NARBONNE.- Five years after opening its doors, Narbo Via is marking a milestone with a season that looks both backward and forward. The museum, dedicated to the Roman history of Narbonne and housed in a contemporary building designed by Norman Foster, has welcomed more than 630,000 visitors since 2021 and has become one of Occitanie’s key cultural landmarks. For its anniversary year, the institution is inviting the public to see antiquity not as something fixed in the past, but as a living source of dialogue, imagination, and contemporary creation.
At the center of this programme is “The Breath of Time,” a contemporary art trail by Franco-Chinese artist and designer Jiang Qiong Er, on view at Narbo Via from May 19, 2026 to January 3, 2027. Installed within the museum’s permanent collections, the exhibition creates an unexpected conversation between Roman archaeological remains and Jiang’s own universe of mythical creatures, calligraphy, bronze, wax, mineral pigments, and monumental felt works.
Rather than presenting the past as a silent archive, Jiang asks visitors to imagine history as something still breathing. Her sculptures and installations move among ancient stones, inscriptions, frescoes, and architectural fragments, inviting a meeting between civilizations separated by time but connected by shared questions: How do we live together? What survives? What do we choose to pass on?
The exhibition brings together twelve hybrid mythical creatures inspired by Chinese mythology as well as Mayan, Egyptian, Indian, and other ancient traditions. These figures, gathered under the title “XII Calls,” embody values such as bravery, wisdom, fraternity, kindness, freedom, peace, and inclusion. Placed in dialogue with Roman mythology and the museum’s lapidary collections, they seem less like visitors from another world than messengers moving between cultures.
Jiang’s work is rooted in the meeting of tradition and experimentation. Born in Shanghai, she studied at Tongji University before continuing her training at the École nationale des Arts décoratifs in Paris. Her practice crosses visual art, design, craftsmanship, and material research. In 2009, she co-founded Shang Xia with Hermès, a house dedicated to bringing traditional Chinese craftsmanship into a contemporary creative context. Her works have entered the collections of institutions including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris.
At Narbo Via, that long-standing concern with memory and material takes on a new setting. The museum’s Roman fragments become more than historical evidence; they become partners in a visual exchange. Jiang responds to their worn surfaces, broken forms, and traces of inscriptions with works that explore what time preserves and what it erases.
One of the most poetic sections of the project centers on writing. In “Her Voice – Bravery,” Jiang revisits nüshu, a script once developed and used by women embroiderers in Jiangyong, in China’s Hunan province. From this historical source, she has created what she calls a new nüshu, a contemporary visual language that draws from Chinese seal script, cursive script, and oracle bone inscriptions. Set within Narbo Via’s route, the works speak quietly to the museum’s ancient Latin inscriptions, opening a reflection on women’s voices, literacy, memory, and the power structures behind written culture.
The exhibition also includes “Sky & Earth,” an installation of 76 bronze tiles arranged around the museum’s reflecting pool and engraved with words related to time in Latin, French, and Chinese. Inspired by Roman architectural tiles, the work transforms an everyday building material into a poetic carrier of language. Light, shadow, wind, and rain become part of the piece, making time visible through small changes in the surface.
In “Angels of the Caves,” Jiang turns to mineral pigments and techniques inspired by prehistoric painting. The works evoke Lascaux and Dunhuang, connecting European and Asian rock art traditions with the frescoes preserved in Narbo Via’s collections. Here, painting becomes a thread running across civilizations, from the first marks made on cave walls to contemporary gestures of remembrance.
The monumental “Via Mundus” works, made on wool felt using a rubbing technique, draw directly from the museum’s Roman remains. Fragmented forms are transferred, reassembled, and suspended, suggesting that ruins are not simply endings. They can also become foundations for new images, new stories, and new ways of imagining the future.
The anniversary season extends beyond Jiang’s exhibition. Narbo Via is also presenting “Lagoon Memories,” a project built from photographs and oral testimonies about life and work around the ancient port over the past two centuries. Together, the two exhibitions connect local memory, ancient heritage, and contemporary artistic practice.
The museum’s birthday is also being celebrated through a lively public programme that includes open-air cinema screenings, archaeology-focused excursions from the museum to the lagoon, European Heritage Days, and a round-table discussion dedicated to Jiang’s work on October 15. Choreographer Sylvain Groud, director of the CCN Roubaix – Hauts-de-France, and dancers from the Ballet du Nord are also part of the celebrations, with performances and participatory dance events designed to bring audiences directly into the museum experience.
With “The Breath of Time,” Narbo Via uses its fifth anniversary not only to celebrate what it has become, but to ask what a museum of antiquity can be today. Jiang Qiong Er’s answer is gentle, ambitious, and deeply human: a place where stones can speak again, where cultures meet without cancelling one another, and where the past is not a closed chapter but a shared breath moving through the present.
