Chicago-based Iverson Foundation who is also a curator of Chinese art for the Field Museum. They will begin to draw up a “wish list” of objects from the palace--a repository of furniture, porcelain, jades and robes belonging to Chinese emperors throughout the 3,000-year dynastic period.

“The Chinese government is anxious to bring a major cultural exhibition to the” United States, said Keller, who was invited by Song Beishan, director of the Foreign Affairs Division of the State Bureau of Cultural Relics in Beijing.

The last major traveling exhibit from China seen in Southern California was “The Quest for Eternity”--ceramic sculptures loaned by 14 Chinese museums--on view in 1987 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

But is it appropriate to host such an exhibit from China in the post-Tian An Men Square era, when the Chinese government has been heavily criticized internationally for its human rights policies? (China has refused to grant exit visas to dissident labor leader Han Dongfang and political activist Hou Xiaotian, despite apparent promises concerning their cases made by the Chinese foreign minister to U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III last fall.)

“I think, when it comes to cultural treasures, it’s got to be above politics,” Keller said. “The political situation changes so rapidly. . . . Bringing an exhibition of great magnitude takes time--three to five years. You have to assume things can change for the better.”

Now that the Bowers is putting the finishing touches on its renovated and expanded museum building, Keller said he is busy working on plans to fill the galleries.

After being closed since January, 1989, the museum will open again to the public on Oct. 15 with four exhibitions, including “Tribute to the Gods: Treasures of the Museo del Oro” (in Bogota, Colombia) and “Power and Creation: Africa Beyond the Nile” (which utilizes objects from the Bowers’ own collection.)

For the future, Keller is considering exhibitions of jade objects from all the major Chinese museums and gifts Chinese emperors have received over the centuries from the emissaries of other governments. On his upcoming trip, Keller also will travel to Shenyang, an ancient imperial capital on the North Korean border, to research the “gift” exhibit.

Another exhibit might consist of Thracian gold--gold objects found along the Black Sea in the ancient region of Thrace (which is now Bulgaria). Keller said he was in negotiations with Bulgaria several years ago when he was associate director of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, but the traveling exhibition required a stiff $250,000 participation fee from the museum.

A couple of months ago, Keller said, the Bulgarian Embassy called him again to reopen negotiations. Just for fun, he suggested a token participation fee of $25,000 per museum, and the embassy agreed. Keller said the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Field Museum and the Denver Museum of Natural History all have expressed interest in a 1995-96 traveling exhibit of this material.

Keller said the as-yet undetermined cost of bringing the Summer Palace exhibition to the Bowers would be paid for largely by “participation fees” from the other two museums on the tour and corporate underwriting. He hopes to return to China in the fall with a delegation from the co-sponsoring museums to formalize agreements about which objects will travel, and when.

Keller remarked that museums in the United States have largely abandoned the blockbuster exhibits popular in the early ‘70s and early ‘80s, with such rare exceptions as “Mexico: Splendors of 30 Centuries,” mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last winter, and “Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration,” organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it was on view last fall.

“But . . . temporary exhibitions bring in all the excitement, new members (and) public relations,” Keller said. “They increase your shop sales and restaurant sales and ticket sales. (Major exhibitions) bring in a new vitality on a frequent basis.”

Although philanthropic corporate funding for the arts has fallen off in recent years, Keller said the solution is to appeal instead to corporate marketing budgets by “finding a program that ties into (the company’s) image.”

Does that mean there will be a rash of exhibitions tailored to the glossy self-promotion of big corporations?

“We’re not going to let marketing drive our exhibition programs at all,” Keller responded. “You can take esoteric exhibitions and still market them through clever advertising. The title (of the exhibit) sometimes makes a big difference.”