All booms should finish, and mainland China’s spectacular interval of recent museum constructing within the 2010s was most likely destined to fizzle even earlier than the dual tripwires of Covid-19 and an financial droop. Nonetheless, China’s artwork world was shocked when the information got here in August 2022 that Guangzhou’s beloved Instances Museum could be shutting that autumn.
Since 2003, Instances’s small house atop an condo block had hosted a number of the most provocative exhibitions and nuanced scholarship in Asian artwork and constructed a robust neighborhood round it. However it was funded by Instances Property, and a long-predicted implosion of the Chinese language property sector had lastly arrived.
Many non-public museums failed to ascertain sustainable funding fashions
Instances Guangzhou relaunched final 12 months as a challenge house. However there have been loads of different extra definitive demises. The Shanghai location of OCAT, a sequence of property developments that at one level additionally had museums in Beijing, Shenzhen and Xi’an, closed indefinitely in summer season 2021 after outrage over a video work it exhibited rating ladies’s attractiveness. As Covid restrictions deepened, the museum by no means reopened.
Qingdao’s TAG Museum this summer season introduced it was suspending operations. Nanjing’s a lot vaunted Sifang Artwork Museum now seems to be a rental house for occasions, whereas different standouts like Yinchuan MoCA and Shanghai MoCA have scaled again to mount solely modest, occasional exhibitions. In 2023, when the rich house owners of Lengthy Museum in Shanghai and Chongqing auctioned a part of their huge assortment, that establishment’s future additionally appeared precarious, although it has continued working.
“The sector has entered a post-boom part,” says Li Anqi, a curator and historian who has a analysis deal with Chinese language museums. “The preliminary speedy growth—at instances, a craze—has cooled down, which is a pure growth as perpetual progress is unrealistic.”
The museum craze of the 2010s introduced China tons of of recent artwork establishments, a lot of them vainness tasks arrange by keen new collectors or connected to property developments in pursuit of site visitors and tax breaks. In line with China’s Nationwide Cultural Heritage Administration, in 2024 the variety of registered museums within the nation elevated by 213 to 7,046; researchers Fenghua Zhang and Pascal Courty discovered that between 1996 and 2015 the quantity greater than trebled, from 1,210 to three,852.
‘A second of consolidation’
However past the preliminary fanfare of flashy amenities and eye-watering budgets, just a few dozen of those museums established reputations for constant curatorial visions and exhibition programming. “This present second presents a invaluable alternative for museum founders to mirror on their work and deal with how you can sustainably function and preserve present ones,” Li says.
Philip Tinari, the director and chief govt of UCCA, which has a number of areas in China, describes 2025 as “a second of consolidation”. For some time, he says, “discourse was dominated by this concept of a sort of infinite growth”. Now he sees China shifting “in a route the place modern artwork doesn’t must be a sort of catch-all for aspirations and anxieties in regards to the future. As a substitute, it’s—or it’s changing into—a area of cultural manufacturing with a particular set of prospects and viewers and reception round it. There’s positively a maturation that’s taking place.”
Collector-backed basis areas are proliferating. “There are plenty of non-public people who ten or 15 years in the past would have been the sort of folks to start out museums,” Tinari says. “That keenness is getting channelled into barely extra contained and targeted tasks.”
“Individuals realise now that lots goes into beginning and working museums,” he provides. “It’s not as straightforward because it seems to be.”
UCCA, which launched in Beijing in 2007, has branched out to tasks in Beidaihe, Yixing, Shanghai and in late September to Jincheng, Shanxi province. It was the main focus of a report in July within the South China Morning Submit (SCMP) alleging that cashflow points had induced delays to some workers salaries. In an emailed assertion, UCCA mentioned the article “was riddled with inaccuracies and exaggerations. UCCA is at the moment in authorized proceedings with SCMP over the a number of materials and factual errors contained therein.” The museum declined to handle the allegations or to specify what was inaccurate.
In a press release, the South China Morning Submit mentioned it stands by its story. “The article in query was ready following a complete analysis course of. The SCMP is happy that the reporting precisely displays the substance and context of the issues mentioned.”
Related cost rumours have dogged different establishments, with tax investigations, backdoor artwork gross sales and messy divorces among the many purported conditions dealing with non-public museums.
“It has develop into clear that many non-public museums born from this growth failed to ascertain sustainable funding fashions or domesticate in-house curatorial and academic groups—each are important for a museum’s long-term survival,” Li says. “The non-public museums that proceed to function comparable to Rockbund Artwork Museum [in Shanghai], He Artwork Museum [Shunde], and By Artwork Issues [Hanghzou] are usually these with sound monetary operations {and professional} workers who’re paid with affordable salaries and are given alternatives to be taught.”
Shao Shu, the manager director of He Artwork Museum (HEM), says the museum’s funding construction is “fairly wholesome”. Based in 2021 by He Jianfeng, a prolific collector and son of the founding father of the electronics producer Midea, HEM receives assist from a basis.
Shao Shu, director of the He Artwork Museum, says tickets are a dispensable luxurious in tight instances
Picture: courtesy He Artwork Museum
“The museum wouldn’t be simply influenced by the economic system, environments or if the corporate made unhealthy investments and misplaced cash,” Shao says. Tickets and merchandise additionally herald a portion of the funds that’s anticipated to extend yearly, at the moment masking exhibition prices, with the purpose of full independence after a decade.
Falling ticket gross sales
Shao says HEM eschews the industrial gallery-funded promoting exhibits which have sustained many different non-public museums. That income stream has slowed, although; even profitable vogue model exhibitions have develop into much less widespread. Admission to HEM prices 150 yuan ($21) however with reductions or free admission for some, the per-head common is slightly below 100 yuan ($14). The museum bought round 400,000 tickets final 12 months however expects that to drop 20% this 12 months. The explanations, Shao says, are primarily financial; museum tickets are a dispensable luxurious when revenue shrinks. Although progress is projected at 4%-5% for this and subsequent 12 months, youth unemployment hit 18.9% in August.
In the meantime, the ranks of up to date artwork lovers in China are rising, however slowly. Shao says many guests discover modern artwork “difficult”. With the economic system slowing, the younger, educated core demographic is disproportionately leaving China, or decamping from the large cities to cheaper small cities.
Authorities-backed Chinese language museums have in recent times moved in the direction of free admission, which Shao believes additionally cuts into non-public museums’ customer numbers. “Individuals who don’t care about high quality will select no matter is cheaper … Plus the normal cultural issues displaying on the nationwide museums are simpler for folks to attach with.”
Public-private collaborations have a combined monitor report—Qingdao’s TAG Museum, as an illustration, suspended operations after dropping backing from a cash-strapped native authorities.
“The decision for systematic assist for personal artwork museums has been voiced for years, but significant coverage progress stays restricted,” Li says.
In contrast with public museums—notably these selling conventional tradition and values, or serving as devices of international relations, like Shanghai’s West Bund Museum, which has a ten-year partnership with Centre Pompidou—non-public modern artwork museums are “particularly weak”, Li says.
