Dinner was held in the second-floor corridor, with Chinese art on one side, and Greek on the other.
Last year, when Mia was installing its Qing gate at the entrance to the museum’s Chinese galleries, Joyce Sun visited with her father. They were planning Sun’s wedding, still nailing down the venue, when her father noticed the gate. It came from Shanxi, a neighboring province of Shandong, the province where he and his family are from, before they moved to the Twin Cities. And he got to talking with the main installer, who turned out to be from Shandong. Sun’s father was sold—he was, in a sense, home.
But what really sold Sun and her now-husband, Zach Johnson, was the second-floor corridor, with the Chinese galleries on one side and Ancient Greece on the other. Sun is Chinese, after all, and her husband is of Greek heritage. Where else, outside their own lives, would they find such a juxtaposition?
The wedding was held on June 18, 2018. The ceremony, intended for Target Park, was instead in the Target Wing rotunda due to predictions of rain. Dinner was in the corridor in question, the head table in the shadow of Doryphoros. Dancing followed in the nearby Fountain Court, the water glowing pink with spotlights.
Dancing was held around the Fountain Court.
In the months beforehand, Sun and Johnson had anxiously awaited the close of “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty,” an exhibition that had gathered some of the most charismatic Chinese art from the corridor into the museum’s special exhibition space. When the exhibition was held over for several weeks, they grew even more anxious. It closed just a week before the wedding, and the objects they were expecting for a backdrop returned to their places in time, including the jade mountain—a piece they had admired, separately and together, for years.
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Top image: Joyce Sun and Zach Johnson. Vendors included wedding planner Piece of Cake, dress from Posh Bridal Couture, floral arrangements from FIG, hair by 139 Hair by Heidi.