Mapping China: Design - Design of Museums

Museum Design in China

Text/Marco Gastoldi

In 1949, during the Chinese Communist supremacy, our country had only 25 museums, while most of them were closed during the Cultural Revolution and their collections dispersed. But the rapid growth and opening politics that inscribed the years after, associated with a prosperous urbanisation, prepared a museum-building boom that went beyond that simply replacing what before had been pulled-up.

During the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, in a relatively short period of time, three remarkable institutions were established in the United States: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Hereafter, by the 1930s, museums of considerable dimensions rapidly opened in almost all the American cities. Apparently, those cultural organisms resembled the homologous Europeans, even if presenting notable differences: if the museums in Europe were serving revolutionary aims, and, immediately afterwards, imperialistic purposes, the United States institutions didn’t intend to prioritise social reforming strategies, created by a civil more than nationalists awareness and so characterised by a clear didactic purpose. Even thought the most notable difference was the private nature of the American museums in opposition to the state and political supports of which the European institutions have been benefiting, the firsts closely emulated the European examples, being understood that at the end of the nineteenth century the European model of displaying was by that time the universal accepted standard. Purposes, ideas and museum’s outcomes were coinciding with the desires of the ones who had collected conspicuous holdings after the Civil War, wishful to showcase not only their prosperity but also cultural and social consciousness.

The dynamics that resonates in the current cultural Chinese reality partly reminds the museums trends of the United States at the beginning of the 900s: abundance, prosperity, patronage, philanthropy and nationalism. Human beings find money can only satisfy them for a while. After you getting them, what do you want? You want status, and recognition from society, said Carrie Waley, founder and CEO of Mandarin Consultant.

In 1949, during the Chinese Communist supremacy, our country had only 25 museums, while most of them were closed during the Cultural Revolution and their collections dispersed. But the rapid growth and opening politics that inscribed the years after, associated with a prosperous urbanisation, prepared a museum-building boom that went beyond that simply replacing what before had been pulled-up. The huge efforts focalised on creating new cultural centers, foundations and institutions, is the metropolises as well as in the provinces, demonstrates and indisputable approach resembling the cultural industries created in the United States during the last century, far from the European model of conceiving the pure mission of preservation. Even if the premises has lots in common with the past American model, the dynamics interesting the Chinese museums-era follows a typical and own logic, with the contributing favorable market that answer with astonishing records to the fading years of the United States fervid activity and to the European venerable state-financed institutions currently on their knees by the financial crisis. The amount of 3,500 museums that had to be established by last year, according to the current Five Years Plan, have been achieved three years in advance. Public services, which guarantee cultural access, also demonstrated an encouraging growth: by the end of 2008, China counted 2,819 public libraries, 1,893 museums and 3,217 cultural centers. In 2012, the opening of 451 museums contributed to the total record of 3,866 institutions, explained An Laishun, vice-president of the China Museum Association. In the United States, by contrast, during the decade before the 2008 financial crash only 20-40 museums have been founded, while in 2014, including 500 private institutions, the number of museums in China reached 4,165 institutions.

Today, our nation yearns for achieving approximately 10,000 museums by 2030: the ambition is to have one museum every 200,000 inhabitants, and Beijing and Shanghai had already accomplished this typically American standard. After the Japanese invasion in 1948-49, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces shipped 230,000 of the magnificent emperor’s treasures in Taiwan: some of what was left behind can still be enjoyed today in the Beijing’s National Museum, even if no museum in China conserved a treasure able to stand the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Perhaps, public museums have not traditionally been part of the Chinese culture, but the awareness that the well-established global metropolis - New York, Paris and London- have all created well-known institutions, matches the wishes of presenting the ancient and contemporary culture to an international audience, demonstrating the importance of recollecting the past as a source of collective memory for a further education. Today, five days per week, a new museum or art related extension opens in China. Beijing and Shanghai: China’s colossuses to become cultural hubs Philip Dodd, chairman of Made in China, a cultural consultancy that forges links between China and the United Kingdom, spoke about an explosion of museums, and the unfading traces of the trend are above all notable in China’s hundreds of years old megalopolises. In Beijing, the construction of Jean Nouvel’s National Museum of China began during the last quarter of 2014: as to the art-display has been given the function of urban catalyst, part of the Olympic Park, designed for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, is going to be converted in a new city’s cultural cluster. Once completed, the architecture of the new NAMOC, currently located in the city centre and a third size of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, will be dedicated to displaying twentieth century Chinese and international art and calligraphy, expected to attract 12 million visitors per year and predicting it to be the world's busiest art museum. "Images of major or emblematic works belonging to different periods and influences form a panorama of Chinese painting and culture. The contents will be decided in consultation with the most eminent Chinese and international specialists, explained the architect. Self-proclaimed to be one of the greatest museums of the world, the NAMOC will contain collections dating back to the Ming Era. Featured programs will include permanent and temporary exhibition galleries, a research and education center, auditorium, large-scale interior garden and a series of public spaces. Our proposal is the result of one year of catalysis, of immersions, of dialogs and explorations to translate, synthesize, symbolize and materialize the spirit of the Chinese civilization, described Ateliers Jean Nouvel. Our goal is to protect the miracles created with ink throughout the centuries, to reveal the force of a living art to welcome the artist of tomorrow.

And due to its one-of-a-kind booming growth, China has also become a fertile terrain for contemporary art market: for Christie’s, the mainland Chinese buyers have increased their spending on global art by 47 percent in the first half of 2015, while for Sotheby’s Chinese buyers spent 51 percent more during its summer sales in London. So that, Beijing will host the new headquarter for auctioneers China Guardian: as the world’s first major museum and auction house hybrid, the Guardian Art Centre designed by Büro Ole Scheeren is soon awaited to open.

In the 798 Art District, instead, the Minsheng Art Museum, designed in 2011 by Studio Pei-Zhu and recently opened as a requalification concept for the abandoned Panasonic factory, has to be intended as an outstanding architecture carrying the dense essence of rebirthing: its concept respects the simplicity and reality of industrial buildings, addressing the future of contemporary art spaces. The factory in the 798 area was devastated and ruined, but its rough, plain and real industrial building’s features happened to coincide with the contemporary artist attitude, explained the Studio. There, flexibility replaces the traditional museums standards with spaces for interaction and communication, highlighting public’s participation and integrating all-together artworks, audience and institution. Embodying the essence of the 798, which have been characterised by a new life of post-industrial heritage tourism through art production and exhibitions, the Minsheng Museum revives an outstanding phenomenon that from Europe has been experimented in the Chinese country: renovating through arts, including once abandoned sites in wider urbanisation renewal projects conceiving multipurpose and cross-disciplinary cultural and creative centres.

This is the case of Shanghai, where the historic Bunds former banks and trading houses along the Huangpu River have been converted in a series of popping-up museums and galleries as part of the city’s plan to turn the West Bund into a world-class arts and cultural hub. On one end of the waterfront area, two industrial buildings have been repurposed and transformed into the West Bund Art Center, site of a new annual art fair, and the Yuz Museum, focusing on contemporary exhibitions.

On the other end is the Long Museum West Bund to exhibit a mix of classical antiquities and modern art: the founders, Wang Wei and her billionaire financier husband Liu Yiqian, has amassed one of the China’s largest private collections. The couple have been protagonist of an outstanding acquisition, a record breaking 170$ million Amedeo Modigliani sold during a recent New York auction. "I want to build a museum that is an attraction to old and young, local citizens and international audience", explained Liu, "and I hope my museum will stay for hundreds of years". The new design adopts the cantilever structure featuring vault-umbrella with independent walls while the shear walls with free layout are embedded into the original basement so as to be concreted with the original framework structure. With the shear walls, the first underground floor of the original parking has been transformed to an exhibition space with the overground space highlighting multiple orientations because of the relative connection of the vault-umbrella at different directions; besides, the electrical and mechanical system has been integrated in the vault-umbrella structure. As to the overground space covered by the vault-umbrella, the walls and the ceiling feature as-cast-finish concrete surface so that their geometrical dividing line seems faint. Such structure cannot only shield the human body in conformation, moreover, the building’s internal space can also represent a kind of primordial and timeless charm while the spatial dimension, large or small, and the as-cast-finish concrete surface with the seam among molding boards and the bolt holes bring a sense of reality as well. The directness and simplicity resulting from this literal structure, material and space plus the sense of force or lightness because of large-scale overhanging style enables the overall building’s continuation of the industrial property of the original site, not only in time but in space. After the first branch opened in Pudong in 2012 and the second in 2014, the third branch of the Long Museum is scheduled to open this year in Chongqing: their institutions have made the founders darlings of the Shanghai government, as they generate buzz and bring visitors to the city.

The vibrant metropolis, currently ready to perform a crucial role in the Chinese cultural and artistic promotion, is actually the scene of numerous vibrant projects scheduled to open in the near future. The Bund Finance Centre designed by Foster + Partners and Heatherwick Studio, will occupy a prominent site on the Bund defining an ending point to Shanghai’s most famous street. At the very heart of its scheme, a flexible arts and cultural center will combine exhibitions and events halls with performance venues, inspired by the open stages of the traditional Chinese theatres. The project will mix business and retail-oriented functions with cultural and artistic fruitions, with 420,000 square metres eight-structures arranged around a landscaped public plaza. The initiatives competes with Hong Kong, where the West Kowloon Cultural District, the largest cultural initiative of its kind in the world, will establish a major centre for music, performing and visual arts in the earth of the city, integrating the cultural venues with the everyday life of the city.

1000 museums in 10 years: the museums era in the second-tier and third-tier cities

But it isn’t only about our country’s well-known and greater cities. Following the 2006 slogan "1000 museums in 10 years", the I.M Pei Suzhou Museum opened the museums booming era to the Chinese second-tier and third-tier cities. Conceived as one of the four major cultural landmark buildings for the new financial hub in Zhejiang Xicheng of Guangzhou, the Guangdong Museum deigned by Rocco Design Architects have been opened in 2010 and designed not only to house a great variety of fascinating objects of treasure, but as also in itself designed to be a treasured object of great fascination becoming an identifiable cultural icon, giving the visitors a memorable experience of the local provincial history and traditional wisdom as well as contributing to the enhancement of the city’s cultural identity.

In Nanjing, the 2013 opened Sifang Art Museum, designed by Steven Holl, contributes to the Chinese International Practical Exhibition of Architecture’s programme that will see architectures of both Chinese and foreign architects populate the site within the Laoshan National Forest Park. When designing the jolting snake-like form of the architecture, the architect was there interested in the difference of usages of the perspective between Western and Chinese paintings: The museum is formed by a field of parallel perspective spaces and garden walls over which a light figure hovers, explained the studio.

And the New York based architect and watercolorist is currently involved in some architectural projects in the cities of Qingdao and Tianjin, shaping a new public spaces and art-related institutions with the Qingdao Culture and Art Center and contributing with two buildings to the cultural district of Tianjin Eco-City with the Ecocity Ecology and Planning Museums. Constructions has almost reached their final steps also for the Datong Art Museum, the Foster + Partners museum of the twentieth-first century: Datong’s new quarter will be the centre of the city’s cultural life, with the new museum as its urban room, designed as a dynamic space open to everyone to meet and enjoy its different displays and activities, commented Luke Fox, a senior partner of the architectural firm.

It is certainly a thrilling time for the Chinese museums industry, but it’s also an insidious and uncertain one. The country’s institutions are humble enough to learn from the West, commented Philip Dodd, but they have a different strategy: put up museum, put in the collection and then begin to develop what one might call the audience for that museum. Attendance figures for both the Long Museum and the Shanghai’s Power Station of Arts, the first Chinese sate-run contemporary art museum, have been so far disappointing, aided by the out of the way location and lacking of appropriate public transports to reach the institutions: It has to be accessible. No matter how much you love contemporary art, this place has to be easy to get to or else your passion will be washed away, commented the deputy director of planning Li Xu. And the 30 millions cultural-historic objects in China, according to Lu Jiansong, Professor from the Department of Cultural Heritage and Museology of the Fudan University, is a too small amount to fill the planned museums numbers. Some of them collected only 1,000 pieces, while as a reference, the London-based British Museum’s collection boasts around 8 million objects itself: contrasting the architectural and institutions rise, Chinese museums can’t complete in artefacts. Some museums -continued Lu- have a splendid appearance but end up being transformed into shopping malls due to the lack of collections and items on display.

Since officials pay excessive attention to construction instead of acquiring items, the funds for exhibitions reveal at the end to be very limited: as an example, the Ordos Museum designed in the area once occupied by the Inner Mongolian Gobi Desert, was completed in 2011 but still struggles in pursuing its collection. Lars Nittve, ex-director of the London’s Tate Modern and the Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, looks to the Chinese museums with skepticism: Certainly they have magnificent buildings, but a museum is not a box. And particularly today, a good museum have to offer an articulated collection but has also to be innovative, being able to redevelop a model accepted during the past.

However, despite the critiques also regarding the lack of professionals managing important institutions, Neil Wenman, senior director of the Hauser & Wirth gallery in London, is clearly encouraging: What is really interesting is that the collectors I work with take things very seriously in terms of research. There is an assumption they buy in bulk and don’t know what they are doing. Tat is fall completely untrue: they are very aware of what they are doing, very well researched and very global in their knowledge. How our country’s newly built institutions will support and maintain themselves in the future is hard to predict, but the activation of conspicuous urban marketing and commercial circuits, which pitched the museums institutions on a mass-media scene rising numerous interrogatives on the authenticity of the cultural impact of their exhibited masterpieces, could represent in China’s a successful strategy for both private and public institutions.

There are 675 million mobile phones in China, and this new media may become a really interesting place for artists to work in, or museums to work in, suggested Dodd. Or probably, it’s just a matter of time: If there are so many museums, -explained Gao Peng, deputy director of Beijing’s Today Art Museum- would we have enough of a new generation of managers and staff to run these museums? As a museum manager we need to know how source funding, understand management and be knowledgeable about art. We need some time until the new generation of museum managers will mature. It’s therefore important for our country’s museum sector to find its own solutions to its peculiar challenges, but the country’s system of museums building is just at the beginning of a process that took about 130 years to resolve itself in Europe.

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