An exhibition featuring some 100 Chinese animal paintings and objects from museums in Taiwan, China and the United States will open Oct. 9 and run through Jan. 3, 2010 at the Cincinnati Art Museum, museum director Aaron Betsky announced Wednesday at an opening ceremony. Of the exhibits, 20 original animal paintings has been loaned by the National Palace Museum in Taipei, said Lee Wen-chi, press chief of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago (TECO-Chicago), who attended the ceremony. Describing the exhibition as the research results of Sung Hou-mei, the curator of Asian art at the museum, over the past 20 years, Betsky said the exhibition took five years to prepare. The exhibition examines the evolution of the symbolic language of Chinese animal imagery and highlights paintings, from the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, Lee said. TECO-Chicago Director Perry Pei-hwang Shen note that the National Palace Museum rarely lends the national treasures in its collection to other countries. However, to show the importance Taiwan attaches to enhancing comprehensive exchanges with the United States, particularly in the area of culture and arts, the museum agreed to lend the treasures for the exhibition, according to Shen. The exhibition will showcase 86 paintings and dozens of objects, with 15 paintings selected from the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Shanghai Museum, and many other artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Nelso-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas. One of the oldest arts institutions in the United States, the Cincinnati Art Museum has a rich collection of more than 60,000 works of art spanning 6,000 years. 