Masks reveal unknown worlds

Five years after it signed a memorandum of cooperation with the National Museum of China, the Paris-based Musee du Quai Branly is finally coming to Beijing with an exhibition of 100 masks expressing the dramatic link between people and the unknown world.

The Masks: Beauty of the Spirits exhibition showcases imaginative works from a number of African, Asian, American and Oceanic collections at Quai Branly. The museum was opened in 2006 and is devoted entirely to non-Western arts.

"The masks act as a passage, a door, through which people are able to see the forces of the untouchable. When wearing a mask, people can talk to the spirits and phenomena they can't see or feel," says Yves Le Fur, the exhibition's French co-curator and director of Quai Branly's heritage and collections department.