Research trip to South China to map possible collaborations

Main focus of the visit was identifying opportunities for future Sino-Dutch cultural cooperation in museum management training and creative industries.

Input for new museum management training – fall 2016
We visited five prominent museums in the Pearl River Delta region: the Guangdong Provincial Museum, the Guangdong Museum of Art, the Guangshanyue Art Museum, the soon-to-open Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the Guangdong Times Museum. The latter, opened in 2010 and privately funded, is situated on top of a skyscraper in Guangzhou designed by Rem Koolhaas.

Some of the museum directors we met had participated in the first Dutch museum management training program in May 2015. By visiting them in their own museums we learned about their achievements and challenges in various aspects of museum management. We collected their further needs in professional training, which varied from case studies on practicalities in curating to exhibition design.

DutchCulture will advise the trainers to incorporate these requests in the curriculum for the next training programme, likely to be held in autumn 2016 in Beijing. In the same period, also a Sino-Dutch national design forum will take place. This is a result from our collaboration with Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art (GAFA), the prominent art school in the Pearl River Delta area.

A Possible Sino-Dutch Design Centre in Shenzhen
In Shenzhen, China’s new ‘capital of design’ and hometown of our long-term partner Overseas China Town Group (OCT), DutchCulture and colleagues from the Dutch Consulate-General in Guangzhou met with the Shenzhen Art and Design Alliance. The Alliance is a recently launched collective of representatives from the creative industry, art institutions, universities and financial institutions.

Together we brainstormed about opportunities and chances for realizing a Sino-Dutch cooperative platform for Dutch designers, companies and educational programmes to work more efficiently in south China. DutchCulture shares the result of this joint brainstorm with the Dutch creative industry. We aim for forming a high-leveled ‘creative industry mission’ to Shenzhen in March 2016, to investigate further strategic collaboration of the creative industries in China and The Netherlands. If you would like to know more about this, please contact us.

The Future of Fashion is Now 2.0
Initiator Han Nefkens and curator Jose Teunissen of the fashion design exhibition The Future of Fashion is Now joined DutchCulture on the research trip to China in December 2015. In Guangzhou, the Han Nefkens Foundation granted new commissions to five China-based young designers. They will add new designs for the upcoming Shenzhen edition of the exhibition (26 March - 31 July 2016).

A few Dutch young designers whose works are shown in The Future of Fashion is Now will exchange their cross-disciplinary ideas and fresh working methods with their Chinese peers. As producer of this comprehensive project in China, DutchCulture organizes a series of programs around the opening ceremony in March. There will be a training on museum’s textile collection care for the staff of the OCT Art&Design Gallery in Shenzhen, the location of The Future of Fashion is Now. Designers will participate in a forum and lecture at the art schools in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

More information
If you would like to know more about our research trip to South China, about the museum management training in late 2016 or our other activitities, please contact Ian Yang or Monique Knapen.