Museum Processes in China: The Institutional Regulation, Production and Consumption of the Art Museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region 9789048550357

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Museum Processes in China

Asian Visual Cultures This series focuses on visual cultures that are produced, distributed and consumed in Asia and by Asian communities worldwide. Visual cultures have been implicated in creative policies of the state and in global cultural networks (such as the art world, film festivals and the Internet), particularly since the emergence of digital technologies. Asia is home to some of the major film, television and video industries in the world, while Asian contemporary artists are selling their works for record prices at the international art markets. Visual communication and innovation is also thriving in transnational networks and communities at the grass-roots level. Asian Visual Cultures seeks to explore how the texts and contexts of Asian visual cultures shape, express and negotiate new forms of creativity, subjectivity and cultural politics. It specifically aims to probe into the political, commercial and digital contexts in which visual cultures emerge and circulate, and to trace the potential of these cultures for political or social critique. It welcomes scholarly monographs and edited volumes in English by both established and early-career researchers. Series Editors Jeroen de Kloet, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Edwin Jurriëns, The University of Melbourne, Australia Editorial Board Gaik Cheng Khoo, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Simon Fraser University, Canada Larissa Hjorth, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Amanda Rath, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany Anthony Fung, Chinese University of Hong Kong Lotte Hoek, Edinburgh University, United Kingdom Yoshitaka Mori, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Japan

Museum Processes in China The Institutional Regulation, Production, and Consumption of the Art Museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region

Selina C.F. Ho

Amsterdam University Press

Cover image: Museum of American Art in Berlin, Museum of Modern Art, reproduction of the 1936 MoMA exhibition ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’, exhibition view, ‘A Museum That is Not’, Guangdong Times Museum, 2011 (photo by Guangdong Times Museum) Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 352 7 e-isbn 978 90 4855 035 7 doi 10.5117/9789463723527 nur 692 © Selina C.F. Ho / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

9

Note on Romanization

11

1. Introduction 1.1 Rethinking museums in China 1.2 Museum as cultural circuits 1.3 The selection of art museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta region 1.4 Methods 1.5 Book structure

13 17 33

2. Revisiting the historical trajectories of modern art museums in China 2.1 The path towards the birth of modern public art museums in the Republic of China (1912-1949) 2.2 The development of art museums in the People’s Republic of China (1949-current) 2.3 The changing museum contexts in Hong Kong (1962-current) 2.4 Concluding remarks 3. He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen 3.1 Between the state and the market: a contingent national museum framework 3.2 From nationalism to the production of knowledge: the art of He Xiangning 3.3 Cross-straits cultural diplomacy and public dialogue on contemporary art 3.4 Interpreting contemporary sculpture: possibilities and limitations 3.5 Educated youth, provincial visitors, and a diversified national public 3.6 Concluding remarks

40 47 49 63 66 71 86 90 97 100 107 112 118 127 135

4. Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou 4.1 Institutional boundaries: the private market, the state, and society 4.2 A developmental perspective of cultural globalization 4.3 Artistic regionalization: southern imaginary vs northern hegemony 4.4 Educated youth and the consumption of ‘alternative culture’ 4.5 Concluding remarks

141 144 151 161 164 173

5. Hong Kong Museum of Art in Hong Kong 5.1 Museum bureaucracy and its institutional network 5.2 The historical painting collection: from the colonial legacy to aesthetic differences 5.3 International blockbusters and global cultural capital 5.4 National representation and the grandeur of dynastic art 5.5 Different notions of the local: from East-meets-West to a local-national-global nexus 5.6 Public and counter-public: museum consumption in a citystate 5.7 Concluding remarks

177 180

6. Conclusion 6.1 Museum modes of circuits 6.2 Implications of the findings 6.3 Contributions of the research

215 218 219 226

Bibliography

235

Index

259

182 185 188 192 197 211

List of figures, tables, and illustrations Figures 1.1 The number of museums in Mainland China (1949-1982, 19852017) 1.2 The Museum Circuit

19 37

Tables 3.1 Modes of museum identification of the visitors of He Xiangning Art Museum 4.1 Modes of museum identification of the visitors of Guangdong Times Museum 5.1 Modes of museum identification of the publics of Hong Kong Museum of Art Illustrations 3.1 The exterior of the He Xiangning Art Museum 3.2 The central exhibition lobby of the He Xiangning Art Museum 4.1 The rooftop gallery of the Guangdong Times Museum 4.2 The main entrance of the Guangdong Times Museum 4.3 The artist Gum Cheng and a passer-by drawing portraits of each other in a public area near the Huangbian village, 2014 4.4 Visitor at the ‘Roman Ondák: Storyboard’ exhibition, 2015 5.1 The exterior of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, at the stage of renovation, December 2018 5.2 ‘Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation’ exhibition at HKMoA, 2009

129 167 200 98 109 142 144 155 166 178 210

Acknowledgements The bulk of the research for this book was done in preparation for my PhD thesis, submitted to the University of Melbourne (UoM), Australia in June 2018. My research could not have been completed without the help of my former doctoral supervisors, Dr Edwin Jurriëns and Dr Lewis Mayo at the Asia Institute of the University of Melbourne. Their contributions have largely laid the groundwork for this book. My deepest gratitude goes to Dr Jurriëns for his principal guidance and detailed comments on my original thesis. As an expert in media and contemporary art studies, he has given me valuable advice, particularly on audience reception and contemporary art practices. I must also thank Dr Mayo for his thorough review of my original thesis and his encouragement to develop it into a book. I am deeply grateful for his critical questions that challenged my thinking at different times. I have truly benefited from his profound knowledge of the cultural history of China. I also have benefited from the comments and suggestions offered by the external reviewers of my original thesis, Dr Chow Yui-fai (Associate Professor of Hong Kong Baptist University) and Dr Olivia Khoo (Associate Professor of Monash University), and the anonymous examiner of this book. I am indebted to my friend and interlocutor, Dr Vivian Ting who has constantly discussed with me the subject matter of this research. I thank all of them for their inspirational commentaries that led to several important improvements to this book. This book has grown out of my interest in museum studies and China studies. How a museum constructs its institutional identity and expresses or diffuses its ideologies through exhibitions and their relationships and networks of cultural production and patterns of cultural consumption is the focus of this research. During an intensive four-year period of research, I have investigated museum-related materials, and interviewed a range of curatorial and managerial staff, as well as visitors, in three museums. They include Feng Boyi, Wang Dong, and Philip Ngan from the He Xiangning Art Museum; Zhao Ju, Cai Yingqian (Nikita), Shen Ruijun, Veronica Wong, and Jacqueline Lin from Guangdong Times Museum; and Eve Tam, Maria Mok, and an anonymous interviewee from the Hong Kong Museum of Art. I would like to express my appreciation to them for sharing their views. Their interviews have given me insights into understanding their practices. I also thank the staff members of the Asia Art Archive, Michelle Wong and Linda Lee, who have offered help in accessing the materials of the Archive. Most of all I thank some 150 anonymous visitors. I appreciate their opinions,

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attitudes, and interesting remarks. They have greatly contributed to my analysis of museum consumption in this research. Undertaking this research required enormous financial support. I must acknowledge the Faculty of Arts and the Asia Institute of the University of Melbourne for their full support of my research. With the support of the Fieldwork Grant (2015-16), and two GRATS funds (2015 and 2017), I conducted my field trips in the three museums and presented my research findings at two conferences, respectively the eighth International Conference of Inclusive Museums (New Delhi, India, 2015), and the tenth International Convention of Asia Scholars (Chiang Mai, Thailand, 2017). I thank the scholars and curators who kindly shared ideas for my work during these trips. In addition, I greatly appreciate the support of Professor Kee Pookong (the former Director of the Asia Institute of UoM), and the help of Dr Zhou Shaoming and Associate Professor Gao Jia, who chaired my academic meetings. Parts of this book draw on earlier publications but have been substantially reviewed. In the introductory chapter, I draw in part from my publication (2016) ‘Between the Museum and the Public: Negotiating the “Circuit of Culture” as an Analytical Tool for Researching Museums in China’, The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 9(4): 17-31, doi.org/10.18848/18352014/CGP/v09i04/17-31 (©Common Ground Research Networks, Ho Chui-fun Selina, All Rights Reserved. Permissions: [email protected]). In Chapter 3, the findings concerning the museum’s institutional regulation and production are derived from my article (2019) ‘Curatorial Agencies and the National Cultural Dilemma at the He Xiangnaing Art Museum in China’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 34(3): 290-305, doi.org/10.1080/09 647775.2018.1562361 (copyright Taylor & Francis, http://www.tandfonline. com). I also thank Hong Kong artists Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng, and the Guangdong Times Museum for their photos to be included in this book. I am enormously grateful to Amsterdam University Press (AUP) who supported the publication of this monograph. Dr Jeroen de Kloet and Dr Jurriëns, the editors of the Asian Visual Culture Series, have been supportive in getting this volume published. I am lucky to have worked with Dr Saskia Gieling (Senior Commissioning Editor Asian Studies of AUP), Drs Jaap Wagenaar (Desk Editor of AUP), and Mike Sanders, who helped to bring this book to fruition. Finally, this book would not be possible without the encouragement of my family, my friends and colleagues, near and far. They are too numerous to list, but I especially thank those who offered help and support with my research. They are Dr Michael Robinson, Dr Helen Ho, Dr Seng Yujin, Ivy Yuen and Jessica Kong. I dedicate this book to the cultural practitioners who work at the forefront of museum politics, and struggle to exercise their agencies in museum work.



Note on Romanization

Names of mainland Chinese are given in the traditional Chinese order and in pinyin: surname followed by given name. Names of Hong Kong and Taiwanese people follow the English spelling adopted by the individual or as found in official sources such as exhibition catalogues. Place names outside of Hong Kong and Chinese terms or concepts are in pinyin. Where confusion may arise, an additional transliteration appears in brackets, or in a footnote when explanation is required. For place names within the territory of Hong Kong, the original names are used.

1. Introduction Abstract The museum enterprise in China has long been seen as a state monopoly. This chapter finds that the contingent roles of the state and the market, the agencies of social and cultural actors in their signifying practices, as well as the notion of museum public, have been neglected in the existing analyses of museums in China. By drawing the constructive, multidimensional model, ‘museum circuit’, it argues that the study of China’s museums should incorporate reflection upon institutional-regulatory changes, processes of cultural production by networks of museum intermediaries, and processes of museum consumption as practices of appropriation, negotiation, or resistance. Based on the model, it suggests an empirical study of the art museal processes that have affected GPRD since the 1990s. Keywords: Museum studies, China studies, museum circuit, museum public, museal processes

Public museums first appeared in Western European countries in the late eighteenth century against a background of European colonial expansion and the emergence of democratic societies in Europe. Although these public museums in Europe and their counterparts in North America set important museological precedents that have had a global impact, museums in other countries have had different trajectories due to the specific historical, social, and cultural backgrounds against which those museums emerged. In Asia and the Pacific, museums are engaged with postcolonial critiques and state-building projects (see for examples, Macleod 1998; Kreps 2003; Vickers 2007; Lepawsky 2008; Bhatti 2012; Lu 2014; Mathur and Singh 2015; ErskineLoftus et al. 2016). The museum, as a locus of production, circulation, and consumption of visual culture, has emerged as a state tool of nationalism and has been adopted as a vehicle of modernization in the postcolonial countries in Asia. Their distinctive local discourses have challenged the validity of

Ho, S.C.F., Museum Processes in China: The Institutional Regulation, Production, and Consumption of the Art Museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi: 10.5117/9789463723527_ch01

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treating museums with a universal discourse that is epistemologically and ontologically the same as Western counterparts. In the twenty-first century, Asian museums are urged to establish their own museologies, aligning the efforts of the West in ‘decolonizing’ the Eurocentric museum.1 Museums across the world have become an academic issue that emphasizes global dialogues, cultural specificity, and the need to focus on particular contexts.2 China is at the forefront of museum development in Asia. This book will focus on China’s historical, cultural-political, economic, and social contexts (including those of Hong Kong, which was a British colony between the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth centuries), and addresses the specificities of the localization processes affecting its museum culture in the global city-region – Greater Pearl River Delta (abbreviated as GPRD) – from the late 1990s to the present day. It does not only empirically study the art museal processes in the region, but also creates a conceptual framework that can inform the study of museum-making in China, and promote the study of museum agency in other parts of Asia. Breaking away from the traditional state-centred perspective that primarily focuses on the official narratives, and the characteristics of modernity and nationalism, this book will present China’s museum culture in its complexity as processes negotiated and contested by contending forces and diverse actors that exist in different forms of management and levels of governance. By studying how a particular regime of representation can be challenged, contested, and transformed (Hall 1997, 8), I hope this book will provide a stimulus for us to rethink the relationship between the state, museum, and society in Asia. In addition, considering how actors express their alternative messages and negotiate new forms of identities and cultural politics, this book advocates a research paradigm in the study of museum culture in Asia that can promote cultural critique and social changes and strengthen the development of a viable democratic society. In this book, I treat museums as important cultural organizations that engage in institutionalizing and reinstitutionalizing the structures of history, 1 These concerns were raised in the international conference ‘Museum of Our Own: In Search of Local Museology for Asia’, organized jointly by the Universitas Gadjah Mada (Indonesia) and National Museum of World Cultures (Netherlands) from 18 to 20 November 2014 in the city of Yogyakarta in Indonesia. The conference aimed to explore the possible existence of a set of museological models and practices that is unique to Asia. See Cai (2015). 2 These aims were highlighted at the 50th Anniversary International Conference, ‘The Museum in the Global Contemporary: Debating the Museum of Now’, which was held by the School of Museum Studies of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom in April, 2016. See Walklate (2016).

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art, culture, and society. It is problematic to consider museums only as a means for assessing the changing worlds of the state and economy, and to overlook their potential for initiating changes to contemporary cultural politics and social realities. As Timothy Luke (2002, xxiv) notes, museums are ‘sites of finely structured normative arguments and artfully staged cultural normalization’. Their products are reflective of individuals’ and groups’ ongoing struggles to establish what is real, to organize their collective interests, and to gain command over what is regarded as cultural authority. It is important to work out a style of interpretive criticism to articulate how political knowledge and power can be propagated in museum images and narratives, and to analyse what the social realities, normative truths and normalizing events relayed in museum settings are. Drawing from the field of cultural institutions studies, I view culture as involving specific cultural entities (artefacts and practices) bound by specific institutional frameworks. From a macro-sociological perspective, ‘institutions’ constitute a sector (or ‘system’, or ‘field’) of society – they are not limited to enterprises or cultural organizations which use human and financial resources to achieve certain aims efficiently. They are not identified exclusively with organizational entities but are also linked with specific local structures, explicit rules and norms, forms of exchange, and conventions that structure and pre-structure social actions (Hasitschka, Goldsleger, and Zembylas 2005, 153). More importantly, institutions operate as gatekeepers, controlling access to organizational structures and social fields by generating surplus value, creating scarcity, or transforming cultural goods into commodities. By including artefacts and practices into production, marketing, and reception (or excluding them from these domains of activity), cultural institutions act as a kind of filter that enables or disables the economic and cultural exploitation of artefacts and services; they also create public visibility or obstruct it (ibid, 154). The theoretical frameworks used in the field of cultural institutions studies differ from traditional approaches to art and culture that focus on the interpretation and understanding of symbolic and aesthetic meaning (approaches such as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and semiotics) and also from approaches that take a solely economic perspective (approaches that exclude the elaboration of non-economic aspects of cultural goods such as symbolic representation and the articulation of social critique). Cultural institutions studies theory instead embraces an explicitly interdisciplinary approach. It holds that cultural goods, which are perceived as both symbolic and material entities, are not subject to a linear process of exchange but undergo various forms of valuation and evaluation while being transmitted

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to different contexts (ibid., 149-150). The cultural (institutional) sector constitutes an interface between differing spheres: social structures (classes, genders, ethnic groupings, etc.) interact with cultural formations (forms of expression, styles, values, habits of reception, etc.) and simultaneously overlap with economic interests and political forces.3 This book endeavours to tease out this interface by looking from the perspective of a new cultural agency – the art museum enterprise in China. Considering that museums are increasingly visible players in Chinese cultural politics, they should not be solely viewed as instruments for maintaining dominant political and economic interests – reference to their intersection with other spheres in the social or cultural domains needs to be made. This broader view will serve as a point of departure for examining the meaning and the context of museums in contemporary China. In this introductory chapter, I shall begin by addressing the fundamental changes affecting museums in the shifting context of China in its post-reform era, and exposing the methodological limitations for examining the museums. In the first section, I question the conventional research framework that privileges the structure and modes of production determined by the forces of state and market, and which reduces reception studies to an instrumental or practical function, and limits the idea of the museum public to the concept found in the public-relations management approach. By highlighting the importance of understanding the complex relationships and new conditions of museums, I argue that research needs to take a holistic approach to the complex processes that affect museums and their relations with different actors, including diverse publics. I suggest utilizing a circuit approach to examine how the museum and its contents are regulated, represented, produced, consumed, and identified. Following the circuit model as explicated in Section 2, my study asks why and how political-economic agents play a regulatory role; what meanings and modes of production are used by the museum intermediaries; how visitors are differentiated from each other, and relate themselves to the museum production-regulation dynamic; and finally, how museums vary under different institutional conditions and address different circuit modes that mediate the relations between the social, cultural, and political-economic spheres. Section 3 will explain the reasons for case studies of the art museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta region. The three art museums chosen are the He Xiangning Art Museum (Shenzhen), the Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou), and the Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong). My research 3 World Heritage Encyclopaedia. ‘Cultural Institutions Studies’, worldheritage.org, http:// worldheritage.org/articles/Cultural_Institutions_Studies, accessed 26 January 2018.

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adopts ethnographic methods, including content analysis of the museum, and textual analysis of a range of sources such as printed and online documents, including curatorial statements, exhibition/project catalogues, newspapers, and data from interviews with museum professionals and visitors. The primary data was mainly collected between 2015 and 2017. The details are listed in Section 4, which is followed by the final section of book structure.

1.1

Rethinking museums in China

The origin of museums in non-Western countries has been subject to debate. In the context of China, Chinese historian Guo Changhong (2008, 80) has stated that China’s modern museum culture can be traced back to the Chinese tradition of collecting cultural artefacts, manifested in the collections amassed by imperial courts and by members of the social elites including aristocrats and literary scholars. He claims that modern China’s museums were viewed as an ‘imported wonder’. This came about as a result of the increasing acceptance of Western ideas in China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the institutional transformations in Chinese society occurring in the wake of the 1911 and 1949 revolutions which sponsored the establishment of museums to facilitate the education of the Chinese people, safeguard cultural artefacts, and promote research. However, Chinese museology also considers the proto-museums to be the origin of the museum institution in China, and that museums are to be seen as Chinese creations rather than imported wonders. The Temple of Confucius, 4 dating back to the fifth century BCE, was ‘the earliest recorded primitive museum in China’ (Su 1995, 63). Regardless of the debate on when and where the modern Chinese museum originated, the country has experienced various localization processes in museum development that go back at least a hundred years. Broadly speaking, the modern Chinese conception of museums emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Qing scholars and officials began to use the word ‘bowuguan’ to describe the museums they visited in Europe.5 The early Chinese translations of the word ‘museum’ were 4 Varutti (2014, 25) notes that Confucius’ home in Qufu, Shandong Province was transformed into a temple a few years after his death in 479 BC, and his belongings were preserved as ‘sacred’ objects. The temple officially became a museum in 1994. 5 The word ‘bowuguan’ was first used as a term to describe the British Museum in London by Lin Zexu (1785-1850) in his book, Sizhou zhi (1835), one of the earliest Chinese books depicting

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extremely varied and reflected the translators’ different interpretations on the appearances of the museums they had visited and the types of items they had observed in museums (Chang W. 2012, 16-17). The word ‘bowuguan’ literally means ‘hall of extensive things’. ‘Guan’ signifies a public building. ‘Bowu’ originally meant ‘having an understanding of the reasons for things’, and the word mainly carried the connotation of natural history (ibid.). In the late Qing, museums had been founded by Chinese elites to strengthen China through education, above all through the spread of Western science and natural history. (Museums were also established in areas under foreign control, including the treaty ports and colonized territories such as Hong Kong and Taiwan. In particular, Hong Kong had followed a separate path from that of the Chinese mainland since it was ceded to the British in 1841 before the collapse of the Qing Dynasty). Public museums emerged out of the world of revolutionary China that came into being with the fall of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). The institutions generally came to distinguish between art museums and museums of other kinds by referring to the latter as ‘bowuguan’ and to art museums as ‘meishuguan’ (literally, halls of fine arts). During the Republic of China (1912-1949), both bowuguan (museums) and meishuguan (fine art museums) were managed by the Education Department of the Nationalist government, and used for developing social education as part of the Nationalists’ modernization project. The heyday of this development was in the 1920s and 1930s, but it was disrupted by the war with Japan (1937-1945) and finally ended with the 1949 defeat of the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War. (After 1949, the Nationalists’ museum system was transferred to Taiwan. It then followed a separate path from that of the communist-controlled Chinese mainland.6) The museum enterprise was radically transformed when the Communist Party took power in 1949. New institutional arrangements put bowuguan and meishuguan respectively under the State Bureau of Cultural Relics (the superseding agency of the present State Administration of Cultural Heritage, abbreviated as SACH) and the Ministry of Culture, leading to the gradual separation of activities between them. Meanwhile, prohibition of the private ownership of antiques led to the disappearance of private museums (Lu 2014, 119-121). In Kirk Denton’s account (2014a, 19), the development of museums in the People’s Republic of China took place in three the world’s geographies, histories, and politics, covering more than 30 countries on the four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa, and America (Chen 2005). 6 For the development of museums in Taiwan, see Chang (2006), Chen (2008), Vickers (2010), and Huang (2012).

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Figure 1.1  The number of museums in Mainland China (1949-1982, 1985-2017)

Source: Data adapted from National Bureau of Statistics of China (2018a)

dynamic bursts. They are the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), the early post-Mao period (1980s), and the post-Tiananmen period (1990s-present). To summarize Denton’s periodization, during the Great Leap Forward, the state expanded the number of museums in the Chinese hinterlands and built national museums for promulgating Mao’s view of history. Although severely attacked by radicals during the Cultural Revolution, museums were utilized to revive the memory of the revolutionary past. The first post-Mao flourishing of museums took place in the early to mid-1980s, and served to ‘reinstitutionalize’ the memory of the past and to emphasize ‘spiritual civilization’. In the aftermath of the 1989 democracy movement and the collapse of communist states in Eastern Europe, museums flourished again during the period between the 1990s and the present, and have served to restore waning socialist values and increase patriotism and nationalism. The above f igure charts two signif icant increases in the number of museums in mainland China since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The first increase occurred around 1958-1960, when Mao was about to embark on the Great Leap Forward, and was articulated by one of the slogans of the day, ‘A museum in every county and an exhibition hall in every commune’ (xianxian you bowuguan, sheshe you zhanlanshi). This surge resulted in a sudden leap in the number of museums from 72 to 360 in 1958, although this was followed by a subsequent downturn during the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution led to an abrupt break

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with the past, and caused a severe blow to the Chinese museum system. The second wave of museum expansion started in 2009. It accelerated in 2012 and 2013, and rebounded in 2017, with these three years recording a staggering increase of over 400 new museums. By the end of 2017 there were already 4,722 museums in existence in mainland China. Compared with the official figure of 365 in 1980, the number of museums has grown more than ten times in the four decades (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2018a). One of the key questions arising from the proliferation of museums is whether this is socially and culturally sustainable. To what (and to whom) are museums relevant in contemporary China? In addition to the concern of these fundamental questions, this study reveals the recent resurgence of interest in the studies of museums in China. Recent studies (Lu 2014; Denton 2014a; Varutti 2014) have emerged to examine China’s museum discourse, which responds to the dramatic political, economic, and social changes that the country has experienced since the launch of its opendoor policy in the 1980s. The studies are largely concerned with the political/ ideological imperatives shaped by the state’s changing representations on history and cultural heritage and the impacts of tourism on museum practices. They transmit genres of expression ranging from modernity to cultural nationalism7 or patriotism to the interplay of different ideologies in producing a more heterogeneous culture and polity. These studies provided insights into the ideological ‘difference’ in state museums between the Maoist past and the post-reform present. However, they adopt a rather ‘statist’ approach that neglects the role of individual agents (Kloeckner 2015), the relationships between stakeholders and the party-state, and the new hegemonic ideologies relayed through museums (Ku 2014), as well as the alternative or counter-narratives raised by dissenters or the public (Park 2016). In addition, this state-centred approach of studying China’s museums tends to look solely at the finished text, which precludes all possible accounts of production, including any competing agendas, and assumes a conscious manipulation by those involved (Macdonald 2006). This approach has ignored the agency of subjects within the operation of state power as well as the contradictions that beset governance practices. The possibility and efficacy of museum politics generated from the cultural sphere in contemporary China has generally been overlooked. 7 The term, ‘cultural nationalism’ has been coined in previous studies of the state cultural discourse. For example, Wang Jing (1996) has stated that cultural nationalism is used to express the repositioning of the Communist state as the inheritor and promotor of Chinese traditional culture, and its policy on guoxue or national studies. Guo Yingjie (2004) also notes that cultural nationalism has revived since the mid-1990s, and was considered by the state as an alternative official ideology after the Marxist-Maoist ideology lost its general appeal.

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In her book, Museums in China: Power, Politics and Identities, Tracey Lu (2014) presents a historical account of the development of museums in mainland China, from 1840 to the present day. In the part that traces the developments after 1978, she focuses on the issues of ethnic identity and the management of cultural heritage in the eco-museums in Huizhou of southwestern China and the tourism and local cultural changes affecting the site museum of the Mogao Buddhist grottoes at Dunhuang in northwestern China. Lu maintains that museums in mainland China have been vested with multiple and diverse roles and responsibilities for developing the economic, social, political, and ideological interests of the modern nation-state. These roles include the following: economically, museums have been used to generate revenue, facilitate the development of tourism, brand the image of a city or a region, and even reduce poverty through the establishment of eco-museums; socially and politically, they have been used as an educational institution to supplement the curriculum of the nation’s education, for legitimation of the authority of the CPC and the nation-state, and for presenting a positive image of the state in the world; ideologically, many museums are still disseminating Marxist narratives of historical materialism and cultural evolution through their exhibitions and research works. The book finishes with a general discussion of different aspects of the current museum situation in China, including museum-related legislation, classification, management structures and associations, the impact of globalization, the policy of ‘free museum admission’, and visitor studies. With much emphasis on social, political, and state actors as the dominant powers in museums, she questions the potential role of the visitors and their place in museums. Lu (2014, 136) has remarked, ‘in theory, visitors should be another group of stakeholders in museums’. However, they ‘do not have much say’ in mainland China. She explains: First, many visitors are members of factories, schools, public and private companies, etc., and their visits to museums are organized by the organization they belong to. Second, many visits are guided and controlled by the museum through docents, which discourages visitors to develop an independent and critical assessment of museums and exhibitions. Third, visitors are excluded from participating in the decision-making process of museums. (2014, 136)

With reference to the idea of the museum visit in China being a political ritual or even a pilgrimage, Lu (2014, 210) notes that ‘the phenomenon remained after the 1980s, but many visitors were tourists or local residents

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visiting museums on their own for different purposes’. However, it is difficult to approach the issue in depth if the research is solely based upon casual interviews with a few university students about why they visit museums. When Lu discusses the relation between the museum and the general public, her analysis is based on her general criticisms on the failure of the policy of ‘free museum admission’, the lack of facilities for the disabled in museums, and other limitations – in particular the lack of a democratic political framework, the lack of a strong sense of social equality within Chinese intellectual communities, and the dichotomy between urban and rural areas. Lu’s inevitable conclusion is that museums in China still have a long way to go to be socially inclusive and to genuinely serve and empower the community. In this regard, Lu uncovers the limited nature of public discourse about the museum in China and its lack of potential to engage with differences in ethnicity, with disability or with class. Lu’s anthropological studies on ecomuseums inform us about the involvement of various parties including local governments, private company, scholars, and museologists, and the problems such as the project’s disengagement with local villages and the display of exotic cultures to visitors. Nevertheless, her studies are focused on rural regions. We are far from developing a detailed and critical picture of how museums are localized in urban cities which have accommodated over 58% of the total population in mainland China (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2018b). Kirk Denton (2014b) observes that museums are expected to support the Party’s patriotic education programme and ‘national learning’ (guoxue) with renewed emphasis on the imperial past and China’s ancient philosophies. He states that China’s emergence as a global power relies heavily on memories of the imperial state by reviving the dynastic glory and the Confucian ethical system that had underpinned the state in imperial times. In his book, Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China, Denton (2014a) offers an extensive analysis of the state’s exhibition culture of the past over the past three decades. His study covers a wider range of museums and exhibition spaces from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials for martyrs to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history, urban planning exhibition halls and the state sponsored programme of ‘red tourism’. He thoroughly analyses the historical narratives in museum exhibits and the way their political and ideological meanings are intertwined with China’s changing social and economic situation. Instead of re-emphasizing the idea of China as a hegemonic and monolithic state, Denton presents how state museums interplay different ideological forces including the evolving legacy

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of the socialist and revolutionary past, the appeal of the Western ideals of enlightenment, and the commercial culture and commodity fetishism of the market economy in the neo-liberal present. Denton’s concern is primarily with the ideological representations that state museums are attempting to convey to their visitors. Nevertheless, he has discussed the forces at play in the shaping of museums and their exhibitions, for instance by describing the negotiation process involving stakeholders in the case of the renovation of the National Museum of China. His concern towards a more fluid interaction between the state and the people deserves closer scrutiny. In her 2014 book Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao, Marzia Varutti seeks to examine the recent changes in display practices, narratives, actors, and architectural styles in Chinese museums. Varutti uncovers the narrative shift from political indoctrination to cultural nationalism that tends to extol Chinese culture, industry, technology and science, and emphasize the role of ethnic minorities in representing the Chinese nation. Specific attention is given to the role of aesthetics as a new mode of display deployed in contemporary museum representations and narratives of the Chinese nation and to the futuristic museum architecture as a facet of museums’ enhanced visibility in Chinese cities. It is worth noting that she has provided an overview of the new actors in the Chinese museum world, including the Chinese government, private and state-owned enterprises, museum donors, and museum audiences. However, how these actors involve and exert their agencies in the museum discourse, requires closer scrutiny. Meanwhile, the role of the museum audience deserves further attention. The section on museum audiences contains a brief commentary on audience development in Shanghai and Beijing, and a small-scale survey of museum audiences and their profiles, preferences, and expectations, which was conducted in three museums in Shanghai in 2006. The data has to be reconsidered for a more productive analysis of the museum consumption in the cities, and its relevance to the national identity relayed by the museums under her study. Other related studies have shown that the official cultural discourse of recent decades has shifted towards the idea of the cultural industry working to preserve the past and to represent the hegemony of Chinese culture (Keane 2011), or towards the contemporary ideology of commerce, entrepreneurship, and market reform, in which city branding, economic competition, and tourism are important factors in creating a consumer market for culture (Denton 2014b). Economic reform has created a new politics of culture. It has not openly reconstructed the institutions of state, but has altered the meaning of CPC rule by eroding the Party’s control over

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culture (Kraus 2004). In particular, Jane DeBevoise’s (2014) has depicted the impact of economic reform on the production of exhibitions and the power relationship between the state and emerging stakeholders as this affected the evaluation and display of artworks in Beijing’s National Art Museum of China (ibid., 270). She points out that the economic reform has pressured government-run institutions, including museums, to diversify their sources of financial support. The diversification of funding sources, including attempts to generate fee income by renting out display spaces, the establishment of profit-making galleries, and the organizing of art exhibitions or sales overseas, have decentralized the state system of support for the arts and diminished the role of the Chinese Artists’ Association as the primary arbiter of artistic values and standards. Her study informs how the national art museum has been responsive to the dramatic economic changes in China between 1979 and 1993. In 1997, China resumed the political sovereignty over the territory of Hong Kong under the framework of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. By including Hong Kong, China can be portrayed as formed from the coexistence of capitalism and socialism, using multiplicity and multidirectionality (rather than uniformity and linearity) in configuring the historical time of the nation (Hai 2010, 167). Hong Kong can debunk the myths about universal patterns of cultural practices, such as cultural heritage management, and can testify how political, economic, and social factors influence how the practices proceed (Du Cros and Lee 2007). In the city of Hong Kong, the official museums, once under British control, have not been democratized or liberated in the way that museums purportedly have been in Western countries, where they are regarded as having functioned as vehicles for the promotion of democracy or sites of social transformation and community empowerment. After 1997, the museums of the former British colony were gradually transferred to a new museum structure established by the government of Hong Kong Special Administration Region, under the framework of ‘The One Country, Two Systems’ policy. On the one hand, as Edward Vickers (2007) notes, museums in mainland China have become a key element in supporting state-centred patriotism but the totalizing official version of Chinese identity is contested in Hong Kong and Taiwan.8 On the 8 Vickers (2007) has noted a significant narrative shift from socialism to patriotism in the history museums and memorials in Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing, and identified the difference with those in Taiwan and Hong Kong. By highlighting the visual representation of the June Fourth Student Movement in ‘The Hong Kong Story’ exhibition of Hong Kong Museum of History, he argues that the totalizing official version of Chinese identity is contested in Hong Kong.

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other hand, research on the local museums is primarily concerned with national narratives and issue of cultural identity in official museums in its postcolonial period. Official museums have become the sites for constructing a national narrative for postcolonial Hong Kong (Stokes-Rees 2011), or for reflecting Hong Kong’s cultural hybridity (Man 2010). In the latter thesis, Man Kit-wah (2010, 90) argues that the Hong Kong Museum of Art’s juxtaposition of displays of Chinese, Western, and local Hong Kong art is considered a strategic response to some of the cultural and political antagonisms in Hong Kong spanning both colonial and postcolonial spaces and constitute ‘ever changing internal competitions of cultural identities’. However, as Joan Kee (2003, 91 and 97) notes, the concept of hybridity attributes a quality of perceived difference to Hong Kong and alludes to the gaze of tourists for the purpose of consumption. She has called for a critical reconsideration of the concept of hybridity, questioning the motives and reasons behind its use. In order to attempt a critical reflection on the institutional use of the categories of culture, difference, or hybridity, and art representation, we should closely examine the actual practices of the museum, specifically how it inscribes particular cultural meanings and identities. The major research works on Chinese museums are chiefly concerned with political and economic imperatives and their impacts on officially sponsored cultural representation, and identities. Limited consideration is given to human agency and to the different discursive practices of the various actors involved. Research to rethink museums in China becomes crucial, not only because of the shifting of political and ideological boundaries, and the impact of the cultural economy that have been discussed above, but also because public museums are now engaging in, or competing for the representation and interpretation of arts and culture, and the public engagement with other emerging forums and sites. These platforms can be creative clusters, private museums, and other new actors such as the creative labour force, and audience. Michael Keane (2011) claims that contemporary cultural clusters are fundamentally changing China, causing greater openness and internationalization, leading to an embrace of creative communities, and, in time, possibly leading to unintended changes in social and political attitudes. At societal level, a ‘creative class’ (Florida 2002) or ‘creative labour’ (Abbing 2008) has emerged. ‘New cultural intermediaries’ who are fuelled with ‘economic imaginaries’, merge work and life, career and self, and reflect the emancipatory promise of the cultural industries (O’Connor 2015). However, criticism points to new forms of creativity-related governance, which has led to the current generation of precarious jobs (McRobbie 2016). Whether

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representing a new claim for cultural leadership or a new exploited class, creative labour has become a new factor operating in different sites of cultural production in mainland China and Hong Kong (Chumley 2016; Ho 2016; Chow 2017). The museum world itself has negotiated some of the changes in distinctive ways. In the early post-Mao period, legislation was issued to regulate the private acquisition and sale of artefacts and to legalize the private ownership of heritage and nongovernmental collections. This paved the way for the development of private museums. Under a robust market economy, private museums, as well as a thriving mass culture and competing forms of entertainment, have seen significant growth. According to the National Cultural Heritage Administration, at the end of 2015, there were 1,110 private museums in mainland China. Compared with the figure of 315 in 1980, the number of private museums has grown more than three times (China Private Museums United Platform Limited 2016). Since the late 1990s, private museums that have sprung up in China were mostly established by enterprises (Zhu 2003). Studies find that private museums have become more distinctive and prominent with their increasing focus on social returns by granting the general public easier access to cultural heritage (Song 2008). Allegedly reflecting the rise of individualism among some individuals in modern China, the establishment of private museums has been regarded as platforms for those individuals to realize their personal ambitions and influence society from various perspectives (Hansen and Svarverud 2010). Though there is limited reflection on the role and function of museum practitioners, they have the potential to act as cultural intermediaries, functioning as mediators between producers and consumers, actively creating meanings by connecting products or issues with their publics (Curtin and Gaither 2007, 210). Because of stable financial support from the government, funding is not a pressing factor obliging the state museums in China to justify its value in the cultural economy. Museum practitioners, who largely work in a government-controlled environment, are often assumed passive subjects, devoid of any chance of expressing individual identities and personal creativities. Nevertheless, there are cultural workers, particularly independent curators9 working in the expanding field of private museums 9 In the 1990s, independent curators emerged for practising ‘art exhibitions’ in the field of contemporary art. They are amateurs by personal interest or temporary exhibition organizers with adventurous spirits. Though they live in precarious working conditions without much concrete reward, their practices are considered critically important to the future of experimental art. Their exhibitions are closely related to their intellectual background and social aspirations (Wu 2000, 88).

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and public museums with a more flexible production network. Museums act as a potential site where creative labour can combine cultural work and individualization (McGuigan 2010). In other words, museum practitioners can have more room to push forward their preferred agendas and create new meanings to products or issues. The impact of globalization has also been observed in the museum world, with increasing numbers of overseas and tour exhibitions, institutional exchanges with overseas institutions, the use of the Internet for marketing and dissemination of information, the creation of virtual exhibitions, and the employment of new modes of data digitization, exhibition design, and collection management (Lu 2014, 209). Increasing globalization has been affecting how people live and make sense of their lives. It has also been shaping museums’ linkages with each other and with other structures, their recreation of history, and their contribution to the production of hybrid cultural identities. The challenge for museums is to develop more complex concepts of the audience, and to develop research that responds to the transformation of identity and the diversity of interpretive communities (van den Bosch 2005). Particularly in China, there is a growing public demand for museums.10 Museum-going culture is still developing. Museums’ concepts are subject to ongoing public discussion and reimagination. The notions of visitors and the public in the museum context deserve closer scrutiny. In mainland China, museums are no longer presented as serving the ‘proletarian masses’ – the politicized, homogeneous public imagined in the rhetoric of the Maoist period. The category of the public11 has emerged as a topic of museological enquiry, but the existing related research is limited to a public relations perspective (An 1997; Peng 1999)12 or to the epistemological 10 In mainland China, since its implementation in 2008, the free admission policy triggered a steady increase in the number of visitors to museums across the country. The number of ‘museum visits’ has more than doubled from 283 million in 2008 to 850 million in 2016 (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2018a). In Hong Kong, the off icial attendance f igures from 2002-2014 fluctuated, with occasional surges of visitors in 2005, 2007, and 2013, by import of blockbuster exhibitions. The figures were provided by the Hong Kong Museum of Art in email communication on 14 January 2015. 11 In modern Chinese, the noun ‘gōng zhòng’ or the adjective ‘gōng gòng’ denotes the idea of the public. The character, ‘gōng’ covers a range of meanings including public, state-owned, or collective, common, general, equitable, impartial, fair, public affairs, off icial business, ‘father-in-law’, and making something public; ‘zhòng’ means many, numerous, crowd, and multitude; ‘gòng’ means sharing, joint, together, common, and communists. See Han-Ying cidian [A Chinese-English dictionary] (1988, 234 and 910). 12 For example, Shi Jixiang and Guo Fuchun’s 2004 discussion of the museum public in terms of its influence, contributions, decision-making power, its level of participation, and its relationship with the museum. In this work the visitor is viewed as one of the constituents of the museum

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position taken by operational museology with its strong focus on practical, organizational, and managerial issues. Studies of private museums are largely concerned with museum management, organization mechanisms, professional development, state policies, and legal systems (for examples, Guo 2003; Ran 2003; Zhu 2003). Research of this type focuses on management modes and exhibition and curatorial systems (for examples, Ma 2010; Zhao 2010; Gong 2013; Li 2013; Gao 2014; Bai 2016). These studies are restricted to an instrumental understanding of museums with a lack of critical analysis of the museum practice within its institutional context. Their approach is not particularly suitable for addressing the social and cultural effect of an institution. In spite of the methodological limitation, local scholars have started to emphasize the cultural role of museums (for examples, Su 1993; Zhao 1993; Lan 2016, 23), and proposed a relationship between museums and society. They discussed the public nature of either history or art museums,13 and exhibited a tendency towards discussing the public museum in terms of the idea of ‘yi ren wei ben’ (people-oriented), and as a charitable cultural public, external and secondary to the museum management group, and classified according to his/her relationship, importance, or attitude to the museum. These classifications have yielded a dichotomized and hierarchical approach to viewing the relationship between the audience and the museum management personnel, and show a tendency towards a segmentation of the audiences that is based on their compatibility with the institution’s policies, practices, and interests. Another piece of public relations-oriented research by Ren Jie (2011), who empirically examines the state-owned historical site museums in China, sees the museum stakeholders as made up of guanzhong, the government, and the mass media. Ren examines the two-way communication between the audience and the museum, the reciprocal interaction and conflict between the museum and the government, and the co-operation between the museum and the mass media. Conflicts that are highlighted include those involving the deficient management system that has limited museum autonomy, the difficulty of maintaining public financial resources, and the imbalance between heritage preservation and urban development in terms of their respective economic and social benefits. In such studies, much focus is put on the management function of the institution, particularly the process of communication with its publics, and the shared relationship between the museum and its stakeholders. Both adopt a public relations approach oriented to the ‘empirical-administrative tradition’ (Dozier and Lauzen 2000, 8). 13 Here are two examples. Cheng Lu (2007) puts forward three concepts of ‘publicness’ by tracing the general development of history museums in China. These concepts stress the idea of the open access of cultural heritage to all, the museums’ responsibilities in public education, and public participation in museum activities. Based on his evaluation of the collection, exhibition, education activities, and facilities of the National Art Museum of China, Chen Rongyi (2006) identifies three development phases of the museum. It was first seen as serving proletarians from 1963 to 1979, and then for artists from 1981 to 2002, and, since 2003, has committed itself to public service by offering docent services, public lectures, school projects, digital information, and a restaurant. He concludes that the three phases have reflected both ‘national characteristics’ and ‘intentional standards’ in constructing the art museum in different modalities.

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institution intended for the public good.14 In a more proactive way, museums are considered as ‘producers of knowledge’, in Wang Huangsheng’s words, which are meant to reflect on knowledge from a critical perspective and to construct other possibilities for the formation of culture. Wang is a museum director, formerly at the Guangzhou Museum of Art and currently at the Art Museum of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. His book, Zuowei zhishi shengchan de meishuguan (New experience on art museum [I] art museum as knowledge production) (2012) is a notable work that presents Chinese critical thinking about museum practice. Drawing on his curatorial praxis at the two museums, and his efforts to found new museum journals, Wang stresses the academic role of art museums in the production of new knowledge and in the creation of a wider platform for social access to diverse knowledge and public interaction. He also addresses the role of art museums in reflecting on the museum as a public space where the people are able to freely express and discuss matters of public importance (Wang 2012, 46). The autonomy of the curatorial system upheld by the museums is thought by Wang to be a force that can counterbalance the state’s institutional frameworks, and mediate the relationship between art and society and which can offer other alternative narratives. Wang offers a way to conceptualize contemporary art museums as institutional forms that can potentially support the political democratization of culture. More importantly, Wang arguably represents the new agency of the museum policy maker or leader, someone who creates new awareness about the possibilities for developing museums into open discursive platforms. Although less concerned about suggesting a methodology for researching museums, and heavily relying on an autographical method, the study is an early call for a discursive shift in understanding the museum authority and the politics underlying the constitution of the museum public. Wang’s idea is close to the Habermasian type of public sphere, which stresses rational communication by a bourgeois class with the aim of advancing the cause of democracy that recently has been stressed in Western museum scholarship. Barrett (2010) traces out how the museum public has been historically constituted in the transition from housing royal collections to being a cultural institution in the West. Because of different engagements with the state, museums developed competing notions of the public. She 14 For instance, a feature on the public education in meishuguan (fine arts museums) and bowuguan (museums) was published in the National Art Museum of China Journal (2011), and the people-oriented approach was present in both museums. See Cao (2008), or Liu and Wu (2012).

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urges museums to engage with Jürgen Habermas’s ([1962]1989) theory of the public sphere as a way of reflecting on their identity as sites where ‘the people are able to determine and address matters of public importance’ (ibid., 81). This concept of ‘public sphere’ has had broad influence in discourse about the social role of museums in the West. A body of significant literature puts forward the museum’s activist role in supporting challenges to injustice racism, human rights, homosexuality, sexuality, terrorism, drugs, and climate change (Janes and Conaty 2005; Sandell 2002, 2007; Janes 2009, 2013; Golding 2009; Cameron and Kelly 2010; Sandell and Nightingale 2012; Golding and Modest 2013). The studies perceive the potential of the museum for supporting social or political activism (Message 2014; Reilly 2018; Janes and Sandell 2019), and are oriented towards a democratic socio-political or policy-oriented context, which they seek to foster.15 They offer a way to conceptualize contemporary museums as institutional forms with a place in public culture based on new forms of sociality. The Western concept of the public sphere directly addresses the issue of the democratic politics of a bourgeois public sphere that is separated from the economy and the state (Garnham 1992). It might be difficult to directly address this discourse in a different cultural context where the notion of the museum ‘public’, and the performance of a public sphere is inevitably different. In China, there was a rise of a new ‘cultural public sphere’ in the 1980s. Based on his study of the projects on civil justice and rural community, Philip Huang (1993) calls it a ‘third realm’, ‘a space intermediate between state and society in which both participated’ (ibid., 224). Based on his study of the intellectual life of three editorial committees in China, Edward Gu (1999, 391) draws up a typology of the space that comprise: ‘(1) state generated public space, (2) society-originated, officially-backed public space, (3) societal public space, and (4) dissentient public space’. These studies maintain that the Western concepts of ‘bourgeois public sphere’ and ‘civil society’ that presuppose a dichotomous opposition between state and society are not applicable to China. Though Chinese scholars have used the concept of ‘public sphere’ to confirm the role of the museum as a producer of knowledge through the exchange of ideas, how this concept manifests itself in China’s museum-public spaces is still generally underdeveloped or under-explored. 15 Many of the studies on social inclusivity and cultural diversity in the Western museums mentioned are undertaken in the context of democracies, democratic culture, or state policies on multiculturalism or cultural diversity (such as in the United Kingdom and Australia) developed in response to decolonization and the migration of people across national and cultural boundaries in the late twentieth century.

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Even so, the idea of a differentiated museum public has emerged in China and has developed the notion of visitors. We have noted that in several studies16 in Chinese since the 1980s, the visitor has become a subject of investigation and the concept of visitor is generally denoted with the word ‘guanzhong’ (meaning ‘audience’ – literally, ‘the assembly of viewers’) in Chinese.17 Regardless of the terminological nuances between the West and China in the interpretation of museum visitors,18 in this book, the expression, ‘visitors’ will be used in line with its use in museum texts in English, as generally referring to those who visit museums or other sites. Studies of Chinese museum visitors have been largely oriented to the use of questionnaire techniques and quantitative data analysis for updating knowledge of the visitors’ demographics, motivations, and levels of satisfaction.19 Qualitative research largely focuses on visitors’ experience and 16 A quantitative study of teenagers’ understanding of a natural science exhibition in a Shanghai museum, conducted by Zhang Songling (1985) in 1983, is considered to be the earliest visitor survey in China. It was followed by a larger-scale report on visitors living in Beijing and Tianjin, conducted by Wu Guowei (1987) and a team specializing in museums from the History Department of Nankai University. 17 In Chinese, ‘Guanzhong’ is a modern word. Its first character, ‘guan’, according to the earliest modern encyclopedic Chinese dictionary (Ciyuan 1947), means a scene, the act of travelling, viewing, offering a point of view on a thing or matter, giving official advice, and, by extension, profound thoughts related to Buddhist philosophy and Yijing (known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes). Thus, in the contemporary appropriation of the term, ‘guanzhong’ refers by implication to the subject’s responses as well as the extension of awareness or the transcendence of human epistemological constraints. 18 The term visitor first appeared in the English language in the early fifteenth century, and referred to an overseer of an autonomous ecclesiastical institution, such as a cathedral, chapel, college, university or hospital. Holding a role that was more than ceremonial, the visitor played an important function within academic institutions, with a right or duty of inspecting, reporting and settling internal disputes that was stipulated in judicial documents (Blackstone 2009). The historical function held by the visitor of supervising and mediating institutional affairs and those of the people more broadly yields an interesting contrast with that of the curator. The word curator comes etymologically from the Latin curare – to care – which arguably implies that curators are trained more to care for their collections than the visiting public (McClellan 2008, 155-158). A visitor now literally means a person visiting someone or some place, especially socially or as a tourist. We can observe that the contemporary appropriation of the term is associated with a sense of place, institution, and people. 19 Much of this literature involves quantitative surveys of visitor demographics, motivations and levels of satisfaction for individual museums (for examples, Chen and Ryan 2012; Mo 2012; Wang T. 2012; Hei 2013). In some cases, attempts have been made to relate the geographical location of visitors and the number of visits to the population of a city (for example, Liu 2009); other work seeks to synthesize the analyses of visitor data from several museums across the country (for example, Wang 2005). In Hong Kong, large-scale cultural surveys are commissioned by the Arts Development Council, a statutory arts body set up by the Government. The studies

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interaction with particular works of art, objects, or exhibitions.20 With their strong practical orientation, visitor studies generally help institutions to justify or evaluate their services and programmes, or help governments to formulate their cultural policies and measures. They fail to theorize the relation between museum and visitors in a broader sociocultural context. The study of visitors should give greater account of the visitors’ interpretative agency in terms of how they evaluate their own experiences and negotiate their cultural orientations. An in-depth probing of the nature of the visitors’ reception of what they experience, and their differences from each other, and their agency in acts of museum consumption is still lacking. Based on the above reviews and discussion, we can say that there is a need for reflection on China’s museological approaches and its research methodologies (which are currently dominated by the perspectives of the state/government and the market, privileging the modes and structures of cultural production in the museum), and a need to rethink the concept of the museum public (which is currently confined largely to a public-relations management approach), and to further develop the notion of ‘visitors’. In particular, the dominant state-centred approach neglects the possibility and efficacy of politics generated from within the cultural sphere – particularly from those who are directly involved in cultural production and circulation processes. It also assumes that there is conscious manipulation by those involved in creating exhibitions, and a public that is passive and unitary. The role of human agency, particularly the role of social and cultural actors and their signifying practices as well as the interpretative agency exercised by visitors have been neglected in the discourses connected with offer statistics on areas like arts creation, arts spending, attendance, box office records, and the presenters of programmes, exhibitions, and screening events. In addition to these, every two years the public museums jointly commission marketing consultants to conduct quantitative surveys of visitors’ levels of satisfaction towards various aspects of museum services and facilities. 20 In mainland China, qualitative research is very limited, and mostly found in the theses of university students. The qualitative studies that have been conducted to date include, for instance, studies of teenage visitors’ behavioural characteristics (Li 2007), theoretical studies of visitors’ behaviour in relation to the spatial design and visual and aesthetic elements in various Expo exhibitions (Zeng 2006), and a study of the art perception of Chinese audiences (Yang 2007). In Hong Kong, efforts have been made by academic researchers using quantitative methods to explore the effectiveness of public programmes at the Hong Kong Museum of Art (Lam 2003) as well as qualitative inquiries into the experience of works of art in museums (Tam 2002) undertaken from a phenomenological perspective. Research has also been done on the processes of meaning-making engaged in by visitors in an exhibition of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, by identifying different modes of experience based on the visitors’ personal motivation, interpretation of experiences, and general perception of art and cultural activities (Ting and Ho 2014).

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contemporary museums in China. The discussion called for a new method that can provide a broad approach to enable us to conceptualize the cultural construction of museums and which will reveal the institutional dynamics in the museum field, including the complex processes by which different actors and diversified publics participate in shaping museum discourses and practices in China.

1.2

Museum as cultural circuits

A new theoretical framework is proposed in this section to examine the museum as a circuit. The ‘museum circuit’ model is refined from the ‘cultural circuit’ model which was developed in the late 1990s by a group of British cultural theorists (Du Gay 1997; Hall 1997; Mackay 1997; Thompson 1997; Woodward 1997) and is based on Stuart Hall’s ([1973] 1980) semiological theory of ‘encoding/decoding’21 and his constructivist view of representation. The idea is aligned with the semiotic and discursive approaches of Ferdinand de Saussure and Michel Foucault. The ‘circuit of culture’ model not only examines the processes of representation in which meaning is constructed and conveyed through language and other symbolic media but also emphasizes the primacy of power in the dyad of structure and human agency which operates in discursive relationships. The circuit serves as a tool for understanding the process by which culture, knowledge, and power converge. It enables us to analyse the specific conditions of every stage in a communication process unfolding in a given society. There are five major processes, namely production, consumption, identity, regulation, and representation, and they relate to and co-construct each other in the circuit. ‘Representation’ designates the discursive process of shaping meanings – ‘we give things meaning by how we represent them’ (Hall 1997, 3). ‘Production’ designates the process involved in creating the artefact that is being represented. It refers to the culture of organization as well as to the ways in which practices or production is inscribed with particular cultural meanings. However, ‘meaning does not reside in an object but in how that object is used’ (Baudrillard 1988, 101). Thus, the meaning of an object is 21 The encoding/decoding model of communication was developed by Stuart Hall to challenge the traditional conception of linear transmission of a message from sender to receiver. Briefly, the encoding of a message is concerned with a system of coded meanings created by the sender. The decoding of a message is concerned with how an audience understands and interprets the message encoded by the sender (Hall [1973]1980, 130).

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established through the process of consumption, which is as important as production. ‘Consumption’ refers to the process by which messages are decoded or interpreted by audiences who use cultural texts or artefacts in everyday life. In many postmodern accounts of the concept, consumption is understood as a productive activity for society, and consumers are seen as being able to develop themselves into citizens who can actively participate in the polity (Mackay 1997, 2). Meanings derived from the production and consumption processes give us a sense of our own identity, which define who we are, with whom we belong, and from whom we differ. Identities are never fixed, individual essences are multiple, evolving, and developing entities that derive from culturally constructed meanings, and exist in all social networks, from the state or national level to the levels of the organization and the public. The last element ‘regulation’ refers to the processes by which meanings regulate social conduct and practices. It can encompass cultural control mechanisms or conditions, social norms, technology, and institutional as well as economic, religious, and political systems. In sum, the elements overlap and intertwine in complex and contingent ways and they are the elements that are useful for the cultural study of a cultural text or artefact. In the museum field, the circuit model has been used for discussing the issue of national identity (McLean 1998). However, it has not been widely adopted. This might be due to the difficulty of accessing the behind-thescenes information necessary to elucidate the processes of production and regulation. Museum professionals are often not open to critical interrogation of their practices because of their personal investments or the political sensitivities involved in museum work (Macdonald 2006, 29). In addition, the methodological difficulties in analysing experiences, the threat of populism, and other practical concerns (i.e. being time-consuming and labour-intensive) contribute to the lack of visitor studies (Kirchberg and Tröndle 2012). In spite of the difficulties of achieving empirical verification in certain key areas of the circuit, there are significant advantages for adopting the circuit paradigm to the study of China’s museums. First, the circuit paradigm diverges from analytical methods in which political and ideological meanings are conceived as being linear, and the production and representation of the museum are overdetermined. The circuit not only emphasizes language and signification (underpinned by the approach of semiotics), but also focuses attention on discourse and discursive practices. The discourse approach tends to place emphasis on politics – the effects and consequences of representation in the field of power – and to stress how a particular discourse and knowledge structure

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constructs identities and subjectivities and defines the way certain things are represented and practised. In addition, the circuit seeks to synthesize the analysis of museum production and representation with study of the complex structure of relations and processes of discourse and articulation that operate on micro and macro levels. The older museum research tradition, which has drawn on a model of linear transmission of messages dominated by the political and ideological meanings of museums, largely ignores the competing agendas involved in exhibition-making and programme-running. The model thus helps to address the internal discourses connected with meaning claims, and to identify the role of new agents, and evaluate the operation of their agency in the museum ensemble. Second, the circuit confronts conceptions of the ‘audience’ being passive and homogenous. It reconsiders the consumption or reception practices of visitors, a constituency which has generally been overlooked in previous research on Chinese museums. Production and consumption do not exist in binary opposition to each other but combine to form discourses of contested meanings and ensembles of contested and contesting practices (Taylor et al. 2002). The model transcends the limitations of the functionalist, transmission-based paradigm by positioning the museum as a meaningmaking, nonlinear, and dynamic communication structure – a structure that can also be seen as a process – operating within ‘the politics of signification’ (Hall [1973] 1980, 137-138). It is useful for questioning the ideological role of museums in China and in particular their role in producing and transforming ideologies in audiences. According to Hall, the decoding subjects can have three possible positions: hegemonic-dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. When the subject identifies with the dominant-hegemonic position, s/he operates inside the dominant code that the encoder expects him/her to recognize and decode. In the negotiated position, the subject holds a mixture of adaptive and oppositional decoding elements. S/he ‘acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules – it operates with exceptions to the rule’. A consumer occupying this position understands the literal meaning but has his/her own way of forming interpretations based on his/her individual background or context. The oppositional position is known as ‘globally contrary code’, which implies that ‘it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and connotative inflection given to an event, but to determine to decode the message in a globally contrary way’ (ibid.). Although the consumer understands the intended meaning, s/he opposes or rejects the dominant code.

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Lastly, the circuit paradigm is oriented to the project and concept of ‘radical contextualization’,22 which holds that knowledge depends upon context. Even where there may be differences from British experiences23 (the context in which the paradigm was originally developed), the circuit model is capable of analysing cultural objects, events, and practices in a wide range of contexts and applications. It is a useful analytical tool for linking the particular (China’s social and historical context) and the institutional (museums). The circuit paradigm does not privilege Western models over the diversity of practices that exists in other countries. It enables a museum to be defined as a specific cultural phenomenon that exists at a particular juncture in a given country’s history. Overall, contemporary museum studies cannot neglect the ever-changing interrelations between power and politics, economics and society, production and consumption, and representation and identity. By taking into account the multiple modes and relationships of these discursive elements and domains of practice, the circuit model provides a powerful tool for exploring the significance of – and the possibilities for – contemporary museums. To facilitate a productive analysis of museums, I have distilled the components of the model into the diagram below (Figure 1.2). In the museum circuit, the museum constitutes and is located in a circuit which interlinks three processes, namely regulation, production, and consumption. Representation (the process of shaping meaning) and identity (the process of defining oneself and one’s relations to others) are key elements embedded in the three processes. Individual elements only have significance when considered in relation to other elements or to the structure as a whole. In the circuit, the state/market, museum intermediaries, and the museum public are the major actors in the political/economic, cultural, and social spheres, respectively. ‘Agents’ are active actors, who exercise their agency to produce a specific effect. They articulate the interlinking and interlinked processes 22 This was articulated by Larry Grossberg, who held that the choice between the universal and the particular does not bring theory and politics into dialogue with the world. Thus, critical cultural studies refuse to carry a fixed theory but rather seek theories that provide the best answers to the questions posed by the world (Cornut-Gentille D’ Arcy 2010, 107-120). 23 The circuit paradigm has had a distinctive critical trajectory in the field of cultural studies. Historically, the Birmingham tradition of Cultural Studies, exemplified by the work of Stuart Hall, can be traced back to the decolonization movement after the Second World War and the formation of the British New Left in the 1950s. The movement of leftist studies of culture in Britain in this period was comprised of two main components: E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams represented the dissident side of the British Communist Party, whereas Hall belonged to a group of intellectuals coming from the Caribbean and other colonial or postcolonial territories (Chen K. 2010, 101).

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Figure 1.2  The Museum Circuit

that surround and inform the practices and discourses affiliated with the museum and affect issues of representation and identity in the museum. These processes are described in more detail below. My study of regulation focuses on the mechanisms that regulate the museum and how the regulatory agents make use of the museum to represent them. The regulation process entails the question of how the agents of the state or market liberate or limit the institution in terms of governance, management, and organization. Production involves the production and circulation of the museum’s symbolic and discursive practices. In particular, production concerns the matter of the agency of museum actors within their institutional conditions of production, namely how they articulate the museum’s cultural production activities through collection development, exhibition interpretation and display, institutional networks, and programmes. I use the term ‘museum intermediaries’ to refer to a broader range of actors in the field who take part in museum production processes. As discussed, museum practitioners have the potential to act as cultural intermediaries,24 functioning as tastemakers 24 The concept of the ‘cultural intermediary’ originated from the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 359) and refers to a section of middle-class professionals whose work

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or producers of meaning, adding value to their practices, and connecting products or issues with their publics. They are increasingly central to the generation of cultural and economic capital and becoming the members of a ‘creative class’ (Florida 2002). However, my study of museum intermediaries is not concerned with the privileged middle class involved in the mediation of production and consumption, or the dialectical relationship between culture and economy. It is more concerned with the relationship between culture and politics in the museum context of China. Depending on the museum’s mission and practices, the actors who we call museum intermediaries can include internal or external curators, artists, collaborators, or other individuals in the museum’s organizational networks. In particular, the work of museum curators and their collaborators shapes the production and circulation of symbolic practices, and affects and reflects the conflicts or impasses they encounter in circulation processes. The approach and strategies they use, the impact they make on the construction of museum publics and their identities, and the changes they make to the actions and meaning of the state/market, are major components of the production process. It is essential to identify within a particular museum circuit the main museum intermediaries involved and their particular roles and tasks. An examination of consumption focuses on the perspectives of museum visitors in experiencing the museum. To assess the consequences or effects of museums, we need to explore how visitors make sense of their museum visits and how they negotiate their relationship with the museum entity. Based on their communication/experience with the museum’s products/ practices and their interpretative approaches towards the museum, the decoding subjects can have three possible positions: adaptive/integrative, negotiated, and oppositional. As discussed, these three categories of positions are derived from Stuart Hall’s theory of hegemonic-dominant encodings and negotiated or oppositional social-individual decodings. Such analysis not only pragmatically facilitates the effective operation of communication between producers and consumers, but also reflects on the social sphere in which local people position themselves in alignment with or in opposition to the museum and the values and models of identity it upholds. In addition, consumption can be a process associated with consumer activism (Kozinet involved the ‘presentation and representation […] [of], and in, all institutions providing symbolic goods and services’. Bourdieu (1984) describes them as having a lower level of education than average individuals of higher-class origin but as having more cultural and social capital than the average middle-class member. Diverting from the class theory approach, the term was subsequently explored by academics in relation to the role of practitioners in a range of cultural industries following the cultural economy approach (Maguire and Matthews 2014).

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and Handelman 2004; Hilton 2007) by which social activists seek to influence how museum exhibitions and activities are produced or circulated in society. In this study, ‘museum visitors’ refer to those who visit the museum, while ‘activists’ are those who take social action as a form of resistance against the museum’s ideologies and structures of production that are imposed on the general (consumer/museum) public. Studies of these two actors can show how museum consumption functions as appropriation and resistance on the one hand, and challenges the image of a homogeneous public shaped by the dominant forces/agents on the other. So this study is more concerned with the roles of visitors with regard to the politics of signification, and their positioning to the museum sites of consumption. It seeks to expose the dissonance or compatibility between the ‘ideal’ public envisaged by each museum and the actual public in social reality. Furthermore, in this circuit-based analysis, culture is viewed as a set of values and institutions, which manifest themselves in the museum’s symbolic and real functions, providing the basis for the museum’s social communication and its authority. The museum, which constitutes ‘a sector of society’, can be seen as a symbolic and real counterpart to the political, economic, cultural, and social forces operating in the wider context. It is a circuit involving the interaction of complex forces connected with three interrelated spheres. The political and economic sphere in the diagram refers to the state/market and its mechanisms that regulate the organization of the museum both institutionally and ideologically. The cultural sphere refers to the set of beliefs, values, skills, and knowledge (cultural capital) that shapes social action and cultural change. The actors in the cultural sphere are museum intermediaries and their relations and networks. Their actions are reflected in the museum’s various material arrangements and its nonmaterial practices (which can involve any discipline); these represent the cultural codes and rules/principles that govern the social sphere. Furthermore, the social aspect of the museum is the very essence of what makes it a trustworthy public institution. In order to see how the Chinese museum’s public functions as an essential foundation of cultural governance, it is important to examine the social sphere of museum discourse in China. Because it does not presume that only one of these factors has primacy in bringing about museum transformation, the model demonstrates the position of the museum as an interface, one which undergoes multidimensional transformation driven by the interplay of cultural, social, political, and economic forces. The meaning-making agency of the main actors involved in each sphere informs their struggles in relation to other sets of meanings and, in turn, reflects the broader relations of power and resistance in society.

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All in all, the circuit model addresses various discursive elements, including institutional regulation, cultural production and consumption, identity, and representation, and understands these interlinked processes in constructive terms. It also represents a communicative interface between the social, cultural, economic, and political spheres; spheres that are differentiated but interlinked, all of which are important factors for explaining the museum phenomena in China. By reframing the museum model in terms of a ‘museum circuit’, this study enquires into, firstly, how the museum is institutionally regulated; secondly, how museum intermediaries produce and articulate cultural representations; thirdly, how visitors are differentiated from each other, and relate themselves to the museum production-regulation dynamic; and finally, how museums vary under different institutional conditions and address different circuit modes that mediate the relations between the social, cultural, and political-economic spheres.

1.3

The selection of art museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta region

The ‘circuit’ model is used to examine three art museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta region. The three representative cases are the He Xiangning Art Museum (Shenzhen), the Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou), and the Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong). Although the art museum is an underexplored category in Chinese museum studies (which primarily focus on bowuguan for studying the central state approach of history and culture), it plays an increasing role in both social and cultural spheres. In mainland China, local art elites conceive art museums as active agents of knowledge production (Wang 2012) and platforms for expressing regional artistic perspectives (Asia Art Archive in America 2015). In Hong Kong, art institutions have evolved with increasing relevance to people’s lives and the global art market, and art practices have created a form of resistance to the national culture of mainland China (Vigneron 2018). In this book, in spite of focusing on the art museum field, I examine the discourse and practices of art museums from an interdisciplinary perspective. The analysis of the visual materials and nonmaterial practices covered in the art museums under study is not limited to art, but also relates to history and other disciplines such as architecture and cultural materials. In addition, there has also been little assessment of the differences between different cultural institutions in different regions of China. Scholars working on regionalization in China suggest different possibilities for

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undertaking regional analysis and highlighting regional diversity (Cartier 2002). Region-focused analysis constitutes an important move away from viewing history from the perspective of the central state to concentrate on underexplored local and regional cultural processes. An empirical strategy is needed for measuring the regional dynamics of institutionalization over time and analysing how key museum features have been deployed by particular actors in specific regions and to examine how they have been accepted and internalized by citizens in local society. The region examined is the Greater Pearl River Delta region of southern China. GPRD consists of eleven municipalities, including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Zhongshan, Zhaoqing, and Huizhou (in mainland China), and two special administrative regions, Hong Kong and Macao (Zhao and Zhang 2007). Due to their robust economies, intensive urbanization and integration in the past three decades, the region has been developed into a global city-region (Scott 2001), or even the most polycentric one of this kind in the world (Bie, de Jong, and Derudder 2015). Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and Macao have emerged as the key cities, contributing to the historical evolution of the GPRD towards this global city-region. Hong Kong operates as a major global city and Guangzhou and Shenzhen both as minor ones. Three of them play a role as ‘global cities’ as defined by Sassen’s (2001) in terms of production and consumption of globalized advanced services (Bie, de Jong, and Derudder 2015). Although they are under different administrations,25 the cities of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou are geographically linked and have similar cultural characteristics. They share a common origin in terms of regional culture, namely the Lingnan culture (although many of those living in Shenzhen now are migrants from outside the Lingnan cultural zone). Amongst the three cities, Hong Kong stands out as an example of a city-state with complex multiple experiences of colonialism, modernization, global capitalism, and 25 Guangzhou and Shenzhen are prefecture-level cities at the unique administrative level of sub-provincial cities. Although they report to their provincial governments, they possess a higher administrative status than other prefecture-level cities because of their economic or political importance (Bo and Yu 2014). Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region, administrated by the Hong Kong local government, which maintains its own political and legal system, economic affairs, and external relations with foreign countries under a ‘one China, two systems’ policy. In terms of the relationship with the central government, there has been economic and politicaladministrative ‘re-centralization at the lower levels’ (McMillen and DeGolyer 1993; McMillen and Lo 1995). The dialectic of autonomy and integration both in China and Hong Kong, and the positive and negative possibilities of autonomy as dynamic self-governance or isolation, and integration as cooperative interaction or subjugation, have been discussed by McMillen (1998) and Thynne (1998).

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‘internationalist localism’ (Chen K. 2010).26 With the implementation of the state policy formulated in the ‘Outline of the Plan for the Reform and Development of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) (2008-2020)’,27 and the recent plan for boosting the Greater Daya Bay Area development,28 the social and economic linkages between the three cities have been intensified. Moreover, the three cities have each promoted cultural projects in an effort to be seen as more cosmopolitan. Local governments in GPRD have made agreements for strengthening the arts and cultural exchange with each other.29 At the societal level, local practices such as creating a regional artistic subjectivity, and protecting Cantonese as a regional lingua franca (although Mandarin is arguably dominant in Shenzhen), have turned the region into a contested site, in which the political establishment’s discourses about art, language, identity, and rights can be recontextualized. In the art sphere, contemporary artists and curators have advocated for the regional identity of ‘Canton’ (used here to refer to the wider PRD, which centres historically on the city of Guangzhou, known in English and many other languages as Canton). Notable attempts include the establishment of ‘Cantonbon’30 by artists, and the international display of Canton Express as part of the exhibition Zone of Urgency, curated by Hou Hanru for the 2003 Venice Biennale (the 26 The idea of an international localism, formulated by the cultural historian Chen Kuan-hsing (2010), has moved beyond the unconditional identification of the nation with the state. According to Chen, international localism acknowledges the existence of the nation-state as a product of history but analytically keeps a critical distance from it and actively transgresses the nation-state boundaries by engaging with the local. It looks for new political possibilities emerging out of the practices and modernization experiences accumulated during encounters between local history and colonial history. 27 The Plan was promulgated by the National Development and Reform Commission in 2008. It was meant to elevate the development of the PRD region to the higher strategic level of national development and to specify the strategy of Hong Kong/Guangdong cooperation as a national policy. The outline aims to deepen cooperation in the Pan Pearl River Delta Region, to construct a harmonious culture, and to elevate the cultural level of citizens, increase innovation, and improve public facilities in urban and rural areas. 28 In 2017, the former GPRD was renamed as ‘Canton-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area’ as part of the ‘One Bell One Road’ economic initiative of the state. 29 For example, the signing of the ‘Greater Pearl River Delta Cultural Cooperation’ agreement between Hong Kong and Guangzhou in 2003 and a three-year plan (2013-2015) between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. 30 The Chinese artist Chen Tong (originally from Hunan) used the word ‘Cantonbon’ (a hybridized English representation of Chinese words that mean ‘Canton gang’) to describe his independent institution, Libreria Borges. It was established as a bookstore in 1993, and turned into a contemporary art space in 2007. From 2002-2006, Libreria Borges collaborated with Guangzhou-based artists and worked on the project ‘Canton Express’, curated by Hou Hanru (Asia Art Archive in America 2015).

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exhibition was restaged at M+ Pavilion in 2017). The ‘Cantobon’ demonstrated the emergence of a regional artistic subjectivity, and Canton Express reflected the significance of the Lingnan regional cultural landscape in the context of rapid globalization and urbanization taking place in China during the 1990s. In addition, the citizens in Guangzhou and Hong Kong jointly engaged in the 2010 pro-Cantonese campaign, which in turn, gained the support from Chinese netizens for protecting Cantonese as a regional lingua franca, and defending their individual linguistic rights (Gao 2012). In 2013, a Cantonese language advocacy group, ‘Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis’ was set up to continue the campaign. Its spokesman has claimed that the move of PMI (Putonghua as medium of instruction) is a political strategy to promote Hong Kong’s integration into the mainland by marginalizing the city’s mother tongue (Chu 2017, 204-205). Such debates show the identity of the region as a contested cultural site for recontextualizing the political establishment’s discourses. Studies of art museums focusing on GPRD will contribute both to the development of an in-depth understanding of the dynamic regional cultural phenomena and of the wide range of museum contexts that can be found in China. Studies of contemporary museums in mainland China concentrate on the key municipalities which are directly controlled by the central government, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing (Denton 2014; Varutti 2014; DeBevoise 2014; Le Mentec 2015; Kiowski 2017), or on peripheral locales/ regions such as Huizhou, Dunhuang, Guizhou, Yunnan, and Tibet (Lu 2014; Varutti 2014; Keränen et. al. 2015) where local villagers or ethnic minorities are located. In conceiving this research, I intend to turn away from the Beijing or Shanghai centric approach, and focus on the museum development in urban cities. In examining the art museums that are distinct yet interrelated in their social and cultural conditions, historical background, and geographical locations, I take the approach of case study to optimize our understanding of their significance in relation to the specific institutional regulation, production and consumption conditions in the under-explored southern region of China, GPRD. Case studies can help provide ‘a holistic understanding of a problem, issue, or phenomenon within its social context’ (Hesse-Biber 2017, 221) and can shed light on the complexity of an issue by showing the influence of its social, political, and other contexts (Stake 2005). In this research, case studies are not invoked in order to make generalizations about China’s museum discourse; rather, they make possible an in-depth examination of the cultural and institutional differences in a regional context, and provide larger implications for the study of museum phenomena in China.

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The He Xiangning Art Museum (Shenzhen), the Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou), and the Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong) are mostdifferent cases (Gerring 2008), and they were selected based on the following three main reasons. First, all three museums are located in the global city-region – GPRD. As mentioned earlier, the region deserves greater attention, because of the significant moves indicated by the government’s economic and cultural initiatives, and the emergence of contested cultures and identities. Instead of further highlighting the regional integration perspective underlying the GPRD economic experiment or Greater China unification project, I will explore the regional cultural perspectives, and the contested practices and relationships involved in the three museums. The case studies seek to explore the museums’ boundaries of agencies in the global city-region, and the local-global cultural connections that shape global cities in China. The studies will also offer a wider historiography of museum in China that can complement the official version or state-centred approach of studying museums in China. Second, the three museums differ in their institutional orientations. They present different institutional modes and enable us to address the complex cultural forces that exist at different levels and forms of cultural governance. The He Xiangning Art Museum is the second national modern art museum after the National Art Gallery of China, and the first national art gallery to be named after a political revolutionary leader in China.31 The museum was built in 1997, at a historical memorial site connected to the Chinese Communist Party. Established in a distinctive location and at the time of Hong Kong’s administrative incorporation into the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the museum serves as a unique case for examining the new national cultural context that arose in the late 1990s. Serving as a counterpart and alternative to the state museums, private art museums have become increasingly visible players in China’s cultural politics. The Guangdong Times Museum is a private museum founded by a business enterprise. In this idea-driven museum, curators create a public discourse that differs from that of official museums by ‘reaching beyond canonical programming 31 He Xiangning and her husband Liao Zhongkai were amongst the revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the Qing Dynasty. Liao Zhongkai was the protégé of the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, and was expected to become the Kuomintang (KMT) (Chinese Nationalist Party) leader after Sun Yat-sen’s death. After her husband was assassinated, He Xiangning became an important leader of the leftist wing of the KMT. She had studied art in Japan in the early 1900s, and she used her art skills as a weapon for designing the propaganda work for Sun’s military uprising. See Itoh (2012).

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to nurture creative processes and cutting-edge practices in the areas of art, design and architecture’.32 The museum’s nongovernmental organizational background, its open curatorial attitude, and global multitude provide an alternative institutional model in GPRD, and in China more broadly. The Hong Kong Museum of Art differs from the above two examples; it is an official art museum in the Hong Kong Special Administrative region. Its history can be traced back to 1962 when the British colonial authorities established the museum system in the city. Since the political sovereignty of Hong Kong returned to China in 1997, the museum became directly run by the bureaucrats of the new government. It now aims to preserve and present the cultural heritage of China and promote art with a local focus, while maintaining an international character.33 Third, the three museums use different representation systems and create different bonds with their publics. The He Xiangning Art Museum is mainly engaged in collecting, displaying, and studying He Xiangning’s works but also showcases contemporary art. The museum emphasizes the influential role that it plays in art, academic circles, and society at large.34 Located in Shenzhen, a trans-provincial city accommodating a massive migrant population from across China, the museum has an advantage of drawing a wider implication on Chinese visitors’ experience. The Guangdong Times Museum, located in a residential building and embedded in a local middleclass community, seeks to engage its visitors through dialogue and through interactive activities and projects. The Hong Kong Museum of Art positions itself in a wider regional landscape, with a collection covering historical pictures, Chinese ancient artefacts, and the modern and contemporary art of both Hong Kong and China. It encourages leisure and lifelong learning and aims to stimulate the cultural lives of people.35 Adopting different approaches and strategies for the representation of art, the three museums present and circulate meanings differently and offer different experiences to the public. It is also noteworthy that, regardless of their differences in terms of museum collections or displays, the three museums have all worked with overseas partners to organize exhibitions that seek to cultivate a global 32 See ‘Guangdong Times Museum’, Ran Dian, www.randian-online.com/np_space/guangdongtimes-museum/, accessed 17 December 2018. 33 See this webpage of Hong Kong Museum of Art, ‘About the Museum’, http://hk.art.museum/ en_US/web/ma/about-the-museum.html, accessed 17 December 2018. 34 See the webpage of He Xiangning Art Museum, ‘Introduce’, www.hxnart.com/main.aspx? ModuleNo=00&SubModuleNo=02, accessed 17 December 2018. 35 See the webpage of Hong Kong Museum of Art, ‘Vision, Mission & Values’, http://hk.art. museum/en_US/web/ma/18.html, accessed 17 December 2018.

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appreciation of art. Ethnographic research on these three museums which have works of art drawn from different cultural contexts and with different institutional positionings, provides knowledge with wider implications for the study of museum discourse in GPRD, China, and the world. The three art museums can be regarded as ‘strategic research sites’ (Merton 1987), which illustrates the problems that appear when ‘knowledge’ is given (as exhibited in the formal structure and goals of the state/market), and when a gap exists between ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’. They reflect a dynamic museum reality in which multiple organizational and managerial approaches and strategies of knowledge production, and diverse publics coexist and respond differently to state/government regulations, regional contexts, and broader social and economic conditions. They were strategically used to question the symbolic boundaries of museums that have been predominated by nationalist and economic policy agendas, and to drawing broader patterns with regards to regulation, production, and consumption of museum discourses and practices in the region and in China more broadly. The method of ‘juxtapositional comparison’ was also used to compare the three different case studies. In her article, ‘Why Not Compare?’, Susan Stanford Friedman (2013) suggests using ‘juxtapositional comparison’ to avoid the political and epistemological problems of traditional modes of comparative thinking (such as identification of similarities and differences), and the opposite danger of insisting on the purely local and the particular in its geohistorical context. The method emphasizes comparative acts of cognition for the production of theory, based on the dynamism of comparison unfolding in the tension between commensurability and incommensurability.36 Using this method, the three case studies are put side by side, each with its own distinctive circuit mode and context. They are read together for their in/commensurability in two dimensions: the relations between the political-economic, cultural, and social spheres, and between the roles and functions of the agents (political and economic agents, museum intermediaries, and museum publics) in each sphere. The method helps maintain the particularity of each circuit, and identifies the new generalities based on what the circuits share. It addresses interconnected phenomena, and offers 36 As Friedman (2013, 40) explains, ‘a juxtapositional model of comparison sets things being compared side by side, not overlapping them […] not setting up one as the standard of measure for the other, not using one as an instrument to serve the other. Juxtaposition can potentially avoid the categorical violence of comparison within the framework of dominance. The distinctiveness of each is maintained, while the dialogue of voices that ensues brings commonalities into focus’.

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new insights for reading the museum world as an interconnected entity. More importantly, rather than comparison based on the politics of domination and otherness, it facilities the comparative analysis of different voices and actors coming out of distinctive and asymmetrical museum contexts. They will offer a comparative complement to our understanding of how different art museums exist at the intersection between the political-economic, cultural, and social spheres, and how their ‘in/commensurability’ reveals the larger sociocultural and political implications of museum phenomena.

1.4 Methods This book focuses on museum studies in China, through the use of an interdisciplinary approach that crosses over institutional analysis, exhibition histories, curatorial studies, and visitor research. It also adopts constructive theory and engages with relevant concepts and notions of the ‘public’ and ‘visitors’. The study not only includes extensive reviews and interpretations from scholars, art critics, curators, and art historians about the history and recent development of (art) museums in China, but also conducts empirical investigations into the three museums. The study is undertaken by ethnographic methods including content analysis of the museum, and textual analysis of a range of printed and online museum-related materials, interviews with museum professionals and visitors, and participant observation. The primary research materials were mainly collected during my many fieldtrips to the museums between 2015 and 2017. Content analysis was used in this research to critically review the museums’ representation of content, namely what messages the museums encode, to whom, and how these messages are circulated. The analysis focuses on the museums’ meaning-making mechanisms including exhibition texts, policy statement, the museum’s mission, collection, public programmes, infrastructure (i.e. the museum building, venue, or space), publication, and media coverage. Investigating archival materials, physical facilities, services, collections, and interpretative aids, this study explores their function and constructed meanings, and reveals how the museums mediate the process of meaning production. It is also with particular interest to the dominant structure and significant changes in their representations, and their impacts on the construction of cultural identities and creation of a particular kind of public. To provide a more comprehensive and reliable understanding of the cultural production of the museum, I interviewed the museums’ directors or/

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and curators and asked about their experiences of working in the museum. The interviews helped triangulate the data drawn from content analysis, and encapsulate the construction of meaning from the production side of the museum. They also helped elicit the data about the institutional condition of production. The museum professionals interviewed are fulltime employees, and they receive a stable income. This book is thus not intended to conduct a sociological class study, or a normative evaluation of their working condition or lifestyle. Its focus rests on their finished work and their discursive/creative effects, and engagement with the politics of signification (including ideological dilemma, and cultural conflicts and public tensions) in the museum context. To examine why and how visitors consume the contents of the museum, and how they relate to their visiting site, I conducted face-to-face semistructured interviews with museum visitors aged eighteen or above. The interviews motivated visitors to offer interpretations of their museum experiences and share with me the meaning they construct from experiences with the museum. Some fifty interviews37 were conducted at each museum site, based on a random sampling method. The interview data included the purposes of their visits, expectations, and communication with art/objects/ practices, personal interests, beliefs, and prior cultural experiences. The data was categorized by thematic coding38 to identify the important concepts or features of visitors’ experiences within their visiting context that inform their modes of museum consumption and ‘positionings’ (whether adaptive/ integrative, negotiated, or oppositional to each museum entity). Visitors 37 Qualitative research is concerned with the process behind a topic or meaning of a subject, rather than for making generalized hypothesis statements. It does not use power analysis to determine the sample size, but instead most commonly uses the criterion of saturation – when the collection of new data does not shed any further light on the issue under investigation. In other words, saturation is concerned with the point when discovery of ‘the new’ does not add anything to the overall story, model, or theory. In practice, it is necessary to specify a minimum sample size for initial analysis. After the minimum sample is achieved, interviews are carried out until nothing new emerges (stopping criterion). Mason (2010) found that the mean sample size was 31 in a sample of PhD studies that used qualitative approaches and qualitative interviews as the method of data collection. A majority of other types of qualitative studies fell within the range of 30-50, including ethnographic research, and a higher proportion of researchers seem to believe that the samples should ‘lie under 50’. See Mason (2010). Thus, in this study, the sample size was set to 50, which adheres to the standard of the f ield to estimate the point at which saturation is likely to occur. 38 Thematic analysis is a useful method for examining the perspectives of different research participants, highlighting similarities and differences, and generating unanticipated insights (Braun and Clarke 2006; King 2004). It is also a useful method to summarize the key features of a large data set in a structured way (King 2004).

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were also segmented in order to identify their ‘difference’ in the ways they orient the museum.39 The narrative approach of ‘thick description’ (Geertz 2003) was used to capture the visitors’ experiences and to interpret their meaning and contexts. ‘Participant observation’ as an anthropological fieldwork method was also used to capture how visitors use the museum facilities and services and to identify their interests in the museum. I observed visitors and took field notes on their visible reactions to the museum’s physical facilities and environment as well as on their interaction with other people. It helped triangulate the data drawn from visitor interviews, thereby increasing the credibility of the thematic analysis. In addition, I visited their sites and neighbouring areas, as well as other museums, galleries, art spaces, and cultural creative clusters in the cites. I also had casual conversations with artists and curators in exhibition spaces or academic conferences. All of these have been woven into my contextual understanding of the recent conditions of cultural production and consumption in these museums.

1.5

Book structure

This book is divided into six chapters. This introductory chapter has highlighted the methodological deficiencies in the existing analyses of museums in China. The dominant research framework privileges the museum production determined by the forces of state and market, reduces reception studies to an instrumental or practical function, and limits the idea of the museum public to the concept found in the public-relations management approach. The contingent role of the state and the market, the place of social and cultural actors and their signifying practices, as well as the notion of museum public, have been neglected. To fill the gaps, this chapter offers a new conceptual framework – ‘museum circuit’ and suggests an empirical study of the art museal processes that have affected GPRD since the 1990s. The circuit model is a constructive, multidimensional framework to examine the complex museal processes and relationships in the museum. The model addresses various discursive elements, including institutional regulation, cultural production and consumption, identity, and representation, and understands these interlinked processes in constructive terms. 39 Segmentation studies break visitors into subgroups for purposes of analysis and intervention. Museum professionals and art researchers have long adopted the method to investigate the patterns of art participation and museum experiences (for examples, Doering 1999; Falk 2009).

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With the involvement of possible actors including political and economic agents, museum intermediaries, and visitors, it represents a communicative interface between the social, cultural, economic, and political spheres; spheres that are differentiated but interlinked, all of which are important factors for explaining the museum phenomena in China. Chapter 2 traces the history of and the forces behind the institutional transformation of art museums in China, including those in Hong Kong after 1997. It maintains that art museums in China have undergone various localization processes in response to the dynamic internal and external challenges throughout the history of the country. Art museums emerged out of the nationalist revolutionary period and were used as a place for modern aesthetic education. In the period of Maoist rule, they mainly served to propagate communist sociopolitical ideologies and modernization. In post-reform China, multiple forces including the growing market, the state’s cultural policies, urbanization, the development of creative cities, and a growing middle class, have shaped the contexts of cultural regulation, production, and consumption. The final section of this chapter discusses the cultural context of Hong Kong after political sovereignty over the territory was regained by China in 1997. It examines how Hong Kong museums, under the ‘tutelage’ of the Chinese state, have been reoriented by the new government, and what the contextual changes are that these museums have been facing since 1997. In particular, it analyses the implications of the citizen-led cultural actions that acquired particular intensity with the Umbrella Movement of 2014. The chapter, overall, endeavours to discuss the multiple forces that have been influencing the regulation, production, and consumption of art museums in China. It provides a contextual understanding of the internalization of the structures of art museums by China’s successive political regimes and by its changing society. It finally re-emphasizes the need for an empirical strategy for reassessing the involvement of and mutual relations between different agents in art museums. Chapters 3 to 5 analyse the individual case studies, respectively, the He Xiangning Art Museum (Shenzhen), the Guangdong Times museum (Guangzhou), and the Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong). Each of these three chapters begins with a discussion of the institutional structures that regulate the museum and what these structures mean to the political and economic agents engaging with the museum and to the museum organization itself. The chapters then examine the production aspect of the museum, mainly by identifying the scope of intermediaries who are involved in its production, examining their discursive and cultural practices in exhibition, curatorial, and collection development, highlighting their approaches in

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representing art and culture, assessing their cultural impacts and analysing the construction of the museum public. Finally, the chapters explore the consumption issues pertaining to the different communicative modes and positions adopted by a differentiated public. On the one hand, I identify the differences in the museum publics based on the visitors’ narratives of their own visiting experiences and the communicative practices that they deploy in the museum context and/or their engagement with social criticism and their participation in public discourse. On the other hand, I identify whether or not members of the museum public are oriented to integrating themselves with or adapt themselves to the museum entity, how they negotiate what they encounter in the museum based on their individual situation, or whether they oppose what the museum propagates. These visitor studies reflect the existence of a social sphere in which local people position themselves in alignment with or divergence from the museum systems of value and meaning. The three case studies will provide a detailed picture of the different institutional discourses underlying the processes of regulation, production, and consumption in the art museum field in GPRD. They strengthen the validity of treating museums as being epistemologically and ontologically different from each other at one level, and comparable with each other at another level. In the concluding chapter, in addition to summarizing the main findings of the case studies, I discuss the different modes of museum circuit they involve, and their in/commensurability in two dimensions: the relations between political-economic, cultural, and social spheres, and the roles and functions of the agents (political and economic agents, museum intermediaries, and publics) in each sphere. The implications of the findings and the possible agendas for future research are included in the discussion. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the key contributions of this research.

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van den Bosch, Annette (2005). ‘Museums: Constructing a Public Culture in the Global Age’, Third Text, 19(1): 81-89. Varutti, Marzia (2014). Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press). Vickers, Edward (2007). ‘Museums and Nationalism in Contemporary China’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 37(3): 365-382. — (2010). ‘History, Identity, and the Politics of Taiwan’s Museums Reflections on the DPP-KMT Transition’, China Perspectives, 83: 92-106. Vigneron, Frank (2018). Hong Kong Soft Power: Art Practices in the Special Administrative Region, 2005-2014 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press). Walklate, Jenny (2016). ‘The Museum in the Global Contemporary: Debating the Museum of Now, University of Leicester School of Museum Studies Fiftieth Anniversary Conference, 18-22 April 2016’, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, 4(1): 205-209. Wang, Huangsheng (2012). Zuowei zhishi shengchan de meishuguan [New experience on art museum [I] art museum as knowledge production] (Beijing: Zhongyang Bianyi Chubanshe [Beijing: Central Compilation & Translation Press]). Wang, Jing (1996). High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Wang, Jing (2005). ‘Woguo bowuguan guanzhong chubu yanjin – yi shuju fenxi wei jichu’ [A preliminary research on the museum visitors in China – based on data analysis], Master’s thesis, Jilin University, China, http://cdmd.cnki.com.cn/ Article/CDMD-10183-2005109367.htm (accessed 16 November 2015). Wang, Tong (2012). ‘Shenzhen bowuguan (Gudai Shenzhen) zhanlan guanzong pinggu yanjiu’ [Visitors’ evaluation of the exhibition, ‘ancient Shenzhen’ in Shenzhen Museum], Journal of Nanchang College of Education, 7, www.cnki. com.cn/Article/CJFDTOTAL-LCYY201207030.htm (accessed 16 November 2015). World Heritage Encyclopaedia. ‘Cultural Institutions Studies’, worldheritage. org. http://worldheritage.org/articles/Cultural_Institutions_Studies (accessed 26 January 2018). Woodward, Kathryn (1997). Identity and Difference (London: Sage, in association with the Open University). Wu, Guowei (1987). ‘Jingjin diqu bowuguan guanzhong diaocha baogao’ [Survey report on the museum visitors of Beijing and Tianjin], Zhongguo Bowuguan [Chinese Museum], 2: 28-44. Wu, Hung (2000). Exhibiting Experimental Art in China (Chicago, IL: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago). Yang, Xi (2007). ‘Meishu de shouzhong – dui guonei meishu gonggongxing wenti de yixiang yanjiu’ [Research on art audience: a problem of art publicity in China], Master’s thesis, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China,

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http://cdmd.cnki.com.cn/Article/CDMD-10287-2007194943.htm (accessed 17 November 2015). Zeng, Xi (2006). ‘Xiandai zhanshi bolanhui zhong de guanzhong xingwei yanjiu’ [Research of the visitors’ behaviour in modern exhibitions and expositions], Master’s thesis, Wuhan University of Technology, China, http://cdmd.cnki. com.cn/Article/CDMD-10497-2006060749.htm (accessed 16 November 2015). Zhang, Songling (1985). ‘Dui “haiyang he tade jumin” zhanlan guanzhong yijian de diaocha he fenxi’ [Survey report of the visitors’ opinion on the exhibition ‘Ocean and its residents’ at the Shanghai Natural History Museum], Zhongguo Bowuguan [Chinese Museum], 1, www.cnki.com.cn/Article/CJFDTOTAL-GBWG198501003. htm (accessed 16 November 2015). Zhao, Chunwu (1993). ‘Shixi bowuguan de wenhua yishi’ [Analysis of the cultural consciousness of museums], Zhongguo Bowuguan [Chinese Museum], 4, www. cnki.com.cn/Article/CJFDTOTAL-GBWG199304005.htm (accessed 16 January 2018). Zhao, Xiaobin Simon, and Li Zhang (2007). ‘Foreign Direct Investment and the Formation of Global City-Regions in China’, Regional Studies, 41(7): 979-994. Zhao, Yi (2010). ‘Zhongguo minying dangdai mishuguan cezhan jizhi fenxi’ [Analysis of the curatorial system of private contemporary art museums in China], Master’s thesis, Minzu University of China, http://cdmd.cnki.com.cn/Article/CDMD10052-2010260990.htm (accessed 26 January 2018). Zhu, Qi (2003). ‘Zhongguo sili xiandai meishuguan de tizhi’ [The institutional structure of private modern art museums in China], Meishuguan [Art Museums] Volume A, ed. Huangsheng Wang (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press Group), 2-8.

2.

Revisiting the historical trajectories of modern art museums in China Abstract This chapter revisits the history of and the forces behind the institutional transformation of art museums in China, including those in Hong Kong after 1997. It maintains that art museums in China have undergone various localization processes in response to the dynamic internal and external challenges throughout the history of the country. This chapter offers a historical and contextual background for understanding the multiple forces that have been influencing the regulation, production, and consumption of art museums in China. Against the diverse and contested backgrounds in contemporary societies, it re-emphasizes the need for an empirical strategy for studying the cultural actors in different museum contexts. Keywords: museum history, cultural contexts, meishuguan, bowuguan

Art museums are different from other types of museums, which are each bound by their own disciplinary or f ield perspectives. As noted in the introductory chapter, meishuguan and buowuguan are managed by two different administrative bodies in mainland China. Thus, before examining the practices that contemporary art museums engage in, this chapter will revisit the distinctive discourses and practices associated with art museums, their historical origins, and the transformations of their material, institutional, and contextual aspects, both in mainland China and Hong Kong. I shall focus on the history of art museums in China by reprising their changing roles and demonstrating how they have been locally transformed in response to the dynamic internal and external challenges of the country in different periods of time. The changes that have taken place in museum and cultural policies, art concepts, display practices, institutional structures,

Ho, S.C.F., Museum Processes in China: The Institutional Regulation, Production, and Consumption of the Art Museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi: 10.5117/9789463723527_ch02

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and contexts mean that the history of Chinese art museums has features that differ from what can be seen in the history of museums in the modern West. More importantly, they have been informed by a national and local need for creating public spaces to address the country’s changing political, economic, and sociocultural conditions. In addition, Hong Kong, which was ceded to the British in 1841 before the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, offers another perspective to explore the disjuncture and differences found in the museum discourses of China; this is especially so after China resumed political sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997. It serves as a perfect test case for recontextualizing the complex relationship between national, local, and global, and for testifying how political, economic and social initiatives affect the cultural practices of a global city. Although the museum is conceived as a modern, Western invention, museums in China have undergone various localization processes through the course of modern Chinese history. The first two sections of this chapter are arranged according to different periods of time – covering the transition from the late Qing dynasty to the Republic of China (1912-1948) and the era of the People’s Republic of China (1949-present) from the time it was under the leadership of Mao Zedong to the economic reforms, which began in the 1980s and have continued to the present. Section 1 examines the emergence of modern museums in the late Qing dynasty and the birth of public art museums during the Republic of China in the 1920s and 1930s. At the dawn of the twentieth century, museums were generally built to strengthen China through education, primarily in Western science and natural history. Public art museums emerged only during the revolutionary era of the Republic of China. Both bowuguan (museums) and meishuguan (fine art museums) became institutions for developing social education as part of the Nationalists’ wider modernization project, with the fine art museums focusing on aesthetic education. However, the institutionalization of museums, like the fate of the Republican regime itself, was short-lived. Section 2 examines how the Communist Party radically transformed the museum enterprise after its political takeover in 1949. Under the Maoist regime, the arts and their institutions became highly instrumentalized by the leading political ideologies. New institutional arrangements led to the gradual separation of activities between meishuguan and bowuguan. Above all, the prohibition of private ownership of antiques in the 1950s and 1960s led to the disappearance of private museums. Cultural institutions were monopolized by the state and intensively politicalized, especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Art, museums, and politics remained tightly connected throughout the Maoist period. It was not until the 1980s

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that the political-economic transformation of Chinese society – involving the transition from a Marxist-Leninist ideological state to one dominated by economic liberalization – led to more hybrid forms of development in China’s museums. The reinstitutionalization of museums after the death of Mao involved greater diversity and privatization in museum forms. Multiple forces, including the resumption of private ownership, a growing art market, state cultural policies, urbanization, and the development of creative cities, along with a growing middle class and the globalization of the artworld, shaped the development of art museums in mainland China. Art academies have become increasingly autonomous since their institutional separation from the Ministry of Culture in 2000. Art scholars have constantly emphasized the importance of the relationship between art museums and society. Furthermore, marketization and internationalization have nurtured new actors in the art field. Art museums have become a site of ongoing negotiation and collaboration between museum stakeholders and the government. This section is entirely devoted to examining the above factors in detail, as they have all influenced the development of art museums in mainland China since its economic reform. China resumed political sovereignty over Hong Kong and Macau in the late 1990s. These special autonomous administrative and postcolonial cities have not only served as agencies for mobilizing China’s economic development but have also illuminated the local cultural and social difference in the country. In Hong Kong, the government-run museums have served cultural governmentality for more than half a century dating from the period of British rule. However, after the Handover, these museums have become recentralized and are now managed by a governmental department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, which is increasingly responsive to the forces of globalism and nationalism. The recent outbreak of the Umbrella Movement, calling for democratization in Hong Kong, reflected significant social contestation over the nature of the Hong Kong political system and also mobilized the cultural sphere in practising artistic and museological activism. Taking this cultural contestation as a backdrop, the final section of this chapter will introduce the major institutional changes taking place in museums in post-1997 Hong Kong and review the recent moves made by the local government in museum development. In addition, it will explore the emergence of a cultural activism that has provoked museological changes in the city. This section suggests that Hong Kong has evolved to capture very different values between civil society and the government, and demonstrated a growing cultural citizenship diverging from the ethos of nationalism or patriotism promulgated by the state policy in mainland China. Doubts about the primary assumption that China is

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using museums for the articulation of state/market interests can be further raised by observations on China’s internal dynamics in relation to Hong Kong’s position as the leading global city in the GPRD. Hong Kong as such serves as an important method for rethinking the complex relationship between the local, the national, and the global. Keeping in mind the increasing influence of social and cultural agents and the ability of those agents to express their values and identities in the public domain, this chapter concludes by re-emphasizing the need for an empirical approach to critically reassess the actual practices of different agents connected with the museum and how they relate to each other in the normalized public institutional platform of the art museum.

2.1

The path towards the birth of modern public art museums in the Republic of China (1912-1949)

Before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, there were arguably two climactic phases in the modern museum establishment of China. The first phase came during the Self-Strengthening Movement (1861-1895) and continued in the late Qing Reform. The second climax occurred after the nationalist revolution in 1911. The former was associated with engagement with Western knowledge and new forms of learning. Museums of that period focused mainly on natural history and science and were attached to churches or universities. The latter was closely tied to nationalism and to preserving and building the culture of a nation-state. Museums of that period were strongly focused on history and art (Cao 2008, 50). In the section that appears below, I will explain how public art museums emerged out of the revolutionary era and took up the function of promoting social education in support of the building of a new nation. In the second half of the nineteenth century, foreigners or missionaries mostly founded the new museums in China. These museums served as platforms for Westerners to conduct research into natural history or ethnology in China. Their functions varied and contributed both to the expansion of Christianity and to the construction of a universal science system to extend Western influence in China (Lu 2014, 19-61). However, ordinary Chinese people had limited interaction with museums – there was no real Chinese museum public at this stage.1 The key change came as a 1 In Lu’s case study of the Shanghai Museum, the use of English in exhibitions and guidebooks and the opening of the museum to Chinese visitors on scheduled days in the 1920s is seen as

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response to the foreign threat experienced following China’s serious defeats in the First (1839-1842) and Second (1856-1860) Opium Wars, when the late Qing court initiated the Self-Strengthening Movement (1861-1895). Young intellectuals and Qing government officials began opening up to modern science and culture and were exposed to the museums in Western Europe, America, and Japan through study abroad or diplomatic channels. Later, China was heavily defeated in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the Qing lost both its influence over Korea and its possession of Taiwan to Japan; these difficulties were intensified by the demand for ‘privileges’ by the foreign powers of Germany, Russia, and Britain in 1898. In response, Qing reformers called for institutional and ideological change and sparked the Hundred Days of Reform under the leadership of the young Guangxu Emperor in 1898. The founding of museums was one of the agenda items of the new policies in the Reform. However, the museum policy could not be implemented because of the failure of the Reform (Ma 1994 cited in Lu 2014, 14), which ended because of a coup by powerful conservative opponents led by the Empress Dowager Cixi. In 1901, under Cixi, the Qing Court initiated ‘New Policies’, also known as the ‘Late Qing Reform’, which implemented key institutional changes, including the abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905. During these Late Qing reforms, numerous provincial officers and eminent figures submitted proposals for the founding of museums.2 It was against this turbulent political and social backdrop that China attempted their f irst museum project. Founded and managed by local social elites, the foreign institution of the museum went through a localization process in which the objectives and functions of museums shifted to serve the educated segments of the local community, seeking to promote Western knowledge, and to stimulate the Chinese literati to transform China.3 Chinese intellectuals and entrepreneurs considered the museum as a societal ideal and endeavoured to materialize it (Li 2016, 38). Many scholars argue that the most representative museum was the Nantong Bowuguan, limiting the local community’s full access to museum knowledge and created the social and ethnic boundary between Chinese and Westerners, as well as the difference in forms of identity construction between local and non-local elites. See Lu (2014, 78). 2 The Society for National Strengthening, founded by Kang Youwei and other reformers in 1895, and regarded as the archetype of political parties in modern China, had proposed a plan to create museums. In an 1896 article ‘Lun Xuehui’, published in Shiwu bao (Current Affairs Newspaper), the most important newspaper for the Constitutional Reform and Modernization movement, the author, Liang Qichao, called for the display of an array of technical equipment and for the formation of museums to facilitate technological experiments (Cao 2008, 51). 3 For a detailed analysis of the effect exerted on early museums by social elites, see Lu (2014, 62-88).

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founded by the late Qing Chinese scholar-official and industrialist Zhang Jian in 1905. It is generally recognized as being the ‘first museum of China’ (Nantong Museum 2009 and Zhao P. 2002 cited in Lu 2014, 79) in that it was founded by the Chinese and was rooted in the patriotic cause of ‘fulfil[ing] the political and nationalistic need of a group of Chinese social elites’ (Lu 2014, 84).4 The museum was a mixture of elements including a zoo, Chinese gardens, and exhibition galleries; it displayed historical artefacts, natural specimens, and art objects. Although art museums did not exist at that time, an embryonic public cultural institution was created with the founding of these more general museums. In addition, as a part of the Reform and the Qing ‘New Policies’ programme at the turn of the twentieth century, exhibitions began to be organized on the metropolitan and provincial levels within China (Fernsebner 2006, 100). The name ‘meishuguan’5 started to be used to refer to the display rooms in schools and commercial expositions, such as the influential national expo ‘Nanyang quanye hui’ (literally meaning The Exposition for Promoting Industry in the South Seas) in 1910. Held in Nanjing, this large-scale exposition was not only a culmination of late Qing activism in the realm of exhibitions but was also an event that displayed – materially and rhetorically – the imaginaries of both a national and global order (Fernsebner 2006, 101). A nascent, ambiguously categorized idea of art in the modern sense was visible in one of the ten galleries, namely the Meishu (Fine Arts) Gallery.6 This Gallery is considered to be the earliest example of a state-sponsored art museum in China (Li 2012a). The second phase of museum development occurred in the era of the Republic of China (1912-1949) when nationalism was harnessed to build a new modern state. Museums were considered an element in a wider national programme and served as part of the new education system of the Republican government. In the early Republican years, the most significant moves were the establishment of the Institute of Antiquities Exhibition (IAE 4 Zhang Jian had proposed to the authorities the idea of building a national museum. He emphasized that the national museum should be an institution built in the capital of the nation to glorify and publicize Chinese civilization, Confucianism, and the history of the world and to save Chinese antiques from being taken out of the country by foreigners. The proposal also covered museological issues, including collection management, museum building, exhibition design, and staff. See Lu’s case study of the Nantong Museum (2014, 78-88). 5 According to Li (2016, 75), the Chinese media had started to use the words, ‘meishuguan’ to introduce the Expositions in Japan. 6 The Gallery was built in a Roman architectural style, mainly displaying Chinese paintings, embroideries, and antiques. Western artworks, including paintings in oil and watercolour and drawings in pencil and charcoal, were displayed in the Education Gallery, designed in a German architecture style (Lu 2008, 56).

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hereafter) (1913-1948) and the Palace Museum (1925-), both drawing on the Qing dynasty imperial collection in the Forbidden City. Yet, it was the Palace Museum, which converted the Forbidden City from a royal residence into a public space that symbolically marked the end of the imperial system and the established power of the Republican state through an act of museum founding (Lu 2014, 107-108). With a vision for building a modern nation, intellectuals started to advocate the idea of establishing museums specializing in fine arts (meishu). In the mid-1910s and 1920s, the New Culture Movement, which sprang from an intellectual revolt against Confucianism, called for the creation of a new Chinese culture based on Western concepts of democracy and science. Fine arts became a major topic of cultural debate between modernism and Chinese tradition, which represented alternative and competing visions of China’s future (Andrews 1994, 12). The leading intellectuals and artists Lu Xun, Cai Yuanpei, Xu Beihong, and Lin Fengmian had become influential in the development of art museums through their proposals for aesthetic education.7 Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), a well-known Chinese educator and president of Peking University, served in the provisional Republic’s Ministry of Education in 1912. He made a cogent proposal for national education policy, characterized by the unity of five types of education: military/citizenship, utilitarian, moral, worldview, and aesthetic education (meiyu). To promulgate meiyu, he proposed the idea of ‘yi meiyu dai zongjiao’ (literally meaning that aesthetic education should replace religious indoctrination). Briefly, he held that aesthetic education is a field that enhances students’ innermost desires and feelings of humanity, while religious doctrines militate against their freedom in learning. This aesthetic education not only involved architecture, sculpture, pictures, literature, and music but also the institutions of meishuguan (fine arts museum), theatres, cinemas, gardens, public tombs, and ideas about design of cities and villages, social organizations, as well as individual speech and behaviour (Zhang 2000). In terms of exhibits, he thought that the meishuguan should display the old (dynastic) art objects owned by the nation, while the art exhibitions or expositions (meishu zhanlanhui) should display private collections and new works by artists (Li 2012b). Another protagonist of this cultural movement, Lin Fengmian, a modern Chinese painter and the first principal of the National Academy of Art (the predecessor of the present-day China Academy of Art), stressed the cultural significance of art museums in his article ‘Meishuguan zhi gongneng’ (The Functions of Art Museums), published in 1932. 7

For details of their proposals, see Li (2016, 254-285).

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In 1929, the first large-scale ‘national exhibition of art’ (quanguo meishu zhanlanhui), proposed by Cai Yuanpei and organized by the Education Department, was officially held in Shanghai. The exhibits included Chinese painting (guohua), Western-style painting (yanghua), photography (shiying), sculpture (diaosu), Chinese calligraphy, engravings, architecture, and ancient antiques kept by collectors. The exhibition marked the early phase of the influx of Western art and the beginning of modern forms of art collection and display. After the opening, public demand for art museums was expressed through the media. In the same year, the first national art exhibition hall was established in Nanjing. Museum management was also developed as a field of work and knowledge by the social education section of the Ministry of Education.8 This institutional arrangement showed that the Nationalist government viewed bowuguan (museums) as part of the project of social education, the purposes of which were to propagate Dr Sun Yat-sen’s doctrine of the Three Principles of the People (‘Nationalism, the power of the people and the people’s welfare’) and also to teach the public about science and technology (Lu 2014, 110), while the purpose of meishuguan was to develop aesthetic education in symbiosis with the nationalists’ modernization project. In 1927, Chinese painter and educator, Yan Wenliang, established the first private art museum, the Suzhou Museum of Art. In 1930, the first municipal art museum, the Tianjin Museum of Art, was established under the direction of the education affairs section of the Peking National Art Academy.9 The museum was considered a symbol of modernity, representing the ideas and efforts of Chinese cultural intellectuals to employ aesthetic education for transforming the public into national citizens (Ge 2011). 8 In 1912, under the Beiyang government, museum management was the responsibility of the Ministry of Education and antiquity management was the responsibility of the Ministry of Home Affairs. Like the Beiyang government, the subsequent Nationalist government emphasized ‘Chinese culture’ as the moral and ideological foundations of the state. The Ministry of Education and Research of the Nationalist Government (Zhonghua Daxueyuan) was founded in 1927 to oversee education, performance, fine arts, and museum and the management of antiquities. ‘Establishing more museums’ was one of its key agenda items. However, it faced criticism and opposition and was replaced by the National Ministry of Education in 1929, which had a Social Education Division responsible for museum management, libraries, fine art museums, botanic gardens, and the collection of artefacts (Lu 2014, 109). 9 The museum had four aims: to preserve art works, to be open to the public for study and reference, to nurture art talent, and to promote artistic industry. Exhibits included history, relics, ancient stone engravings, crafts, architectural models, Chinese painting and calligraphy, Eastern and Western paintings, Chinese and foreign sculptures, inscriptions, and art photographs. The museum also produced art publications, and organized seminars, classes on Chinese and Western paintings, and study clubs for photography, sculpture, and engraving. The museum received 16,000 visitors in five years (Cao 2008; Tianjin Meishuguan 1934).

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Other institutional measures relating to the museum field included issuing legal regulations for the preservation of antiquities and limiting the export of artefacts. In 1930, the ‘Antiquities Conservation Law’ was imposed, marking the beginning of antiquities management in China (Xian 2010). Museological studies also began to develop with the establishment of the Museum Association of China in 1935. According to a publication issued by the association in 1936, there were at least 80 museums, including both public and private museums, in the country (Museum Association of China 1936 cited in Lu 2014, 89). Fifty-three museums were registered under four main categories: general education; history; fine arts; and sciences, industry, and technology (Cao 2008). According to an official document of KMT’s committee meeting, by 1936, there were 77 bowuguan and 56 meishuguan (Li 2016, 461). As Tracey Lu (2014, 110) has remarked, the years from 1928 to 1936 witnessed a substantial development in China in terms of both the quality and diversity of museums, as well as in museological studies, with articles published on collections, management, exhibition design, collection research, and archiving. In April 1937, just a few months prior to the invasion of China by Japan, the last iteration of a national art exhibition, the ‘Second National Exhibition of Art’, was held in the newly constructed National Gallery of Art (Guoli meishu chenlieguan) in Nanjing. When the threat of war was looming, a significant part of the National Palace Museum’s collection was removed from Peking in 1933 (O’Neill 2015). It was taken to the island of Taiwan in 1949, following the defeat of the Nationalist Party in the civil war (1946-1949) with the Communist Party of China (CPC). The Japanese invasion dealt a severe blow to China’s museum enterprise, which had begun to develop at both national and local levels, and had extended its focus from Western knowledge to social education. Newly created art museums emerged that were based on collections of dynastic artefacts and displays of ‘modern’ art, and aimed to develop social-aesthetic education in the new nation-state.

2.2

The development of art museums in the People’s Republic of China (1949-current)

Politicization of Art Museums under Mao (1949-1979) On 1 October 1949, the People’s Republic of China was formally established by the CPC, which proclaimed itself to be the vanguard of the working class. The guiding ideology for the arts was based on Mao Zedong’s speech

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on literature and art from the CPC stronghold in Yan’an in 1942. Mao set a blueprint for the creation of politically revolutionary art, based on his interpretation of Marxism-Leninism and oriented to class and national struggles. He called for a society that served the proletariat and had workers, peasants, soldiers and their cadres as the audiences for literature and art. Artists and writers were obliged to guide and edify their audiences through the creation of ideologically informed art and were required to learn from and better understand their audiences. The artworks they produced were understood as a component of the wider revolution. Following Mao’s idea of ‘correct’ art, cultural production primarily served the demands and aspirations of proletarians and was materialized through a centralized arts system that included art museums. When the People’s Liberation Army entered Beijing on 31 January 1949, it immediately took over the management of the Palace Museum and reopened it after seven days. The preservation of the ancient works of art by the new regime, as Joseph Levenson (1968, 76-77) notes, was seen as signifying the end of Confucian society and the feudal system, which were depicted as part of history and no longer relevant to the Maoist modernization plan. In the same year, the Ministry of Culture (MOC) was established to oversee museum management for the new nation. Its subsidiary, the State Bureau of Cultural Relics (the predecessor of the present State Administration of Cultural Heritage, currently an independent bureau of the State Council) took over the management of museums and the protection of relics and archaeological sites, while the MOC oversaw the direct management of the Palace Museum, major national and art museums, cultural centres (wenhuagong), and performance troupes. The museums were managed by various levels of government, ranging from national and provincial to city and county levels. Following the model of the Soviet Union, each local and national museum consisted of a chief curator and a CPC secretary (accountable to the Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party), who supervised an administration office and three departments in charge of public education, exhibitions, and collection management. The CPC secretary was at the helm of each museum and usually had greater power and responsibility than the chief curator in implementing the ideological and political propaganda policies and tasks (Lu 2014, 121). Under Mao, the relationship between art, institutions, and politics was tightly welded together.10 Popular art became the main form of art for the 10 Holm (1991) examines the dynamic social forces and ideologies that determined the form of national arts and how they shaped the Party’s cultural policies in the Yan’an period from 1936

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dissemination of political ideals. The artistic modes of realism and revolutionary Chinese painting were represented in two major genres: pictures of military heroes and the hagiographic leader portrait (Clark 2010a, 45-59). With the official cultural ideology uncontested, the revolutionary state led by Mao was the dominant art patron. The state provided steady professional work to artists (Kraus 2004, 6) and regulated art production through a vast network of cultural organizations, including artists’ associations, research institutes, publishing houses, art schools, museums, and a multitude of national, provincial, municipal, and local cultural bureaus (DeBevoise 2014, 15). In meishuguan, the China National Art Workers’ Association (the predecessor of the present China Artists Association (CAA)), under the management of the Propaganda Department of the CPC, primarily supervised the ideological content of art and the display of legitimate artworks. Fine art museums thus served as a locus of activity for the CAA under the auspices of the Communist Party and as a place for displaying the kind of art representative of the revolutionary nation. Furthermore, the state strictly controlled the market; commercial art values were considered decadent, soft on imperialism, and indifferent to class virtue. The elimination of landlords and capitalists is now seen by many as having resulted in a reduction of China’s aesthetic range and deterioration of the livelihood of the producers of elite art (Kraus 2004, 10). In 1949, legislation on protecting antiques was issued to nationalize the ‘cultural heritage’ owned by private collectors through confiscation or donation. The act of making the private ownership of antiques illegal finally led to the disappearance of private museums. The CPC became the sole agent in the museum system, exercising monopolistic and comprehensive control of museums and their every aspect, including administration, exhibitions and research, and displays (Lu 2014, 120-112). In 1952, the CPC specified the mission of museums as being the carrying out of revolutionary education for socialist patriotism (ibid., 128). Following this, a series of museums showcasing the revolutionary history of CPC to 1948. The arts were understood as reflecting the pattern of thought and feeling characteristic of a particular class or group and were used both as a tool of government and as an aspect of human consciousness. They included the 1930s ‘vulgar’ Marxism of the standard Stalinist, international-communist variety of the CPC, the allegedly feudal-superstitious mentality of the Chinese common people, and the legacies of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, with its strong attachment to cosmopolitan values and its iconoclastic views of Chinese literary and artistic traditions. Andrews (1994) focuses on the art bureaucracy set up by Mao during the People’s Republic of China, examining how it controlled and affected artists’ production. Galikowski (1998) probes into the three dimensions – art institutions, the ideological scheme, and political movements – through which the Chinese government asserted political dominance over artists.

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were built, including the National Museum of Revolution and the National Museum of History.11 In PRC art museums, narratives that supported and promoted revolutionary art (geming yishu) became the exclusive and sole component that characterized communist-era art history. The National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) was one of the ‘ten grand national projects’ established in 1962. According to Jane Bebevoise’s (2014) review, in the inaugural exhibition of NAMOC, approximately 2,000 works were shown for the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talk on Art and Literature. From 1963 to 1965, the museum had run solo shows of prominent artists, such as the venerated ink painter Qian Songyan (1899-1985) in 1964 and a photography exhibition in 1965 heralding the ‘inevitable defeat’ of the United States in Vietnam. Between 1972 and 1975, NAMOC hosted only four shows described as ‘national’, in addition to the notorious Black Painting Exhibition of 1974, which showcased artworks by prominent painters deemed to display counter-revolutionary tendencies. These exhibitions were arranged exclusively by the Guowuyuan wenhuazu (translated as the Cultural Team of the State Council), an administrative group in charge of culture under the direction of Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and a member of the notorious Gang of Four (ibid., 16-17). In other national museums, for example, the National Museum of China, exhibitions were instructed by communist ideology to emphasize class struggles, the concepts of a linear chronological succession of historical periods and of the people as the real driving force of history which were to set the tone for museums in socialist China. Artworks representing revolutionary themes served as complementary materials for constructing the revolutionary narrative right into the 1990s (Yin 2017, 104). Between 1956 and 1966, the authorities alternated between relatively liberal policies and tight ideological control.12 The Hundred Flowers Movement of 1956 permitted a proliferation of exhibitions in China, covering a wide spectrum of traditional and ‘contemporary’ art from China as well as from overseas.13 The Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, which purged a large number 11 Both museums were governed by MOC from the 1950s to the 1980s and were integrated into the current National Museum of China in 2003. 12 For details, see Galikowski (1998, 55-125). 13 As Galikowski (1998, 56) points out, the relaxation during the Hundred Flowers was due to international influence, occurring at a time when the denunciation of Stalin in the Soviet Union was causing great confusion in socialist countries and producing instability in Eastern Europe. In the Second National Exhibition of Traditional Chinese Painting (11-23 July 1956), held in the NAMOC, there were a variety of subject matters and styles, including realistic and charming portrayals of people’s lives and beautiful landscapes. In addition, there was an increase in the

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of intellectuals from leadership roles, intensified the anxiety over politically controversial art (Kraus 2004, 11-12). During the Great Leap Forward (also known as the ‘great tide of socialist construction’), artists participated in art production on a massive scale, and large and small exhibitions were mounted for workers, peasants, and soldiers across China between 1957 and 1965.14 Articulated by one of Mao’s slogans of the day, ‘xianxian you bowuguan, sheshe you zhanlanshi’ (a museum in every county and an exhibition hall in every commune), China experienced a sudden increase in the number of museums, rising from 72 in 1957 to 360 in 1958 (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2018). The subsequent outbreak of the Cultural Revolution (19661976) was the climax of the radical and extreme homogenization of art.15 It led to the massive destruction of cultural infrastructure and the closure of museums;16 yet, exhibitions and museums were still being created to serve the goals of the revolutionary political movement.17 Cultural relaxation and the resumption of privatization in the postMao period (1979-1989) Following the death of Mao Zedong and the purge of the Gang of Four in 1976, Deng Xiaoping (1904-97) emerged as the leader of China in 1979 and led China through far-reaching market economy reforms between 1979 and 1992. In accordance with the socialist modernization drive, the museum number of exhibitions displaying art pieces from countries other than the communist bloc, including a show of British graphic art staged in Beijing and the first ever exhibition of Mexican art in 1956 (ibid., 67-68). 14 Galikowski (1998, 87) states that a national exhibition of worker, peasant, and soldier art was organized at the end of 1958, displaying a whole range of popular forms, particularly New Year pictures and paper-cuts, while also presenting typical Great Leap Forward themes such as steel production, ‘getting rid of the four pests’, and building new roads in the countryside. Small and large exhibitions, which formed the core activities of the Artists’ Association, were held all over China. Factories also organized their worker-artists to produce paintings that reflected the history of their factory, and these were used as educational material for workers’ political training. Similar experiments took place in industrial and commercial units and in rural communes throughout China. 15 See Kraus (2004, 53-54) and Andrews (1994, 3). 16 See Cao (2008, 53-54). 17 During the Cultural Revolution, an exhibition was organized by the Shanghai Museum in 1976, which displayed ceramics from the South China Sea. The exhibition further reinforced Marxist historical materialism by emphasizing class struggle and also served the state’s interests in terms of international policies connected with the USSR on territorial disputes (Lu 2014, 126-28). In addition, some new museums were created, such as the Shenzhen Art Exhibition Hall and the Jiangxi Crafts Museum, founded in 1970 and 1971 respectively (Lu 2008, 69).

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enterprise was reinstitutionalized, with greater diversity and resumed privatization. NAMOC was characterized by less ideological state control and greater economic considerations over exhibition planning and gallery operation. With a growing public debate about art, the museum had to work with different stakeholders in determining its art ideology. Consequently, the museum began to express greater tolerance towards the avant-garde art that sprang up in the 1980s. After Deng Xiaoping rose to power in 1979, political reorganization took place. Deng upheld the slogan ‘art should serve the people and socialism’, which was less militant and more inclusive than the old Maoist slogan of art for workers, peasants, and soldiers. In this new era, intellectuals were officially considered to be members of the working class. Artists repositioned their works and were involved in theoretical discussions in accordance with Deng’s slogans ‘Let 100 Flowers Bloom’ and ‘Liberate Your Thinking’ (Kraus 2004, 28). The government was tolerant of some experiments, yet it faced numerous challenges, including the reorganization of devastated Party organs, the reconstruction of abolished art associations and academic structures, and the rehabilitation of ‘rightists’ who had ostensibly liberal attitudes towards the art system. In addition, because of a lack of clear directives and guidelines, the government was not effective in controlling art ideologies. This liberated context allowed artistic experiments in art academies and stimulated debates on art in public platforms such as art magazines and discussion symposia. These contextual factors, as Martina Köppel-Yang (2003, 23) argues, gave rise to the avant-garde art of the 1980s and shaped it into a kind of symbiotic relationship with the official culture, projecting a modern Chinese identity that remained closely linked to the state’s modernization programme.18 Under Deng’s economic reforms, the system of institutionalized support for the arts began to shift because of three major changes – the diminishing control of state cultural organs over art, rising entrepreneurship, and emerging alternative spaces for artistic work (Kraus 2004; DeBevoise 2014). 18 Köppel-Yang (2003, 22-24) emphasizes that Chinese avant-garde art in the 1980s was not an underground movement and it even appeared in the title of a national exhibition in 1989. Between 1985 and 1987, the art of the New Wave (xinchao meishu) swept all over China. Artists and art critics engaged in experimenting with new concepts and organized numerous events and exhibitions that strongly reflected the influence of Western art. They stirred up cultural debate connected with enthusiasm for humanistic values and equated it with the freedom of individual expression and the establishment of a new spiritual order. Their art reflected a quest for a subjective and authentic representation of reality that marked the beginning of alternative art in China.

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The state was no longer the sole patron of the arts. Market reforms had weakened Party control over culture, with changing trends in censorship and increasing obstacles faced by the authorities in controlling the arts. Moreover, the state paid greater attention to ‘profit’ than to ‘preaching’ in the arts, and consequently the reforms changed the basis of the Chinese claims to political legitimacy in the artistic field (Kraus 2004, 29-30). Deng’s cultural policy put increased emphasis on commodifying art products, leading to the increased diversity in art products, especially for urban Chinese (ibid.). DeBevoise (2014, 270) points out that with rising state-led entrepreneurship ‘economic reform put pressure on government-run institutions, including museums, to diversify their sources of financial support. The diversification of funding sources, including attempts to generate income from fees by renting display space, establishing profit-making galleries, and organizing exhibitions with works of art for sale, contributed to the decentralization of the state system of support for the arts and the diminishing role of the CAA, the primary arbiter of artistic standards and value’. Based on DeBevoise’s study of the national art exhibitions at NAMOC, we can observe that works of art had shifted from gritty realism and state-sanctioned social criticism to a preoccupation with depoliticized subject matter, which accompanied the academicization of socially engaged artists (ibid., 40). In addition, in the debate on the public appearance of Father, a painting by Luo Zhongli, the national museum, art associations, the art academy, and the art media appeared as combined forces, all playing a role in determining artistic ideologies (ibid., 47-66). In terms of museum policy, the Party embarked on the ‘great development of museums’ to serve the urgent need of educating Chinese people and constructing the ‘four modernizations’ promoted by the regime of Deng Xiaoping. Museum development was included in the Sixth Five-Year Plan (1981-1985) in 1982, which stipulated that each city should have one or more museums. Museums were redeveloped to permit greater diversity and allowed to privatize. Museum activities were diversified with additional creation of new departments in charge of new functions, including research, outreach, IT functions, and collection preservation (Lu 2014, 200). The Chinese Museum Association was revitalized in 1982 and it started to publish a journal titled Chinese Museums in 1984. Most importantly, the ‘Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics’,19 which was issued in 1982 to regulate the acquisition and sale of artefacts, legalized the private ownership of 19 The legislation was issued in 1982 and has undergone several revisions since then, with the final version dated to 2007. See Lu (2014, 196-197).

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heritage and permitted the establishment of nongovernmental collections of artworks. This law paved the way for the development of private museums in China. In addition, in 1986, the MOC issued the ‘Provisional Regulations on Art Museums’, stipulating rules on the nature and responsibilities of art museums, defining them as charitable institutions and stating that their collection and facilities were protected under law. Chang Cheng-lin (2012) sees this law as representing the rise of subjectivity in China’s art museums. In all, the cultural milieu in the 1980s was relatively relaxed, but was characterized by alternating periods of openness and restriction, notably the Campaigns in 1983 against ‘spiritual pollution’ and in 1986 against ‘bourgeois liberalization’.20 New cultural concepts and the official ideology of modernization coexisted right until the ‘China/Avant-Garde Exhibition’ at the NAMOC in 1989. The exhibition curated by a group of Chinese critics led by Gao Minglu and Li Xianting, was an attempt to gain official acceptance for experimental art. This co-operation between avant-gardes and the state, and between unofficial and official curators, ended before the June Fourth Incident occurred. The exhibition represented ‘the conclusion of an era and also the end of the ideals’21 of the 1980s avant-garde art. Following the suppression of the 1989 Democracy Movement, the avant-garde art movement came to a halt and the arts system was restructured, while diatribes in the official press against bourgeois liberalism and New Wave Art continued. NAMOC closed its doors for renovation and reopened in September 1991. The art discourse moved in an officially approved direction, again depicting revolutionary and pre-revolutionary heroes (Clark 2010a, 77-87). The nascent development of private art museums in the 1990s As noted, in the aftermath of the June Fourth Incident, the art world retreated abruptly. The June Fourth Incident was soon followed by a nationwide rush towards the market after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 inspection of South China. The 1990s witnessed the development of a nascent market for Chinese art, 20 For details, see Kraus (2004, 18-19). 21 This was a quote from Li Xianting, cited by DeBevoise (2014, 195). DeBevoise (2014) defined the 1989 ‘Modern Art Exhibition’ as a watershed, marking ‘the f inal demonstration of 80s avant-garde art’. Köppel-Yang (2003) viewed it as ‘the summit and the finale of the New Wave’. To Barmé (1999, 214), the 1989 ‘Modern Art Exhibition’ and the June Fourth Beijing massacre are convenient markers for the end of the artistic-historical trajectory that had supported the ideas and practices of the new enlightenment and other cultural developments since the late 1970s, a period which was marked by discoveries, innovations, and efforts to catch up with East Asia and the West in terms of cultural experimentation.

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as well as the creation of new networks for exhibitions home and abroad. This process involved official and non-official critics, curators, and artists – personnel this study would call as museum intermediaries. These individuals sought new modes of expression in international exhibitions, veering away from formalist exploration towards contemporary subjects in people’s daily lives, employing strategies for resisting cultural authority and for dealing with global cultural politics. At home, the state continued to monitor artistic expression and to place public exhibitions under its purview. However, along with the rapid growth of the market economy, China had witnessed the nascent development of private art museums. In the early 1990s, the international market for Chinese art was accelerating. According to DeBevoise (2014, 220-228), early institutional attempts to create a domestic market for experimental Chinese art included the launch of the new magazine Yishu shichang (Art Market) and the Guangzhou Biennial Art Fair of 1992, initiated by the critic and curator Lü Peng. The 1993 exhibition China’s New Art, Post-1989 significantly moved contemporary Chinese art offshore and into an international critical and commercial arena.22 After 1993, experimental art from China began to appear more frequently in auctions or galleries in the West and affluent parts of Asia and in significant overseas exhibitions.23 Driven by both the marketization and internationalization of art, new actors, notably local ‘critic-entrepreneurs’ and a new generation of young artists, emerged. As Geremie Barmé (1999, 217) observes, serving as the gatekeepers of aesthetic taste and the arbiters of the new cultural canons, the critics were ‘going out of the closet of dissent and announcing their presence as middlemen who could guide and inform the taste of the collector-as-investor’.24 In addition, he notes that the 22 The overseas exhibition showcased works by China’s leading young, semi-official artists, including pieces from the fallen art group ‘Stars’, the political parody paintings by Liu Dahong and Wang Guangyi, the disturbing urban people scapes of Liu Wei, Fang Dahong, and others, and a range of abstract, conceptual, and installation art. See DeBevoise (2014, 258-267). To Barmé (1999, 218), the exhibition made the commonwealth of cultural exchanges with Hong Kong and Taiwan possible. 23 These exhibitions included the 1993 ‘Silent Energy’ in Oxford, England; the 1998 ‘Inside Out: New Chinese Art’ at the Asia Society, New York; the 1999 ‘Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century’ at the Smart Museum in Chicago; and the 1994 and 1999 Venice Biennales. However, the 1990s was also a time when experimental art was often displayed in do-it-yourself venues and private residences; hence, Gao Minglu’s term ‘Apartment Art’. See DeBevoise (2010). 24 Barmé (1999) refers to them as a group of young critics, which included Lü Peng (he later abandoned art in favour of real estate), who created domestic market awareness and organized art fairs to help Chinese cultural products ‘compete’ in the international art market. Nevertheless, Lü Peng is also an art scholar. He is the author of essential books on contemporary Chinese art.

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young artists who were born after the mid-1970s had no direct experience of history before 1978 and were exposed to global influences. As Clark (2010b, 100-105) notes, their production became more oriented to personal artistic sensitivity and to plurality in artistic issues than to the canonical doctrines of art. They tended to distance themselves from formalist exploration and came to experience a reflexive relationship with life. Towards the end of the 1990s, there was increasing specialization of artists, a more nichemarket orientation of art publications, and diversity in the circulation of art information (ibid., 188-192). As such, art discourses and practices had clearly moved away from national or Maoist revolution and towards the structures and ideologies of economic and cultural developmentalism, where economic surplus allowed certain types of cultural expression, particularly that which was projected on an international stage. As Peggy Wang (2010) notes, the critical responses of artists, critics, and curators expressed in the exhibition practices of the international art world were implicated in strategies of cultural resistance, and struggles over cultural authority and issues of global geopolitics contributed to the creation of a plurality of disparate understandings of contemporary art in the 1990s. Although the overall official arts administrative structure remained unchanged in the 1990s, the state was not able to maintain a unitary art system. Non-official art activities were run in loosely affiliated circles, involving academicians, paid critics, and artist-curators (Clark 2010b, 7679). Experimental or contemporary art had no place in state institutions until 1996 when the first Shanghai Biennale was held in the Shanghai Art Museum. The state continued to exercise censorship over the artists and the institutions of Chinese contemporary art. The government censored the types of art and exhibition that it deemed subversive.25 Performance and installation art were officially barred from exhibitions in the NAMOC. The shutting down of exhibitions happened occasionally just before or just after they opened (Clark 2010b, 76). With increasing participation of Chinese entrepreneurs and art stakeholders following the rise of the art market, the museum transformation of the 1990s was focused on the private sector. Private art museums were founded either by devoted artists or by real estate companies. The private modern art museum in Beijing, the Yan Huang Art Gallery, was established by the celebrated Chinese painter Huang Zhou and other artists, in 1991. It mainly collected and displayed Chinese paintings created prior to 1980. Other private museums, such as the Chengdu 25 The official censorship over the production of Chinese contemporary art occurred in three ways: stylistic, moral, and political (Si 2012).

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Shanghe Art Museum, the Chengdu Dongyu Art Museum in Shenyang, and the Teda Contemporary Art Museum in Tianjin, were founded by realtors. They opened in 1998 but only survived for a few years. Museums in the twenty-first century Entering the twenty-first century, China had undergone drastic changes, with an accelerating art market and the proliferation of private art museums. The state embarked on ambitious building projects connected with museums and other cultural facilities, and employed contemporary art either for diplomatic purposes or for demonstrating soft power nationally. Official exhibition spaces were transformed at both local and global levels and independent curators were included in the process of negotiation and collaboration over exhibition practices. In addition, along with rapid urbanization and cultural industrialization, members of the urban middle class became cultural consumers and began to reveal their ideological struggles. The art museum became a civic icon of city development. Cultural scholars extended museology from the domain of technical conservation to the exploration of the role of art museums in society. In the new century, as Lü Peng (2012, 21-22) observes, instead of becoming a pluralist society, China encountered social ‘rupturing’, a condition in which different social modes coexisted in complex arrangements with each other. The art system experienced the diversification of artistic practices and discourses, a multiplication of positions in critical circles; there was a chaotic confusion of values, and a multilayering of stances, viewpoints, and tactics. One of the significant changes was the separation of the leading art-educational institutions from MOC in 2000. This institutional reform allowed a greater scope in reformulating the old Soviet educational models and a measure of autonomy in art forms and technical practices for the production of art objects (Clark 2010b, 160-161). In the same year, the 3rd Shanghai Biennale, curated by the prominent France-based Chinese curator Hou Hanru, unprecedentedly involved both Chinese and non-Chinese artists and curators. The show reflected the impact of globalization on China’s art world and indicated the official legitimation of international platforms for art exchange.26 The Biennale was also held to coincide with the controversial ‘Fuck Off’ exhibition and the so-called ‘satellite’ exhibitions 26 In an interview, the curator of the biennale, Hou Hanru, remarked that the show was a political mission but not in terms of ideology. To him, it was attempting to convince people that contemporary art is not dangerous or purely oppositional (Chen X. 2010).

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organized by independent curators and nongovernment galleries. Different reactions to the Biennale contributed to the event’s complex meaning, making it a ‘historical event’, open to multiple interpretations (Wu 2001, 276). In the south of China, the Guangdong Museum of Art initiated the Guangzhou Triennial with its f irst edition in 2002. The f irst three editions discussed cultural topics and contributed to the construction of an academic-art historical narrative in China.27 By 2000, spaces that exhibited contemporary art had been diversified. They included national and municipal galleries, academy-affiliated galleries, exhibition halls, art galleries, commercial spaces, and other temporary sites. Official exhibition spaces were transformed through the efforts of independent curators, incorporating experimental art through delicate negotiation and frequent compromises (ibid., 163-167). A high tide of international display of Chinese art ensued, especially when the first official China pavilion was established at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. Meanwhile, the global art market for Chinese art was expanding. From mid-2003 to 2004, prices on the Chinese modern art market soared sharply, breaking records for prices for twentieth-century landscape and ink paintings. In 2011, China displaced the United States as the world’s largest art market. The rapidly growing market led to the rise of private collectors of Chinese art as major figures in the art scene.28 Super-rich collectors, together with realtors and other commercial enterprises, contributed to the second wave of development of private art museums. From 2002 onwards, more than ten private museums were established, such as the Today Art Museum in Beijing, the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, and the Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing. In 2007, the first foreign-funded private 27 The first edition, entitled ‘Reinterpretation: A decade of experimental Chinese art’, presented a historical review and academic interpretation of experimental Chinese art since the 1990s. The second edition in 2005 titled ‘BEYOND: An extraordinary space of experimentation for modernization’ established the Guangzhou Triennial as a regularly held international art event curated by both foreigners and locals. The Third Guangzhou Triennial in 2008, titled ‘Farewell to Post-colonialism’ also indicated a critical vision founded on a theoretical basis. 28 According to the report ‘The Art Market in 2014’ (102-104), ‘Chinese painting and calligraphy’ and ‘oil painting and contemporary art’ were the two major categories at public art auctions in China. The modern calligraphy and painting market segment had the highest record for sales. The trade in contemporary works was falling, but there were signs of revitalization with the entry of new young artists and collectors. In addition, the proportion of moderately short-term investments was as high as 80%, illustrating that collectors of Chinese art prefer high-risk and high-return investments (ibid., 146). Nevertheless, there was a new circuit of Chinese collectors of contemporary art, such as Guan Yi, whose interest was driven by intellectual curiosity about contemporary art. See Zhang (2009, 42-51).

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contemporary art museum, the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art,29 was founded in Beijing’s 798 Art Zone. It was followed by the Iberia Centre for Contemporary Art (2008) and the Rockbund Art Museum (2010). In 2014, the bank-led Minsheng Art Museum, the Yuz Museum, and the largest private museum, the Long Museum West Bund, were founded in Shanghai. Led by super-rich collectors, the latter two museums run marketing strategies for boosting their reputations (Kiowski 2017) and serve as unique cases for discussing the institutional ambition of achieving globally favoured aesthetic standards that are linked to the availability of local resources and expertise (Zennaro 2017). Meanwhile, in the South of China, the Guangdong Times Museum, founded in 2010, adopted a new curatorial approach, namely the use of institutional critique as a way to explore anew the relationship between artists, curators, artworks, museums, and the public (Nigris 2017). According to Larry’s List (2016), China, with 26 private art museums, is ranked fourth in the world for the total number of private art museums. We can argue that the state has used contemporary art to display its soft power and to construct a global identity at home and abroad. The first state-run contemporary art museum, the Power Station of Art, was founded in Shanghai in 2012. Jeffrey Johnson (2013) states that contemporary art museums are concentrated in major first-tier cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, as well as in other cities, such as Chengdu and Shenzhen. Chengdu ranked first for contemporary art museums per capita, Shenzhen ranked third behind Hong Kong and Ordos for art museums against per capita GDP. Along with these new establishments, new regulations were issued to further institutionalize museums.30 Local governments were given the power to monitor contemporary art exhibitions based on rules that were subject to their own interpretation. Operating within these fluid boundaries, Chinese artists responded by testing the patience of officialdom (Yao 2015, 973). With decreasing censorship (at that time), Chang Cheng-lin (2012) notes that public art museums tended to negotiate with the stakeholders about exhibitions and shifted to a system combining exhibitions, research, collection, and public education. He holds that after 2000, the political censorship of exhibitions had shifted from severe suppression to a relatively flexible model based on power negotiation. As Yao Yungwen (2015) argues, 29 The Centre founded by mega-collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens was bought by a group of prominent Chinese investors in 2017, and registered as a foundation to attract new donors for their financial support. 30 This included regulations issued by MOC on museum management (in 2005), and the museum grading system, and the policy of free museum admission (both implemented in 2008) (Lu 2014, 197 and 206).

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despite the contested meanings created by curators and artists, alternative discourses were ultimately formed by being co-opted as an integral part of China’s soft power strategy, and were used for articulating the country’s national image both internally and externally. In addition to the cultural-political role played by the state in founding art museums, the urban middle class performed an important role in configuring museums as significant sites for cultural consumption. Since the economic reform, China has witnessed striking urban transformation and the rapid rise of modern cities. In addition to skyscrapers, central business districts, and apartment compounds, the cities accommodate ‘the full repertories, including galleries, museums, the concert hall, the theatre, and centres of other experiences’. Most recently, they have also included creative clusters in city-branding, and associated their name with cultural sophistication with the intention of attracting tourists and investment (Landry 2006, 143). These practices have reflected a marked shift from an ‘urban engineering’ approach that focuses on infrastructure building to a ‘creative city-making’ approach that is akin to a cultural industry (Landry 2008, xxii). Several cities in China joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, with Hangzhou and Jingdezhen being identified as cities of crafts and folk art, Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen as cities of design, and Chengdu and Shunde as cities of gastronomy. On the other hand, China’s urban focus has shifted away from coastal regions and towards the hinterland. Museums were built not only in Beijing and Shanghai but also in second- and third-tier cities, such as Xi’an, Nanjing, and Wuhan. Jeffrey Johnson (2013) regards this expansion as a means to define the civic identities of the new urban centres; museums with their iconic structures serve as the landmarks for these newly planned government and civic centres and districts as foci for commence and cultural industries. According to academic statistics, from 1991 to 2012, the total amount of cultural consumption rose – with rapid urban development – by 1606.94%. Urban areas accounted for 79% of this increase, while rural areas accounted for only 21%. The yearly growth rate was 18.12% in urban areas and 9.75% in rural areas (Wang 2015). It is commonly thought that the Chinese consumer market follows the path of linear evolution from a traditional culture towards a more Westernized consumer society. However, Unger and Barmé (1996, 159) argued in the 1990s that the Chinese middle class are unlike the members of the Western middle class who are conscious about their lifestyles and attempt to adopt a set of unique cultural values, but the Chinese members are caught in a dilemma between choosing capitalism and consumerism on the one hand, and celebrating Chinese exceptionalism and national pride on

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the other. As such, as Unger and Barmé hold (ibid.), the rise of consumerism and materialistic pursuits among many educated middle-class Chinese has created a moment of cultural influx in which the very meaning of Chineseness is being called into question. At the same time, as China re-emerged as a country of economic and political power in recent decades, there was a growing cultural renaissance that Chinese people increasingly demanded traditional cultural components be part of their consumption experiences (Cheng and Lin 2009). In 2014, national expenditure on cultural enterprises continued to expand.31 Wang Jing (2001) argues that the socialist state was busy reinventing the construct of the public by claiming it as a space open and accessible to all, and de facto opening it up to consumer goods and officially endorsed leisure culture. Nevertheless, Chinese people began to believe that the purpose of leisure consumption is not only for recreation or enjoyment but also for self-development and improving one’s quality of life and ability (Yin 2005, 176). It thus became inevitable that contemporary art museums would reflect on the public they serve and respond to the volatile changes in cultural consumption occurring in society. In addition, art museums sparked active discussion in local journals and the press. Art museology columns and journals were found in some major art museums and universities. The most established of these is the Zhongguo meishuguan (National Art Museums of China Journal), first published in 2005. In addition to the criticism directed at the simultaneous burgeoning and underdevelopment of art museum operations and management,32 progressive art academics and cultural critics have propagated the idea of the development of the relationship between art museums and knowledge production (Wang H. 2012), and between art and society. They also led the 31 In 2014, the total amount of national expenditure for cultural undertakings increased by 10% compared to the previous year. However, the eastern region (Beijing, Tianjin, Liaoning Province, Shanghai, Jiangsu Province, Fujian Province, Shandong Province, and Guangdong Province) accounted for more of this than the western and central regions, making up 40% of these cultural expenses. The national cultural enterprise is also expanding in various domains, including public libraries, public activities, community cultural institutions, performing art troupes, cultural industry projects, the cultural markets of the Internet and entertainment, cultural heritage institutions and safeguarding services, and national financial investment in culture. For details, see the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China (2014, 18 and 29). 32 Johnson (2013) has observed that Chinese art museums were criticized for being politically motivated ‘vanity’ projects as they maintained no established collections, curatorial mission, and leadership. In addition, many museums lack adequate long-term planning and funding, which hinders their ability to maintain operations and achieve their missions and curatorial goals.

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effort to write the history of art museums. Li Wanwan’s book, Meishuguan de lishi (History of Art Museums in China) (2016) is a remarkable example. Li studies the history of the Chinese art museums from 1840-1949 as a modern-state discourse, based on extensive historical documents. Li is at pains to explain why art museums emerged in China and how they have been developed during the period. He took more than ten years to complete the volume. It covers the Chinese histories of art collecting, expositions, and international exhibitions, the earliest conceptions and forms of museums, art education and exhibitions, national/municipal museum organizations and management, and the museum development during the Sino-Japanese War. Akin to grand narrative (written as a national publication project), though little is known about the history of museums under the rule of CPC, it adopts an approach more extensive and systematic than any previous literature on the history of Chinese art museums. In this section, we can observe overall that by virtue of being embedded in the complex processes of a changing state and society, art museums in China are no longer a unitary space for art display. With increasingly prominent roles in producing knowledge and shaping the cultural lives of urbanites, these museums have become highly visible players in the cultural politics of contemporary China that deserve closer scrutiny.

2.3

The changing museum contexts in Hong Kong (1962-current)

The history of Hong Kong museums is closely tied with the city’s colonial history, differentiating it from the other cities examined in this book, even though Hong Kong is increasingly affected by trends in the art museum culture of the rest of China. Hong Kong’s museum history can be traced back to 1869 when a museum-like exhibition hall in the old City Hall displayed a repository of ‘odds and ends from every corner of the globe’. The collection contained Australian parrots, mineralogical specimens from Wales, old clocks, etc. (Huang 2007, 71-72). The Hall was demolished in 1933. In 1962, the colonial government finished rebuilding the present City Hall as a new cultural civic centre in the city centre. The City Museum and Art Gallery, which combined the presentation of art and history exhibits, was opened in the newly built City Hall in the same year. Like other cultural facilities, the Gallery was managed by the Urban Services Council. In 1973, the Council was granted independent budget authority and supervisory power to carry out its own policies. It set up the Museums Select Committee as a decision-making

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body in which unofficially appointed and elected members worked hand in hand to develop museum services for Hong Kong (Tang 2007, 43). In 1975, the Gallery was split into the Hong Kong Museum of History and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Both moved to their present location in the city’s central tourist area of Tsim Sha Tsui in the 1990s. Meanwhile, in the early 1990s, the government had started plans for developing new museums, some of which were opened after 1997.33 Closer to the 1997 Handover and following the government’s policy of turning Hong Kong into an autonomous city-state (Chin 2008, 85), the Councils that managed museums (urban councils and regional councils) became more democratized with an increasing number of members elected by universal suffrage. After the Handover, the new Hong Kong government took back all cultural and financial resources from the municipal councils by officially dissolving them in 2001. A new department, the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) (under the Home Affairs Bureau), was set up to centralize the management of museums, public libraries, and other facilities, including sports and recreation. Since the early 2000s, the museum has been managed by civil servants who are ostensibly obliged to maintain political neutrality. In 2002, the government started to run the Principal Officials Accountability System in which non-civil servants were appointed by the Chief Executive to lead departments and bureaus, including the Home Affairs Bureau (Tang 2007, 48). However, the appointments that followed continued to be entirely subject to the government. The system allows limited societal representation, triggering ongoing criticism from local art and cultural communities directed at the government’s cultural policy and its museum management. The government has responded by forming study committees and establishing consultation sessions, issuing reports, and proposing recommendations for museum policy improvement. In 2007, the government initiated a study to assess the feasibility of museum privatization, but the plan was aborted after a new Secretary of the Home Affairs Bureau was appointed (ibid., 46-52). Since then, the government has established advisory committees and appointed members for giving advice on the development of public museums. The appointment system ensured that the government could handpick its own advisors and co-opt them into the official system. Overall, the transition of management from urban councils to LCSD was meant to maintain the Hong Kong authorities’ 33 A notable example was the Museum of coastal defence whose plan was devised by the former Urban Council in 1993 to conserve and develop the Lei Yue Mun Fort. The Museum was opened to the public on 25 July 2000.

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governance in the art and cultural sectors and to strengthen the government’s control in the representation of culture and the production of the public. This new mode of cultural governance demonstrated that the newly established Special Administrative Government not only asserted its political legitimacy but that it also reclaimed the territory of culture. In actual practice, the official museum sector in Hong Kong has undergone few expansions in the postcolonial period. The major addition was the Dr Sun Yat-sen Museum which was opened in 2006, in commemoration of the 140th birthday of the influential Chinese statesman. In a similar vein, the Hong Kong Museum of History made efforts to construct a national narrative for postcolonial Hong Kong (Stokes-Rees 2011, 340), albeit in ways that were more controversial than in the museums in mainland China especially with reference to representing the 1989 Student Movement (Vickers 2007). Another big move in the city was the construction of the West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD). The plan for this District was announced in 2005 by the then Chief Executive Mr Tung Chee-hwa as a strategic project for developing cultural and creative industries in Hong Kong. The project sparked intense debate and went through a series of locally driven consultation processes before resulting in a final plan, which is scheduled to be completed in 2020. The visual culture museum M+, as part of the project, has begun holding temporary exhibitions in a pavilion at the project site. On the one hand, the project ‘did bring about challenges to the relatively static museum ecology. It is against this background that the museums start to use their collections in many different ways to connect with the community and even with the world’ (Siu 2010). On the other hand, the nature of the relationship between a global museum and local people remains an issue of significant debate. The WKCD project is underway, and its practice has been under continuous scrutiny. Public attention has focused on M+’s acquisitions of Chinese contemporary art from a famous Swiss collector, Uli Sigg, and of the complete body of work of the digital artist duo YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. In addition, the museum’s intensive involvement of foreign expatriates might be an issue, similar to the case in Qatar, where the practices of foreign expatriates have been interrogated and deemed to be unconstructive for local audiences (Exell 2016). In addition to government-led projects, the high profile international gallery openings and art auctions taking place alongside the annual art fair have brought a hype and frenzy unlike anything seen before in the city. In particular, the conversion of the Hong Kong International Art Fair into Art Basel Hong Kong, through a purchase agreement between Basel and Hong Kong, has elevated the position of Hong Kong in the world art market. With

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the debut of Art Basel in 2013, Hong Kong has become the third largest art market in the world and an important gateway to Asia for international art investors, following Basel in the heart of Europe and Miami Beach as the nexus of North and South America. With unprecedented growth in the art market, local and global attention frequently centres on spectacular artworks and record-breaking art sales, wherever these occur. At the same time, the commercial global art fairs have managed to incorporate seminars, guided tours, and educational programmes to constitute seemingly full-fledged museum events, keeping up with the wider functions of museums seen in other international contexts. Behind the ‘global’ canvas, the ‘great art leap’ in Hong Kong is the possibility of Hong Kong art institutions being charged with denying the local. The WKCD has been viewed as a project for branding a global city without a sense of the ‘local’ (Ku and Tsui 2008, 344). The larger art world, as the local critic Lau Kin-wah (2014) has argued, is finally catching up with the city’s capitalistic ‘collaborative colonisation’,34 and a gap exists between the global art world players holding key positions and the local context. This has given rise to critical debates over ‘the local’ and Hong Kong’s cultural identity framed against the background of the crisis of ‘mainlandization’. As Vigneron (2017) questions, how can a government-funded institution cope with Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of visual culture being an intellectual site where powers must be questioned and criticized, especially at a time of political unrest in Hong Kong? With the government’s recent abrupt announcement of a plan to build a branch of Beijing’s Palace Museum in the WKCD, the potential of the project for emancipating the public from political entanglement with the powerful Chinese central government has been further discredited. Nevertheless, in this postcolonial city, local citizens, from their ad hoc reaction to heritage preservation issues to their conscious and deliberate initiation of social activism,35 have engaged in many types of political action, action that reached its height in the Umbrella Movement of 2014. The civil 34 The concept is raised by Law Wing-sang (2009), who examines colonial rule not simply as a political force but as an elaborate network of cultural relations. He argues that, from the early colonial era, power was extensively shared between the colonizers and the Chinese who chose to work with them. 35 Janet Ng’s (2009) study of the city space of Hong Kong, finds that even the state inculcates capitalist as well as nationalist ideologies in the everyday life in Hong Kong. There are however direct and conscious interventions against the manipulations of the state, including a number of grassroots and popular movements ranging from labour cooperatives to alternative currency programmes.

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society-led movement broke out principally in response to the decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China to renege on its promise of universal suffrage in the election of the Chief Executive of the HKSAR in 2017. The protest movement ended without any sign of resolution and the citizens were forced to give up the street sites, which they had occupied for seventy-nine days. In this movement, in addition to political advocacy, citizens advanced the role of museological, art, and creative practices in social activism and expanded their claims of citizenship in the cultural sphere (Wong 2017; Sebastian 2017; Wong and Liu 2018; Ho and Ting 2019). More recently (since June 2019), citizens have launched a massive movement against an extradition bill that would allow the transfer of criminal suspects to jurisdictions with which the city does not have fugitive agreements, including mainland China. In this stronger civil society context, the role of civic agents and their capabilities for expressing their values and identities in the public domain should not be underestimated. In addition, we should not limit our imagination of the cultural consumption/ participation in the city merely to the question of the pleasure or the added value of art in economic exchange, or to its appropriation by hegemonic official museums (which tend to be linked to national and global capital). Hong Kong museums deserve further interrogation with regard to their relations to local citizens’ realities and their social struggles.

2.4

Concluding remarks

Museums in China have developed through different stages, changing in connection with the transformation of the Chinese state since the imperial era. These stages include the Republican era in the early twentieth century, the revolutionary communist era between 1949 and 1976, and the present era of modernizing socialism with a market economy. These different stages in museum development are reflections of various changes in the ideologies of the state, starting with early national modernization, followed by communist Marxist-Leninism, and then by the transition to socialist modernity based on ideologies of cultural nationalism, social modernization, and economic liberation. The Chinese museum enterprise started in the late Qing, with early displays of natural history and science. Under the Kuomintang republican regime (1927-1949), the role of museums was extended to cover the history and art of the country and was designed to serve the project of modernizing the nation and society. The art museum emerged as part of a social effort to build a modern nation, reflecting the ideas on aesthetic

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education of the leading intellectuals and social elites. During the Maoist regime (1949-1979), all museums were entirely state-owned and highly instrumentalized, being directed to represent the communist cultural inheritance and the party’s political ideals. The dramatic development of China since the 1980s has shifted away from communist modernism to the future-oriented paradigm of economic and material progress. The transformation of China’s post-1980s art world depends on the interaction of the state and the market, or on the hybrid space developing between the state and the market, with relative independence and alternative production having become possible. The diversified museum field, especially in art, has oscillated between following the state’s cultural diplomacy and industrial policy and following the market. In particular, the development of museums has been complicated by global influence, and by internal urbanization, city-making, and the cultural consumption needs of the middle class. In addition, art museology has experienced a shift from the archaeological preservation of art objects or cultural relics, to an academic museology that is not only focused on the construction of art history but also on the idea of the museum as a tool for serving society. This expanding cultural sphere, and the question of how it penetrates society through engagement with political and economic forces, should not be overlooked. In addition, after 1997, China resumed its political sovereignty and strengthened its cultural governance over Hong Kong. The government-led museums in Hong Kong have been drawn both to nationalism and globalism, but in terms of broader social and cultural development, these museums are also undergoing changes in the face of pressures from the robust Hong Kong art industry and the challenges from activist civil society. Local activists and their capabilities in advancing alternative museological practices and representing themselves in the public domain deserve critical attention. Self-designing their own identities, or even using cultural approaches for altering society, these local activists question the museum’s efficacy in serving the public. Overall, this chapter has provided a detailed background for understanding the historical changes in the conceptualization and contextualization of art museums in mainland China and Hong Kong. It has offered a historical, contextual understanding of the country’s process of art musealization, while suggesting that empirical studies of art museums are a way to analyse diverse museal processes and their relation to society. The emergence of new social actors in the Chinese museum field means that research on their practices and differences is necessary: this is what is undertaken in the following chapters, where I use the museum circuit framework to analyse the three different museums that are the focus of my empirical research.

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3.

He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen Abstract This chapter explicates the museum circuit of the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen as a process of interplay between the state’s political and cultural-economic agents, the museum’s curators and academic stakeholders, and the migrant educated elites. The museum’s intermediaries play a role in negotiating meaning at the interface of expertise and official discourse, and they arguably act as reflexive producers, contributing to a public sphere that has links to Habermasian ‘communicative rationality’. Besides, visitors can be categorized into six distinct identities, and they display limited alignment with the state interest in Chineseness or political patriotism. The study reflects on the national museum’s contingent institutional framework, the ideological dilemma driven by its curatorial activities, and the rise of a middle-class museum public. Keywords: national museum, cultural politics, curatorial approaches and strategies, public sphere, Chinese middle-class

The He Xiangning Art Museum is the second national art museum after the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), and the first national art gallery named after an individual. The background of the museum is complicated, as it has a political entity regulating it. Unlike the NAMOC which is directly administered by the Ministry of Culture of the central government, the museum is officially governed by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council and managed by the Overseas Chinese Town Group, a state-owned enterprise headquartered in Shenzhen. It was established in 1997 (the year of the handover of the sovereignty of Hong Kong from Britain to China) on a historical memorial site connected with the Chinese Communist Party and located in Shenzhen, an experimental economy-focused city

Ho, S.C.F., Museum Processes in China: The Institutional Regulation, Production, and Consumption of the Art Museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi: 10.5117/9789463723527_ch03

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Illustration 3.1  The exterior of the He Xiangning Art Museum

Photo by the author

bordering Hong Kong and accommodating a massive migrant population from across China. Founded in a distinctive city, the museum constitutes a unique case that reflects the state’s new national agenda of co-opting cultural-academic elites and nurturing a middle-class museum public in a Chinese society that is rapidly changing. The museum primarily aims to support the collecting, exhibiting, and researching of the art of He Xiangning (1878-1972), and also includes artworks by outstanding Chinese contemporary artists, overseas Chinese artists, women artists, and emerging young artists. The museum has sought to promote the art of He Xiangning, Chinese contemporary art and contemporary art exchanges between China and the rest of the world. It is endeavouring to create a new museum model that it believes will have a great impact on China’s art world, academia, and society, and which it hopes will also come to influence the international world of art museums.1 The main collection of He Xiangning’s works has been built up by purchase or donation from He Xiangning’s successors, friends, and collectors. Her ink paintings2 are 1 Webpage of He Xiangning Art Museum, ‘Introduce’, www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?Modul eNo=00&SubModuleNo=02, accessed 20 December 2018. 2 He Xiangning was one of the earliest Chinese students to study in Japan. She entered a Tokyo art school where she learned painting from the Japanese imperial artist named Tanaka.

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displayed in the central exhibition halls on the lower floor. In addition, around 4003 contemporary artworks have been collected through donation and designated donation following exhibitions. The remaining halls on both lower and upper floors are used for exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art. This chapter will f irstly look into the institutional regulation of He Xiangning Art Museum, with a particular concern for the state’s governing mechanisms and their representations, and with the museum’s organizational structure and network. Promoted by party officials and state-affiliated capitalists, the museum can be seen as representing the political legitimacy of communist rule in the post-Maoist period and the cultural nationalism pertinent to a national identity held to be shaped by common cultural traditions and language. In addition, it represents the economic and social modernity of the Communist party-nation that has been heralded since the start of the economic reform. Managed by a state-owned enterprise, the museum has been used to conjure up an image of quality urban life, and to realize the state’s plans for marketing the cultural industry and city-branding in Shenzhen, as well as for entertaining and civilizing citizens. However, the museum is not limited to the function of serving politics and the state-led market and social plan. It has provided leeway for the cultural sphere to be vibrant, and form its own discursive space, one that is shared by museum curators and art academicians. The peculiar institutional arrangement is an important factor to explain the increasing role of museum intermediaries in mediating the production of meaning by the state in China. Secondly, this chapter explores the scope of the agency of the museum intermediaries within the institutional frameworks that affect their acts of cultural production. Section 3.2 to 3.4 respectively explicate the exhibition approaches to art that are employed in the He Xiangning museum and the curatorial approaches and strategies in the ‘Cross-strait Four Regions Artistic Exchange Project’ and the ‘Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition’. These sections are devoted to depicting an emerging cultural-led public sphere, and the increasing role of museum intermediaries in negotiating meaning at the interface of expertise and official discourse. In their cultural production, undertaken facing the state’s aesthetic patriotism and claims for cultural diplomacy in the Greater China and ‘city development’, the museum’s curators and academic stakeholders work Her ink painting was later influenced by the Lingnan School of Painting, a modern school of Chinese brush painting, led by Chen Shuren and her teacher, Gao Jianfu. 3 The figure was given during my interview with the Art Director of the museum, Feng Boyi on 27 January 2016, in Shenzhen.

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together to rationalize the national art narrative, adopt a dialogic approach to contemporary art, imbued with wider discussion on the relationship between art and society. I will demonstrate how politics are interwoven with this emerging cultural sphere, and how the contested nature of the nation is driven by curatorial activity. For the state, the museum serves as a site for the national redefinition of modern and contemporary Chinese and global art, shaping the museum public to become nationalist or/and rational citizens. To diverge from this instrumental thinking about culture and the homogenous ideas about identity and the public related to it, the final section 3.5 considers visitors’ interpretations of their own experiences and seeks to explore their different museum visiting orientations. It finds that the urban educated middle class forms the core category of museum visitors. These visitors are mainly residents of Shenzhen who moved to the city from other provinces. They can be divided into six main audience categories: ‘culturalists’, ‘utilitarian art learners’, ‘lifestyle/leisure consumers’, ‘revolutionary history enthusiasts’, ‘social learners’, and ‘aesthetic cosmopolitans’. The first four visitor segments adopt an adaptive or integrative strand in accepting and decoding what is offered by the museum, while the last two segments are more inclined to a ‘negotiated position’, in which opinions vary according to individual interests and cultural experiences. Overall, the visitor study reveals that the visitors, although being treated as spectators or receivers of the museum’s messages, value and interpret their visits differently, and appear to demonstrate limited identification with state-planned nationalism. This chapter concludes with a summary focusing on the museum’s efforts to shape a national culture (a national culture which is contested) and to accommodate a cultural sphere. The study acknowledges and analyses the role of museum intermediaries in mediating the meaning production by the state, and reveals how the claims made by the state have been contested through their cultural agencies. In addition, it reflects on the rise of a middle-class museum public in mainland China, and emphasizes the issues of cultural inclusivity and exclusivity in a socially stratified city.

3.1

Between the state and the market: a contingent national museum framework

The He Xiangning Art Museum is off icially governed by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO) of the State Council and managed by the Overseas Chinese Town Group (OCT). The OCAO is an off ice directly

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under the highest administration for handling affairs related to overseas Chinese. It bears responsibility for increasing cooperation and exchange between overseas Chinese and China in economic, scientific, cultural, and educational affairs. The first question to address is why a national museum devoted to He Xiangning is governed by the OCAO and located in Shenzhen. The peculiar institutional arrangement can be explained by the museum’s organizational history. In the early twentieth century, He Xiangning and her husband, Liao Zhongkai, were amongst the group of revolutionaries who sought to overthrow the Qing Dynasty in China. After her husband was assassinated, He Xiangning became an important leader of the leftist wing of the Kuomintang (KMT). After the defeat of the KMT in 1949, she stayed in Beijing to serve the Communist regime. When the OCAO’s predecessor, the Committee of Overseas Chinese Affairs, was established in 1949, He Xiangning served as its first head and remained in office until 1959. Her son, Liao Chengzhi, also a leading Communist, took over the position until the office was abolished in 1970 during the Cultural Revolution. He resumed the position in the OCAO in 1978, where he stayed until 1983. His son, Liao Hui, also joined the OCAO in the same year and was promoted to the position of director in 1984. He remained in office until August 1997 before being transferred to the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office. Holding leading positions in the central government, 4 Liao Hui belonged to the princelings (taizidang), a term referring to the children of former high-ranking CPC officials, a group which has shaped important political factions in twentyfirst-century China (Bo 2007, 165-166). Liao’s family has thus been in charge of the work of overseas Chinese affairs since 1949. The hereditary succession of the OCAO leadership in line with party politics laid the foundation of the museum as a memorial to He Xiangning, with her grandson serving as a shadow museum ‘founder’. Under Liao Hui’s leadership, the OCAO sought approval from the central government to build the He Xiangning Art Museum at its present location, which was originally an area controlled by Liao Chengzhi. Against this highly political background, it is hard to view the art museum as a purely aesthetic project. Its national overtones are reflected in the use of a personal name for the museum, and its association with a revolutionary heroine. The museum serves to legitimize China’s revolutionary past and the continuing hegemony of its political elites. 4 Liao Hui had been a member of the Central Committee since 1985 and was elected ViceChairperson of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in 2008.

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On 18 April 1997, the museum was opened by then-Vice Premier of the State Council Qian Qichen. The three-storey museum building embraces simplicity and minimalism, with an exterior façade designed to evoke the aerial perspective techniques of Chinese landscape paintings. As a visible political endorsement, the name of the museum was personally inscribed on the façade by the then-President of the People’s Republic of China, Jiang Zemin. The museum’s main entrance is linked with a long elevated bridge from the street passing through a sunken garden, where water, plants, and a (stainless steel sculptural) stone5 are used to evoke the Chinese sense of retreat. A monumental tunic suit6 stands in the garden. Along the main bridge, it directs to the centre of the museum, where a courtyard-like area links to the ‘master’s’ memorial space and the exhibition halls of He Xiangning. The museum interior is a two-storey modern white cube, accommodating six gallery spaces, and ancillary functions including a reception counter, a bookshop, guest rooms, an activity room, and a seating area. The galleries are symmetrically and clearly divided, but they are well connected by wall windows that allow natural light to penetrate into the spaces. In the museum’s words, the architecture is elegant and solemn; it is able to reflect ‘a sense of modernity embedded in the rich traditional culture’ and ‘the characters He Xiangning had maintained throughout her life’.7 Its modern outlook is markedly different from the building of NAMOC which was embracing historical Chinese characteristics, national form and the new socialist spirit when it was completed in 1962 (Samuels and Samuels 1989; Zhu 2009, 107). Set against the background of Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 inspection of South China, the He Xiangning Art Museum was built to represent a new image that resonates with China’s drive to modernization and internationalism, with Shenzhen playing the leading role as China’s first special economic zone in modern reform and opening to the world. To begin with we can further ask if the museum’s institutional structure under the management of a state-owned enterprise has led to an altered meaning of state rule, given the increasing investment of the CPC in culturaleconomic industries in recent decades. The Overseas Chinese Town Group (OCT), the largest state enterprise of its kind, was established in 1985 within the purview of the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration 5 The sculpture was created by Chinese contemporary artist Zhan Wang, and collected by the museum in 2004. 6 The sculpture was created by Chinese contemporary artist Sui Jianguo, and collected by the museum in 1999. 7 Webpage of He Xiangning Art Museum, ‘Introduce’, www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?Modul eNo=00&SubModuleNo=02, accessed 20 December 2018.

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Commission of the State Council. Headquartered in Shenzhen with a business focus on tourism and associated cultural industries and properties, and on electronics, the enterprise has produced a series of large-scale cultural clusters, theme parks, and entertainment districts in Shenzhen and other major Chinese cities. In Shenzhen, the OCT first developed ‘Splendid China’ in 1989 and ‘Chinese Folk Culture Village’, ‘Window of the World’ and ‘Happy Valley’ in the 1990s. The three-storey He Xiangning Art Museum was built adjacent to two of these theme parks, which have created artificial and highly visible environments for supporting tourism and real estate development in the adjoining areas of Nanshan District, appearing to facilitate the exchange of cultures between China and the world in a surreal postmodern manner (Wu 2012). This is linked with how, in line with the national cultural industry development, Shenzhen has developed into ‘a city of culture’ since the early 2000s. In Nanshan District, where the museum is located, the surrounding built environment has changed significantly. Since its renovation in 2005, the OCT-owned Huaxia Art Centre has become a locus for the consumption of popular film, shows and performance troupes from China and abroad. In the same year, the OCT-owned Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT) renovated factories into a creative complex serving as both a locus for cultural production and a Soho-like site of cultural consumption. In 2008, another OCT property, the OCT Art & Design Gallery, the f irst design museum in China, was built just next to the He Xiangning Art Museum. With its proximity to several creative ‘cultural’ sites, Nanshan District has been a core development area of the OCT, focusing on lifestyle and cultural consumption. The exhibitions and activities of the Museum, together with other entertainment and festival events at other linked cultural sites, are regularly reported in the enterprise’s media and have become part of OCT’s branding system. In the public media, the museum was grouped together with other OCT museums in Beijing, Shanghai, Xian, and Wuhan as the largest museum chain brand in China, and has been shown as pushing forward the cultural tourism industry and the development of public welfare.8 With its spectacular and creative cultural businesses, the enterprise serves as a state tool for enhancing and marketing Chinese people’s quality of life by branding itself the ‘Creator of good urban life’.9 OCT’s role thus reflects 8 See ‘Guonei zuida meishuguan liansuo pinpai zheng shi xingcheng’ (Formation of the largest chain-brand art museums in China), Guiyang Daily, 14 May 2012. 9 See the logo of OCT on the front page of the company’s website, www.chinaoct.com/hqc/ index/index.html, accessed 29 December 2018.

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the state’s interest in cultural economics and creating an ideal image of life in urban China. In other words, domestically, the state uses the arts and their institutions as part of a project to beautify urban life and serve its developmental ideology. As a state-controlled mechanism, the media also plays an important role in regulating the public’s communication with the museum and shaping it as a place for entertaining and civilizing citizens. In China, media conglomerations have a profound impact on the circulation of signs and their interpretation. In Shenzhen, the mainstream media monopolized by the state has two tiers. The function of the first tier is to ‘publicize the Party’s policies, legitimize its mandate to rule, and contribute to the establishment of cultural and ideological hegemony’. The second media tier seeks ‘to entertain and inform readers through “soft” publications, as a way to contribute to the social construction of human relationships and knowledge’ (Lee, He, and Huang 2006). The national art museum can be seen as a topic for soft news that is given broad coverage in the state, academic, and private arts media. Although the museum uses social media such as weibo, wechat, and facebook for disseminating event news, these platforms do not function interactively. In addition to the ‘soft’ news about the museum and other entertainment industries that are put together in the OCT’s periodic newsletters, the state media limits itself to informing its customers/consumers that the arts are something relevant to lifestyle and leisure. Furthermore, the local media has continually affirmed the values and functions of the museum in civilizing citizens. For instance, their announcements invariably add a few lines reminding visitors to conserve the public environment of the museum and to follow the rules: smoking, eating, drinking, shouting, spitting, littering, and touching the art objects or related exhibition materials are not allowed. Visitors cannot bring any pets or flammable and explosive products inside, while people trying to enter the ‘elegant’ high art museum in sloppy clothes will be denied admittance.10 These rules are clearly stated on the museum’s official website11 and can also be commonly found in the ‘notices to visitors’ found in other state museums. There is no doubt that China’s museums have been historically performing a civilizing function just as Western museums have done in their own settings (Duncan 1995). These rules for behaviour illuminate the role of the museum as a cultural practice for transforming 10 For example, see ‘He Xiangning Meishuguan’, Southern Metropolis Daily, 15 October 2008, AT22. 11 See this webpage of He Xiangning Art Museum, ‘Notice to Visitors’ www.hxnart.com/main. aspx?ModuleNo=00&SubModuleNo=12, accessed 20 December 2018.

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the behaviour and conduct of a population and shaping the ideal form of urban citizenship in China’s societies today. In terms of organizational regulation, the He Xiangning Art Museum is unlike the NAMOC, where the Party Committee Office is stationed to undertake direct ideological supervision. From its inception to 2017, the museum was led by a small management team comprising the company’s chief manager, who served as the museum’s president, two senior corporation managers, and the museum’s executive director, who all served as vice-presidents. The museum has about twenty-two staff members divided between three departments: administration, curatorial affairs, and public relations. The curatorial department forms the core production team; it undertakes multiple functions in managing collections, and in organizing museum exhibitions and educational programmes. The museum is allowed to appoint its own curators and researchers and to work with a roster of external art experts. In 2005, an advisory committee was established by leading art critics, curators, scholars, and artists in modern and contemporary Chinese art, from home and abroad.12 In 2006, an eminent independent local curator in China, Fei Boyi, was appointed as the Art Director. Although programme ideas mainly came from the art director, his team members, Wang Dong and Philip Ngan ensured that curatorial opportunities were available to all members, and all ideas must follow a process of team discussion.13 Wang also commented that the museum has enjoyed greater autonomy in staff recruitment than other state museums, whose staff is recruited and assessed directly by the government. To Feng, the system does not provide the same clear professional identity as other state museums, however, it is relatively successful in securing funding from the OCT enterprise, and is subject to fewer ideological controls than the other national museum (which is run directly by the Ministry of Culture).14 From 1998 to 2005, the museum organized fifteen to thirty-two exhibitions each year. During this period, it collaborated with a wide range of organizations including companies, public and private museums, galleries, academics, embassies, local art associations, art centres, tourist organizations, and 12 With overseas Chinese art history scholar Wu Hung as their Chair, the first advisory committee members included the museum’s art director-cum-committee secretary Feng Boyi, the museum’s executive director Le Zhengwei, and other art historians, artists, curators, and art critics, such as Gao Minglu, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Wang Guangyi, Fei Dawei, Huang Zhuan, and Karen Smith. See Ren Kelei (2007, 245). 13 Interviews with curatorial staff, Wang Dong and Philip Ngan, respectively on 12 May 2015 and 31 July 2015, in Shenzhen. 14 Interview with art director Feng Boyi, 27 January 2016, Shenzhen.

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official cultural exchange bodies. A variety of temporary shows were organized, ranging from those which supported OCT’s branding project and the municipal government’s plan of creating the ‘City of Design’,15 to curatorial efforts to classify great works16 and to map the local art ecology.17 In 2005, the museum’s subdivision OCT Contemporary Art Terminal18 was built, offering additional space to showcase Chinese and international contemporary artwork. Since 2006 (the year when Feng was appointed as the Art Director of the museum), the He Xiangning Art Museum had shown a clearly defined direction for exhibition programming, by streamlining its programme to focus on six to thirteen yearly exhibitions. Notable exhibitions include the Shenzhen International Exhibition of Contemporary Sculpture, the Annual Exhibition of Painting Works from National Art Academies across China, and the Cross-strait Four Regions Artistic Exchange Project. Since 2011, the museum has granted free entry to the public, following the 2008 state policy of giving free public admission to all state museums. The museum’s public programmes are mainly lectures, seminars, and regular talks.19 These activities are held in conjunction with exhibitions and for the purpose of academic exchange, covering a wide range of topics related to arts and culture in both China and the West.20 Speakers are mainly art 15 For example, exhibitions relating to the beauty of OCT Town in pictures (1997), children’s imaginative depictions of ‘Happy Valley’ (1998), the works of the finalists in an art competition for the workers of OCT (1999), the OCT’s tourist festival (2000), the 125th Anniversary of Finland design (2004), and exhibitions relating to design elements in Chinese contemporary art (2005), and design works from local design institutes (2005). In 2014, the museum was also a member of the Shenzhen art and design alliance, a platform formed by organizations from the cultural industries, the art, education, and finance sectors, whose purpose was to promote the innovation and development of the Shenzhen art and design industry. 16 The museum has curated contemporary art exhibitions for individual Chinese established artists, for example, Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun, Xu Bing, Zhang Xiaogang, and Fang Lijun. 17 For example, the 2001 ‘Slang in the City: Contemporary Art in the Delta of Zhujiang River’ exhibition, the 2005 ‘Contemporary Art Ecology of Guangdong (1990-2005)’ exhibition cum seminar, and the 2015 ‘Spatial Ideology: Documenting Independent Spaces’ exhibition cum seminar. 18 In April 2012, OCAT was separated from He Xiangning Art Museum and registered as an independent non-profit organization. Under the sponsorship of the state-owned enterprise OCT group, OCAT has extended its exhibition spaces from Shenzhen to Shanghai, Xi’an, Beijing and Wuhan. 19 The museum reported that it organized 43 academic talks and seminars from 1997 to 2001 (Ren 2002, 53), 59 from 2003-2006 (Ren 2007, 92-94) and 21 in the year of 2007 (Ren 2008, 274). In addition, as documented on its website, the museum has held open workshops led by artists. 20 For instance, ‘The Voice of Humanities’ Academic Conference of 1998 was designed to discuss various art mediums such as sculpture, photography, new media, dance, Chinese and Western paintings, and other cultural issues and topics including city architecture, art market, modern advertisements, museum collections, Buddhist and ancient art, art criticism, feminist

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historians, art critics, curators, and humanities, arts and social science scholars from across mainland China. They have become the cultural gatekeepers of the museum, and their ideas are amply documented in the museum’s official publications. In 2015, in collaboration with university-based scholars, the museum published a series of translated volumes on Western art history theories. The publications and official website only provide Chinese versions,21 as Chinese-speaking communities are their intended audience. Other educational activities undertaken by the museum include regular classical art learning classes for children, irregular guide tours, and art talks for universities. As reflected in the museum structure, there is a relationship of complicity between the state polity and the economy in the operations of the museum. Cultural capital is not something external to the state, which controls major cultural resources and also the financial system. However, these areas only reflect part of the face of the state. In the following sections, I explicate how the museum intermediaries are able to function as agents within the institutional conditions of production, and how their work exerts a normative effect on representation in the context of the processes of the cultural production of state and society and of the cultural production taking place in state and society.

3.2

From nationalism to the production of knowledge: the art of He Xiangning

The He Xiangning Art Museum primarily aims to support the collecting, exhibiting, and researching of the art of He Xiangning. The works of He Xiangning are exhibited in the permanent galleries, which occupy the central section of the museum. The central exhibition lobby is a monumental space with the bust of He Xiangning placed in a prominent position, surrounded by two side walls filled with untitled images, including the artist’s self-portrait, family portraits and pictures of herself with China’s key political leaders Mao Zedong, Song Qingling, and Zhou Enlai art, the relations between modernity and aesthetics, contemporary art and the humanities, and modernism and postmodernism. ‘The First Voice-Chinese Contemporary Artists Forum’ of 2005 discussed topics relating to the practices of Chinese artists, the authority of curators, and the relationship between technology and art practice. 21 The exception is the 2016 exhibition, ‘Appropriation and Transformation: The Exploration of Painting by Chinese Artists Trained Abroad in the Early Twentieth Century’, which provides an English version of the curatorial statement and exhibition paper to be used for cultural exchange purposes.

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(Illustration 3.2). The lobby has two side doors leading to the galleries, where the exhibition ‘Display of feature works of He Xiangning’ was staged in 2015. In the text appearing on the ‘Forward’ panel in this exhibition, juxtaposed against a blown-up image of the elderly He Xiangning writing calligraphy, He Xiangning was described as ‘a close comrade-in-arms of Sun Yat-sen, the forerunner of the Chinese democratic revolution, and the wife of Liao Zhongkai, the pioneer of the democratic revolution’ as well as ‘an active participant and important promoter of the Chinese democratic revolution, outstanding social activist, and prominent artist’. This statement was followed by a brief account of her artistic journey from her education in Japan to the expression of her patriotic feelings and national aspirations in the form of paintings of plum blossoms, pine trees, lions, tigers, and landscapes. The narrative ended with a confirmation of her position as ‘an important reference for modern China’s history, a model of revolutionary spirit and distinguished morality, and a treasure of Chinese art’ and a list of previous exhibitions that the museum had organized for He Xiangning’s works. The works on display were her realistic Chinese ink paintings and poems/inscriptions in collaboration with her political and artistic compatriots. They were professionally hung and individually captioned. The labels mainly contained the title, year of creation, size, and material of each work. The collaborative works were supplemented with brief biographies highlighting the collaborators’ off icial positions and their commitments to the CPC or the revolutionary cause in China. A few labels provided accounts of artistic technique or style. In addition, there was an enlarged image of a calligraphic letter addressed to He Xiangning by Mao Zedong, as an expression of his gratitude for her gifts. The poems that other religious and cultural figures22 wrote to He Xiangning were also displayed, but they were overshadowed by the overwhelming reproduction of Mao’s calligraphy. Mao’s calligraphy is not only aesthetic, but also a code to authority. As Richard Curt Kraus (1991) has pointed out, in Chinese traditional culture, a leader’s excellence in calligraphy represents his ability to exercise his political power. To Mao, calligraphy is a medium of propaganda for reflecting the lustre of authoritative words and deeds. This exhibition’s narrative of He Xiangning’s life and works emphasized her nationalistic spirit, the role of aesthetics in the service of politics, as well 22 These included Zhao Puchu (1907-2000) and Zhou Huijun (1939-). Zhao was a religious and public leader best known as the president of the CPC-supported Buddhist Association of China. He was also a renowned Chinese calligrapher. Zhou was formerly the vice-chairperson of the China Calligraphers Association and is currently a consultant for the association.

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Illustration 3.2  The central exhibition lobby of the He Xiangning Art Museum

Photo by the author

as communist identity. This interpretative paradigm was reiterated in the museum’s exhibitions for national celebrations, such as the Anniversary of the Revolution of 1911 which marked the overthrow of China’s last imperial dynasty, and in tour exhibitions to Hong Kong, Macau, Taipei and cities in mainland China. Approximately half of the twenty-four special exhibitions for He Xiangning were structured to emphasize her contributions to revolutionary China, her loyalty to the party-nation, her outstanding artistic achievements, and her noble characteristics. Other exhibitions diverged from this story of a national patriotic artist. They presented different themes in He Xiangning’s life and work by intellectually scrutinizing her art’s aesthetic, historical, and social values. Museum intermediaries, consisting of both in-house curators and researchers and external scholars, have taken He Xiangning as a subject of inquiry for research in both art history and in the sociology of culture. A prominent attempt was made in the 2007 exhibition titled ‘Art and Life of He Xiangning: Mapping, Illustrating and Documenting the Landscape of History’ (curated by Li Zhengwei and Wang Xiaosong). By drawing on the concept of cultural geography, the exhibition displayed He Xiangning’s works in association with seven significant places where the artist had once lived and/or worked. Historical documents and images were used to reflect the spatial and social milieu of the places that had shaped the artist and

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her husband’s life experiences and practices as well as the broader cultural landscape of China in the twentieth century. In this exhibition, He Xiangning was portrayed as a modern idealist, an intellectual model who aspired to embody a nationalist spirit and revived Chinese tradition at a critical historical juncture for the country (He Xiangning Art Museum 2007). Scholarly inquiry extended into the sociocultural contexts of her activities – for instance, by relating He Xiangning’s resistance to the traditional practice of foot-binding to her experiences in the relatively open society of Hong Kong, by examining the popularity of overseas studies in Southern China as a driving force behind her journey to Japan, and by exploring the activities with her artist collectives as a network so as to reflect upon the concepts of home and nation, and to reflect upon the links between different regions that exerted impact on the development of Chinese traditional art (Wang 2007). In a 2012 exhibition on He Xiangning and her work (curated by Fang Hua and Yang Kening), an approach to the sociology of art ostensibly based on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital was used to conceptualize He Xiangning’s paintings as forms of pleasure, gift, and purchase, and to trace the development of her personal cultural capital as a major resource enabling the extension of her influence in both political and cultural spheres. In this exhibition her works were considered to be her cultural capital, providing monetary support for both her livelihood and her campaign for national salvation. The exhibition narrative also included examination of her social influence, established through her network of connections to the social and cultural elites in Republic-era China and by her connections with high officials in the nationalist-led Taiwan government after the establishment of New China (Fang 2007). Another symbolic order in the museum’s representation of He Xiangning and her works relates to the development of art historical scholarship on her work. It started with the 2009 exhibition ‘Later Works and Manuscripts by He Xiangning’, curated by Li Zhengwei and Wang Xiaosong. This exhibition was entirely concerned with pure aesthetics, periodizing and classifying the content of the artist’s works in terms of style, genre, and technique. The 2014 exhibition ‘Movable Mindscape: The Style, Concepts and Changing Times: He Xiangning’s Landscape painting’ (led by Fang Lihua and Fang Hua, and art scholar Lu Mingju) took an intertextual approach to rethinking the artist’s role in China’s art history. By juxtaposing her landscape paintings and manuscripts with other landscape paintings by Chinese masters, this exhibition identified He Xiangning as having an artistic style that was different from that of premodern Chinese artists and of her contemporaries. In this narrative the early works created during her studies in Japan are seen

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as having been subject to the influence of the Japanese art genre ukiyo-e,23 while her later works are held to have drawn closer to the styles pursued by the literati of the Sung and Yuan dynasties and to have expressed her interest in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. The exhibition also associated her works with the tradition of pure literati painting, and linked her with the amateur painters who were active in the social circles of high officials operating within the literati art system.24 The 2016 exhibition ‘Appropriation and Transformation: The Exploration of Painting by Chinese Artists Trained Abroad in the Early Twentieth Century’ (curated by Feng Boyi, and art scholar Hua Tianxue) engaged in cross-cultural analysis. With broad support from local and Japanese museums, private collectors, experts, and scholars, the exhibition featured the paintings of He Xiangning and eleven other leading artists25 who studied abroad between 1905 and 1937. It explored how Chinese artists were influenced by Japanese artists who synthesized Japanese and Western art, and how these Chinese artists influenced the development of Chinese paintings upon their return to China. To present how the artists appropriated the question of ‘referencing and imitation’ from foreign sources, it offered a careful analysis of the distinguishing features of these artists’ work by comparing them to works by their teachers or by other Japanese artists in different historical periods and contexts. In this period the scientific analysis of visual images mapped the knowledge-scape in rational form. In addition, the exhibition intended to provide a historical reference to the present by reflecting on the new wave of Japanese art imitations that swept through the Chinese painting scene in the 1980s. It also examined why innovative and reforming aspirations had been relegated to the mono-production of gongbi painting.26 These curatorial efforts to pose an artistic question 23 The term ukiyo-e translates as ‘picture(s) of the floating world’. This genre flourished in Japan from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth century. It was expressed in paintings and monochromatic prints of subjects such as beautiful women, kabuki (classical Japanese dance-drama) actors, and sumo wrestlers, historical and travel sceneries and landscapes, folk tales, flora and fauna. These works were popular with the merchant class and reflected their enjoyment of entertainment during the Edo period when the government was led by the military. 24 See this webpage of the exhibition, ‘Movable Mindscape: The Style, Concepts and Changing Times: He Xiangning’s Landscape Painting’, www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?ModuleNo=04&Sub ModuleNo=0403&id=1004&ordertype=0&page=1&year=2014, accessed 20 December 2018. 25 These artists are Gao Jianfu, Gao Qifeng, Chen Shuren, Guan Liang, Zhu Qizhan, Chen Zhifo, Ding Yanyong, Feng Zikai, Fang Rending, Li Xiongcai, and Fu Baoshi. 26 Gongbi is a traditional technique and style for Chinese ink paintings. It uses highly detailed brushstrokes to depict narratives or subjects in a realistic way. The style can be dated back to

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were intended to avoid grand narratives and subjective judgments, and to follow the logic of He Xiangning’s historical context instead (Hua 2016). The exhibition was juxtaposed with the permanent exhibition of He Xiangning, and provided intertextual and cross-cultural perspectives for reading the art of He Xiangning, in a broader historical context. By moving away from essentialist nationalism and using art-historical or sociocultural perspectives, museum intermediaries were able to generate moderately critical narratives. Based on varied analytical methods, including formal, semiotic, intertextual, or cross-cultural analyses, they tended to contextualize works or individuals historically rather than touting a nationalistic persona to be glorified and memorized. Instead of affirming the legitimacy of the regime and its progressivist and developmentalist ideology, museum intermediaries were, we can argue, involved in the rational production and verification of art knowledge. Through their work, He Xiangning’s works were subject to intellectual inquiry and curatorial interpretation. Rather than being subsumed within a fixed official ideology or political truth, they reformulated a new set of disciplinary knowledge structures that has contributed to the development of what can be seen as helping to constitute a trustworthy and authoritative museum that operates in support of the project of constructing a rational nation-state.

3.3

Cross-straits cultural diplomacy and public dialogue on contemporary art

Contemporary art is highly visible in the He Xiangning museum. This section focuses on one of its core projects: the ‘Cross-strait Four Regions27 Artistic Exchange Project’. This landmark yet controversial project was complex both in terms of organization and exhibition, and can provide broader implications on the role and network of actors in Chinese museum production. With the patronage of the OCAO, the project was intended to support the state’s cultural diplomatic policy, particularly for the purpose of building the image of a unified Chinese nation based on a common ethnicity, culture, or language. In line with Benedict Anderson’s (1991, 18) the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). It flourished in the Tang and Song Dynasties (seventh to thirteenth centuries) when these refined paintings were collected by the royal families and used to feature narratives of high authority figures. 27 ‘Cross-strait’ strictly refers to mainland China and Taiwan, which are geographically separated by the Taiwan Strait, while the four regions are Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and mainland China.

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theory of the nation as an imagined community rather than a concrete location, the exhibition symbolically projected the unified spatial imagery of China’s state’s extending over Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and overseas Chinese communities, based on the ‘One China’ political doctrine. In this section, I argue that the project operated with both heterogeneous state and non-state actors, and that the fluid curatorial approaches and strategies made it difficult for it to be simply a tool of cultural diplomacy subject to state manipulation. In addition, the project demonstrated how the structures of public diplomacy have manifested itself in the museum in form of mutual exchange and communication. According to Jan Melissen (2005, 11 and 18), ‘public diplomacy’ considers a pattern of communication that involves skills, techniques, and attitudes. Public diplomacy needs to be differentiated from short-term propaganda effects. It consists of interactive exchange programmes involving a wide range of state and non-state actors who attempt to influence public opinion abroad. This strategy is different from the way that the Chinese state has historically exhibited its culture worldwide. The state-type of cultural diplomacy is a highly selective self-projection and subject to state manipulation. In the museum project, on the other hand, art intermediaries concentrate on a strategy of public diplomacy that aims at multidirectional and ‘long-haul’ dialogue between the participating regions. This arguably undermined the state’s unified image of a monolithic Chinese community and provided a platform for negotiating the cultural differences between different geopolitical regions and the tensions that exist between them. Led by the art director of the He Xiangning Art Museum, this multiregional project ran annually from 2010 to 2014, with a focus on the four regions: Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. The project was officially claimed as seeking to construct an effective mechanism for facilitating exchange and collaboration between the four constituent regions in the arenas of art and culture. Differing from the official exhibitions, which presented a strong Chinese essentialist identity and featured a highly selective representation of artworks and artists (Yao 2015), it was organized in the form of exhibitions and seminars held in collaboration with different anchor art organizations and museums in the four constituent regions. Although, as will be shown later in this section, the project was the object of critique by those who suggested that it had an implicit pan-China agenda, the exhibitions in the project did not carry a strong theme, nor did their titles express ideological statements of national identity. The titles of the exhibitions, ‘The Butterfly Effect: An Artistic Communication Project of Cross-Strait Four-Regions’ (2010), ‘1+1’ (2011), ‘It Takes Four Sorts’ (2012),

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‘Crossroads – Another Dimension’ (2013) and ‘Conformity to Vicinity’ (2014), respectively, all carried metaphors and shifted between meanings. 28 In addition, the project constituted a relatively broad organizational network. Over the years, it involved a total of 100 artists; 30 official and semi-official curators and assistant-curators from the four regions; and ten regional institutions including state museums, official art and cultural bodies, universities, university museums, private galleries, and nongovernmental art institutes. They formed the core museum intermediaries and networks for the material and symbolic production involved in this project. The project was formulated through what were presented as open-ended and transformative curatorial approaches and strategies that allowed the display of fluid, diffuse, and fragmented artistic representations of identities, ranging from individual to social and global identities. The first show, ‘The Butterfly Effect’, explored the artistic differences between the four regions in terms of historical and geographic-environmental existence, cultural identification, and artistic creation. Selected by regional curators, the participating artists produced an array of works to address the issue of identity formation framed within globalization and localization, the impact of urbanization on daily life, and memories of personal histories. The subsequent exhibition, ‘1+1’, was more concerned with the methodology of artistic exchange. Artists from different geographic regions were paired up. The artists were allowed to visit one another and communicated with each other for almost five months. Each pair of artists was expected to produce one collaborative work and two individual works. ‘It Takes Four Sorts’ addressed the curatorial level of exchange. The four regional curators were given the authority to select the themes, artists, artworks, and presentation methods for exhibiting a displaced region. By means of 28 ‘The butterfly effect’ was a term coined by American meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz in 1963 to outline his chaos theory. This is a meteorological theory maintaining that a small change in the initial condition of an active system can cause large long-term effects. The exhibition used this as a metaphor symbolizing the commonalities and differences between the four regions. ‘1+1’ refers to the method for pairing up artists. The Chinese translation of ‘Take Four Sorts’ is sibuxiang, a nickname for a chimera. It literally means ‘unlike any of the four’– referring to the chimera’s appearance of having the antlers of a deer, the head of a horse, the tail of a donkey, and the hooves of a cow. It is a metaphor for the condition of works from the four regions, each with their own geopolitical differences and cultural and artistic contexts. ‘Crossroads – Another Dimension’ refers to the shifting condition of displacement from one dimension to another, something ‘in-between’ two dimensions. The concept is used to denote the phenomena in art creation taking place in regions where artists constantly live in shifting spaces due to travel, immigration, or overseas activities. ‘Conformity to Vicinity’ ironically draws back to a sense of place and explores the possibilities of cultural adaptation.

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observation, fieldwork, or personal experience, each curator selected three to four active young artists from a region other than their own and created a theme representing the region’s geographical and artistic context. The approach of cross-regional curating provided much room for the curators to negotiate the similarities and differences that exist between the regions. It resulted in a touring, four-unit exhibition and a one-day symposium for further engagement between scholars, artists, and curators to discuss the art and cultural conditions in their respective regions. ‘Crossroads’ was a thematic show that sought to explore the global phenomenon of art production. Through collaboration between curators and artists of each of the four regions, the exhibition explored the practices that are subject to the artists’ experiences and imaginations of time and space and their agency in negotiating the methods of production and mediation that obtained in the relationships between different cultures. The project marked a shift in the concept of cultural production from the modern derivative that was formed based on a traditional or regional/local culture, to a definition of art creation as a recurrence of cultural globalization. ‘Conforming to Vicinity’ further explored the relationship between globalization and localization. Rather than displaying studio works and touring the same set of works, the participating artists created and exhibited their works in the first stop, Macau, and extended and exhibited their works while travelling to other regions. With changing production environments, artists were encouraged to reflect on every local circumstance, including the conflicts and compatibilities embedded in particular social structures and habitats. The site-specific and process-oriented approach to art making and exhibition practice intensified the collaboration between multiple institutions and changed their curatorial processes. It brought both interactivity and uncertainty to the exchange process. Instead of advancing the idea of a unified pan-ethnic Chinese identity, the art intermediaries in the project engaged in identifying and expressing differences at both regional and individual levels. For instance, in ‘1+1’, there were some successful co-creations, while other pairs of artists were partly or totally unmatched (Jiang and Wang 2010). The chief curator, Feng Boyi, explained that this was due to the differences between regional artists with respect to their artistic concepts and methods, their standards of quality, their habits and sentiments, as well as their levels of cultural refinement (xiu yang) (Gao 2013). A local media reported the artistic differences in detail: the mainland Chinese artists focus on the impact of globalization on peoples’ lives and creativity; Hong Kong artists explore how to preserve

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and highlight the local culture under the threat of globalization; Taiwanese artists present their spatial mappings in terms of landscape, culture, living memories and emotion, while the artists who represented Macau come from diverse backgrounds, including Western educated and native Macanese, old and new Chinese immigrants, and foreign permanent residents, have revealed more diversified spatial and individual facets. (ibid.)

In a post-production interview, the participating artists gauged their exchanges in different ways. It was viewed as a positive competition amongst artists, a chance to consider other artistic methods and explore the question of authorship, an experience of different ideas, languages or social conditions, and a way to classify artists in terms of regions rather than as individuals.29 Experiencing difficulties in searching for cultural common ground, Feng Boyi described the exchange as ‘a process of communication and understanding that does not intend to break down the bilateral boundaries, nor override or overcome their barriers’. He explained: The exchange is not meant to hold fast another territory, to persist your own ideal or erect influence onto another. The pleasure of exchange remains in the process itself. It might come up to a perfect result, or create a further gap […] it principally aims to reveal an attitude and method that could express mutual understanding and tolerance, and reflect the result of ‘exchange and dialogues’ on visual languages amongst artists in the four regions. (Feng 2010)

During his interview, he also reflected on the creation of his work:30 I prefer to mobilize different resources to realize my idea that works for a society. I am still content with the collaboration [with the state museum], as far as I am able to conceive my idea in a meaningful way. While certain compromise is unavoidable, I think the matter rests in the methodology.

The exchange and dialogues in these regions not only exposed the cultural differences between the regions, but also showed the tension between 29 See Hong Kong Art Centre (2001). ‘1+1: A Cross-Strait-Four-Region Artistic Exchange Project (Artists Interview)’, Uploaded on 4 July 2011, YouTube video, 13:45 min, https://www.youtube. com/watch?time_continue=3&v=PnKPUlUz41w, accessed 24 June 2019. 30 Interview with Feng, 27 January 2016.

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the intermediaries and the institutional conditions in which they were operating. Criticism, as part of public discourse, was directed towards both the structural and symbolic arrangement of the project. In the symposium accompanying ‘It Takes Four Sorts’, the Director of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Huang Hai-ming (2013), questioned the concept of ‘pan-China’ as well as the intention of the project. He addressed issues of inequality, as the project was led by a chief curator from mainland China, and the participating regions were located in very different developmental stages. Furthermore, Hong Kong-based art critic Frank Vigneron, in his 2014 review of the exhibition ‘Crossroads – Another Dimension’, directly criticized the practice of linking the four places with the idea of a ‘Greater China’, the inclusion of two nonChinese/non-Han artists and the selection of four artists to ‘represent’ the multi-regional and multi-ethnic mainland.31 He also highlighted the work of Hong Kong artist Samson Young that emphasized the use of Cantonese as ‘an essential characteristics of the desire of Hong Kongers to demarcate themselves from the culture of the mainland (or even the official culture of a place like Taiwan)’ (Vigneron 2018, 42). In addition to addressing the question of identity, the exhibition marked and tested the limits of symbolic expression, and institutional censorship in the context of the geopolitics of the participating regions. During the project of ‘Conforming to Vicinity’, controversy occurred when an artist’s work was allegedly censored by the University Museum and Art Gallery of the University of Hong Kong. The work by Hong Kong artist Otto Li was a set of computer-modelled portrait busts of government leaders of the four regions, with each bust linked to the number of democratic votes received by each leader in proportion to their regions’ populations. The incident finally translated into a local issue, with a group of Hong Kong cultural professionals criticizing the alleged political censorship and questioning the professional ethics of the museum.32 As an experimental platform for artistic dialogue between regions, the project espoused open-ended conceptual frameworks, ever-changing curatorial strategies and exchange formulas, and public forums. The participating art intermediaries were formally able to express their ideas by posing their agendas, questions, and criticisms, crossing China’s state-drawn policy 31 Vigneron (2014) points out that the two non-Chinese artists were Russian Macau resident Konstantin Bessmertny and the Taiwanese aborigine Labay Eyong (Lin Jiewen) of the Seediq nation (a group in Taiwan that has been important for legitimizing the idea of a nativist culture in Taiwan). 32 For details, see the press release from the University of Hong Kong, ‘HKU responds to media enquiries about exhibition “Conforming to Vicinity”’, 10 February 2015, www.hku.hk/press/ press-releases/detail/12348.html, accessed 24 June 2019. See also Li (2015).

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line and testing the symbolic boundaries in different regions. They initiated debates on a variety of contentious issues concerning the hierarchy of curatorial positions, the identities of the participating artists and the developmental differences between the regions. Instead of privileging the homogenization and reification of Chinese cultural forms and identity, the artists produced multiple identities in individual, local, and global forms. In spite of its inherent structural limitations, the project did engage cultural actors in a dialogic platform and allowed diffuse and contested forms of representation to circulate through curatorial and artistic practices deployed in public discourse. This constituted a significant corrective to an imposed, unified national identity.

3.4

Interpreting contemporary sculpture: possibilities and limitations

The Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition was a hallmark event for the He Xiangning Art Museum. Supported by the OCT, the museum organized the event from 1998 until 2007, with a total of six editions.33 By examining this exhibition series, this section highlights the different signifying practices used by the state and the museum intermediaries. I argue that this exhibition was not limited to serving the state’s developmentalist ideology in which art is used to craft a vision for city development, to network economic partners, and to beautify public spaces or to represent a harmonious living environment. Instead, through their studies, public statements, and project networks, participating art elites strengthened the museum’s role in reconceptualizing China’s contemporary sculpture, also cross-examining the roles and functions that art can play in society. Their discursive practices relating to contemporary sculpture and public art resisted the phantom presence of socialist realist monumental sculptures that flourished in China for many decades, and also problematized the state’s idea of art as an instrument for cultural diplomacy and cultural economies in China. The Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition served the state’s agendas in diplomatic relations and city development, as these were reflected in its institutional partnership, patron support, and the exhibition theme. In addition to the city government, foreign state institutions and companies 33 The event was reorganized by OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in 2012 and 2014 and is officially renamed Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale.

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focusing on art and building design were involved. For instance, the 5th Exhibition, titled ‘Shenzhen International Public Art Exhibition’, was sponsored by OCT, the municipal government, a Melbourne architects’ firm (which has a branch office in Shenzhen undertaking landscape and real estate design projects), Luxembourg’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and its embassy in Beijing, and ShanghART Gallery, among others. The 4th Exhibition mainly functioned as a diplomatic platform for cultural exchange. It was co-presented by the Association Francaise d’Action Artistique of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development of France, and co-organized by the Shenzhen municipal government, the government unit of the Nanshan District of Shenzhen, and by the state-owned Shenzhen Press Group. In return, as part of the bilateral programme Les Années Chine-France, an exhibition with a heavy overtone of Chineseness, ‘China Imagination: Chinese Contemporary sculpture exhibition’, was held at the park of a royal palace in Paris. The state’s developmental ideology was well expressed through the project’s structural and symbolic arrangement. For instance, the 1st Exhibition was co-organized with the Shenzhen Sculpture Institute. In addition to its research, production, and promotion of public art, the Institute, run by the Shenzhen Municipal Bureau, supports the city’s urban planning and real estate management. The exhibition stated the need for the strengthening of the theory and practice of public art and for extending knowledge by thinking beyond the categories of memorial or symbolic significance, and questioning the undertaking of beautifying the environment and life. However, in the survey show of twenty studio works from Chinese artists, there was still an explicit concern about the standard of works for decorating and beautifying environments.34 The 2nd Exhibition, with a Chinese title literally translated as ‘Balancing Existence: A Proposal for the Future Eco-city’, was a thematic show that highlighted sustainable relationships between art and natural and social environments and public spaces, together with the social functions and impact of art.35 Held in a renovated square located in a nearby housing estate, owned by the OCT, the Exhibition was proclaimed to enhance the cultural and natural environment in OCT Town, by displaying outstanding public artworks from China and overseas. Although the commissioned 34 See this webpage of the exhibition, ‘The 1st Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition.’ www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?ModuleNo=0404&SubModuleNo=040401&id=451&o rdertype=0&page=1&year=2016, accessed 20 December 2018. 35 See this webpage of the exhibition, ‘The 2nd Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition’, www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?ModuleNo=0404&SubModuleNo=040401&id=453& ordertype=0&page=1&year=2016, accessed 20 December 2018.

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public works might have disrupted the semantic field of urban space, and challenged the viewers’ visual preconceptions, the projection of the state’s concept of public art was confined to artworks exhibited in a tangible, unified, and coherent site that defined the public as an undifferentiated and essentially passive mass. In spite of the state’s regulation activities, the museum intermediaries who were involved in the exhibition project did aid the expansion of the discursive spaces of public art in China. They were academicians, established curators, researchers, art critics, and artists from both China and abroad. Drawn together in the event by art jury or curatorial selection,36 they developed the event into a public platform for discussing and proposing different concepts and issues relating to contemporary sculpture. In the first symposium for the exhibition, participants depicted the event as a new breakthrough for the development of contemporary sculpture in China. It was considered significant in three ways: Firstly, in terms of exhibition making, the exhibition offered a new mechanism combining the forces of enterprise investment, museum organization, and curatorship from art critics. Secondly, instead of showing conventional works, the exhibition displayed contemporary sculpture works which were conceptually connected to society. Thirdly, it aligned artists and scholars to create a discursive platform to explore the role of art in terms of environment and public spaces, and to examine the relationship between art and the public (Ren 2002, 103-104).

The exhibition was considered by those involved with it to be a new mechanism for institutionalizing contemporary sculpture in China. It used a critical and reflexive approach for exploring the social function of contemporary art. The participants discussed issues relating to the institutionalization 36 For instance, in the 2nd Exhibition, Huang Zhuan (1958-2016), an art historian and critic was appointed to chair an academic committee comprising invited scholars and specialists from the fields of sculpture, urban planning, architecture and art criticism. At that time, he was teaching at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and serving the museum as a researcher and curator. The committee members selected 28 works, three of them from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, two from European countries, and the others from mainland China. Prior to the 5th Exhibition, an academic committee was formed to evaluate and endorse the curatorial proposal initiated by the renowned French-Chinese curator Hou Hanru and a leading Chinese curator, Pi Li. The artistic participation was extended to European countries. Based on the selection by the curator Feng Boyi, the 6th Exhibition supported a broader participation of artists from Taiwan, Spain, Greece, Germany, and Indonesia, in addition to emerging and well-established Chinese contemporary artists.

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process of contemporary art in China, the relationship between art and the public, the rights and obligations of cititzens, the social role of contemporary art through artistic intervention, and the possibility for developing a public sphere in support of civil society. In his article for the first Exhibition, the director of the Shenzhen Sculpture Institute, Sun Zenhua (1998) reflected on the history of sculpture in China in the light of modernity, and emphasized the shift of contemporary sculpture from pure aesthetics to concerns about human existence. According to Sun, early twentieth-century sculpture was the product of Western input and reflected a cultural position supporting Western learning and serving social modernization. The art academics at that time, he argued, were not really connected to society, and were unable to address cultural questions or persuade people in aesthetic matters. Until the middle of the twentieth century, sculpture was highly ideologized and instrumentalized. Against this historical background, Sun urged people to relate sculpture to contemporary culture, the human existential condition, and to contemporary problems in China. Huang Zhuan (2002), the chair of the exhibition jury of the 2nd Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, traced the reasons why public art had been marginalized in the development of contemporary art. Invoking Habermas’s concept of the ‘public sphere’, he stressed that the role of the contemporary artist was not limited to being an instructor or social spokesman, but also to promote a free exchange of ideas among citizens. In the event symposium, local art critics and overseas artists also centred their discussion on the relationship between contemporary art and society. They specifically discussed the relationship between non-institutional artistic individuality and social-institutional constructions including the general public, the social conditions for the display of public art, the definition of contemporary sculpture, and the concept of ‘public space’ (Ren 2002, 105-113). In addition, a local reporter, Zhao Jinhua (2002), raised concerns about the freedom of expression and discussion and the role that public art can play in society. The discursive practices of these commentators, focusing on the institutional/sociological problems of art and negotiating art as a social agent, can be seen as contributing to the formation of a Habermasian type of public sphere based on communicative rationality. Secondly, the curators in their role as cultural agents proposed curatorial concepts and strategies with new materials and mediums for the display of a variety of experimental works, and proposed different interpretations for the public issues linked to contemporary art. We can argue that they made significant cotributions to reconceptualizing sculpture/art in various

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conceptual spaces, including an open and public information network, an imagined fifth space associated with new realities, a public sphere where citizens can freely express and exchange ideas, and the spiritual dimension of social dilemmas and value conflicts. I document the role of the curators in detail in the following paragraphs. Since its third instalment, the Exhibition has been led by curators. Entitled ‘Open Experience: Public Art, Culture, and Community’, the third exhibition highlighted art reflecting on the changing human experience in a purportedly open society formed by overarching information and communication networks, operating alongside the proliferation of imagery that challenged traditional visual experiences. It underlined ideas of ‘publicness’, ‘creativity’, and ‘pioneering’,37 considering the works on display as an expression of the pioneering character of a city. The exhibition was not without overtones that echoed official discourses: Shenzhen has been at the frontier of China’s open policy and modernization reform and has had the privilege to offer ‘public spaces’ for China’s modern sculptures and city sculptures. In the twenty-first century, art should reflect the progressive development of the society through an expression of new languages; the trajectory of Chinese modern art should be at the same pace with the development of Shenzhen as well as China’s modernization.38

The exhibition rhetoric was consistent with the state’s developmentalist ideology, but it also arguably offered a new perspective on art and public space in line with the idea of an open society and global information network. Public art was depicted as compatible with the image of an open society in which art could penetrate public spaces and provide integrated experiences for individuals and collectives. The exhibition curator and professor from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Yi Ying (2002), noted that China had 37 Publicness here refers to the public appreciation of art, with its artistic form and content expressed in bright, healthy, and motivated ways. At the same time, being located in the modernized OCT Town, the publicness also reflected the public quest for a modern cultural community. Creativity referred to an individual creation that represented someone’s individual visual form of expression in response to his/her spatial experience. Pioneering was associated with the spirit of China’s reform, and the break with traditional sculpture in terms of future-oriented concept, form, materials, and themes. 38 See the webpage of the exhibition, ‘The 3rd Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition’, www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?ModuleNo=0404&SubModuleNo=040401&id=454& ordertype=0&page=1&year=2016, accessed 20 December 2018.

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reached a point where it had to further explore the possibility of integrating individual art with collective experience. He depicted the works on display as reflecting a postmodernist style in line with the social changes that came with the proliferation of information and images in the contemporary world. Using the title of ‘Transplantation in situ’, the fourth Exhibition was part of a cultural exchange with France. It was held in the OCT Ecological Square, which was completed in 2001 and consists of a model city square combining landscape, urban planning, and buildings. The French curator Alberte Grynpas Nguyen (2002) took a relatively neutral yet constructive position by proposing an idea of ‘situ’ where culturally displaced works would create new meanings in relation to their environment, architecture, and social and political backgrounds. The Chinese curator Huang Zhuan, on the other hand, advocated a more critical perspective on the relationship between art and the ‘situ’. In his view, in the modernization process, Shenzhen presented iconic world buildings in a spectacular display, while folk and Chinese cultures were used to express nationalism. Unlike the theatrical and symbolic settings, Huang argued, the OCT ecological square corresponded with the concept of transplantation. As he pointed out, the Square, designed by a French company combining the design elements of French and Chinese landscapes and integrating nature with the living environment, was meant to fulfil the combination of the desire for an advanced form of civilization, the perceived need for a return to traditional values, and the consumption aspirations of the neighbouring high-class property owners. Instead of strengthening the idea of the site as a manifestation of consumer culture, Huang attempted to intervene by showing a series of dynamic works manifesting potential for historical and cultural reintepretation (Ren 2007, 14-17). The fifth exhibition, originally titled ‘The Fifth System: Public Art in the Age of “Post-Planning”’ renamed ‘Shenzhen International Public Art Exhibition’, was curated by the renowned French-Chinese curator Hou Hanru and the leading Chinese curator Pi Li. They narrated the relationship between art and city development by conceptualizing one’s perception of a city as involving four systems with two dimensions. In the horizontal dimension, the city mainly involves four spatial typologies: conventional buildings, artificial nature/cultural-scapes (the special forms of the architecture of theme parks in OCT), traditional public art, and the masses on the move. Vertically, a city can be perceived from the perspective of four different levels: high-rise buildings, lower buildings, landscape architecture, and fluxes of people and traffic. By asking how contemporary art intervenes in this new reality and how public art is redefined in an urban environment, the curators considered art to be a ‘fifth system’ that could intervene in and

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transcend the four systems. In their view, art was meant to observe and criticize reality. Furthermore, OCT as an urban city of high speed and high efficiency, condensing the elements from different intra-regional cultures and multi-modernities into a ‘post-planning’ city, transcended conventional modern urban planning, and created much more flexibility and openness than a traditional city. Overall, it signalled the coming of a new age of city-making. In the exhibition, ‘The Fifth System’ was to open new spaces for experimenting with public art. Diverse works were produced specifically in response to the unique context of Shenzhen, and addressing issues relating to urban construction, including ecology, consumption, power, resources, urban community and self-historicization. In short, the curatorial rhetoric generally positioned art as an independent system for active intervention in a new social reality rather than seeing it as an instrument for city building. The Sixth Exhibition was curated by the museum art director, Feng Boyi. The theme of the edition, ‘A Vista of Perspectives’, was set to address the contradiction arising from one’s desire for and anxiety about modernization, and the conflict between the inner self and external ecology. Briefly, the influence of China’s modernization process on people’s lives has not only resulted in a higher quality of life and modernized consumerist practices, but has also created a series of problems, including social inequality, diminishing cultural pluralism and weakening social morality, and the exploitation of natural resources. Artists were motivated to create because of the conflict between reality and themselves. This dilemma produced spiritual tension by putting the artists’ humanitarian and other value orientations to the test. In addition, the curator conceptualized the artists’ works as ‘non-sculpture’ or ‘transcending sculpture’, highlighting the interplay between ‘natural forms’ and the cityscape. He argued that the artists’ works were utilizing natural materials to convey complex and poetic ideas to confront traditional visual perceptions of sculpture, and to express their attitudes towards the relationship between urban planning and nature, and between the man-made and natural worlds they inhabited. The conceptual/symbolic spaces perceived or idealized by the curators expanded the official notion of Chinese sculpture or public art beyond beautification and state-city developmental functions, to a broader spectrum of meaning or imagination closely linked with the issues and problems of contemporary society. However, the public statements of the state and the art intermediaries coexisted, and the expressive space within the state institution was still politically monitored. A notable controversy occurred in the fourth exhibition over the ‘Bat project’ work of the French, China-born contemporary artist Huang Yongping. Huang’s proposed works were replicas

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of the American EP-3 spy plane that had collided with a Chinese jet over the South China Sea in 2001, killing the Chinese pilot. His working piece was initially approved but eventually withdrawn from the exhibition. According to the artist, the disapproval allegedly came from many sources, including the Foreign Ministry and other political channels, due to their worries that the work might harm the diplomatic relations between China, America, and France.39 The participating artists considered the sanction to be an infringement on the freedom of expression, and drafted a letter of protest. The letter was finally released with major revisions, including deletions of the names of the alleged organization, the French foreign ministry, and the signatures of the participating mainland artists. 40 These discussions about aesthetics, curatorial proposals, and artistic interventions demonstrated a discursive struggle over signification, and created tension over the acts of meaning production performed by the state as well as matters of cultural legitimacy. In summary, the exhibition’s production was shaped by the state’s cultural diplomatic-economic engagement, a public sphere supported by art elites for reifying public art and its institutions, and a cultural sphere penetrated by diverse art concepts that promoted an idea of an active role of art and artist/individual in relation to reality/society/environment. Although the art intermediaries refrained from confronting or supporting national or city development, they adopted a critical, humanistic approach. By addressing the relationships between contemporary culture and tradition, and between a reflexive self and the state mechanism, the individual and the collective, the natural world and the life-world, and freedom of expression and censorship, they played an intellectual role, engaging multiple epistemologies of art and posing ontological questions regarding the nature and reality of existence in contemporary Chinese society. Those involved in this exhibition project introduced a public discourse of aesthetics that offers unusual visual experiences and diverse messages to the public through experimental or conceptual sculptures. In summary, art is subject to the complex supporting network and interpretation and display strategies in the museum. He Xiangning’s art 39 See Huang Yongli, Jiang Zhi, Qiu Zhijie, Shu Kewen, Wu Huang, and Wu Meichun (2002), ‘Di si jie Shenzhen dangdai diaosu yishu zhan shang dui Huang Yongli de caifang (Interview with Huang Yongli about the 4th Shenzhen Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition on 11 December 2002)’, artlinkart.com, www.artlinkart.com/cn/article/overview/c08csCop, accessed 20 December 2018. 40 For the original letter drafted by Daniel Buren and signed by the participating mainland artists on 10 December 2001. See artlinkart.com, www.artlinkart.com/cn/article/overview/474csCpr (accessed 20 December 2018). For the final release of the letter of protest of 12 December 2001, artlinkart.com, www.artlinkart.com/cn/article/overview/609csCpi, accessed 20 December 2018.

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spatially dominates the museum, and is presented as a depiction of a modern artist with a national patriotic spirit. However, the museum has periodically changed the themes of exhibitions relating to He Xiangning and her work, adding the temporal dimension of curatorial involvement to the entire production process. In defining contemporary art, the museum has demonstrated its agency as a discursive platform through the artistic exchange project and the international sculpture exhibition. These activities mediate contested representations of ‘Chinese’ communities and the representation of art in public space respectively. Based on the above findings, we can observe that the art museum displays a cultural dilemma that stretches between two different trajectories. One trajectory projects and occasionally circumvents a rather fixed political ideology oriented to expressions of national patriotism and cultural nationalism, which favour a national identity based on an idea of common cultural traditions or languages instead of nationality or ethnicity. The other trajectory focuses on forming an art canon with joint efforts by internal and external curators and academicians in defining modern and contemporary art, and creating a cultural sphere with a dynamic network of appropriation involved in museum production. With their growing authority in the interpretation of art, curators have displayed serious cultural intentions and aspirations for their various undertakings. They act as reflexive producers who channel their cultural capital into the museum, forming an academic-led public sphere connected with the idea of Habermasian communicative rationality. They are also legitimators of art knowledge and form a professional niche in the structure of museum regulation. However, there are hurdles to be confronted throughout the realm of public discourse. They include regional difference and its politics, art censorship, and ideological divergence between the intermediaries and the state, and amongst the intermediaries themselves. In addition, the museum has limited its mechanism for public feedback to simple exit questionnaires and post-it notes. The public is still treated as an undifferentiated mass and as mere spectators of art, while in terms of ideology, they are imagined as nationalist and/or rational citizens. Instrumentally speaking, the complex material and symbolic conditions of and for consumption and the assigned identities are meant to produce a kind of disciplinary or/and patriotic citizen for supporting a stable, progressivist nation. However, museum visitors are not cultural blank spaces. Assuming that visitors are not passive receivers but are instead socioculturally differentiated individuals, the next case study identifies differences in visiting experiences, and the politics of signification these differences involve.

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Educated youth, provincial visitors, and a diversified national public

This section focuses on the consumption side of the He Xiangning Art Museum, specifically how the visitors make sense of their museum experience and relate it to their personal identities. Visitor research on the museum would provide wider implications of the museum consumption in China. As the study finds, an urban educated middle class constitutes the core category of museum visitors. They are mainly residents of Shenzhen, and most of them migrated to the city from other provinces. The findings demonstrate the presence of a diversified national public characterized by different modes of museum consumption, a public that is not particularly aligned with the state’s interest in Chineseness or political patriotism. Except for the ‘revolutionary history enthusiasts’ who expressed strong nationalist sentiments, visitors generally revealed limited identification with state-planned nationalism, and were oriented to other identities including those who can be categorized as ‘culturalists’, ‘utilitarian art learners’, ‘leisure consumers’, ‘social learners’ and, as coined by Monica Sassatelli (2011), ‘aesthetics cosmopolitans’. Although nearly all the segments of this urban elite can be seen as tending to absorb what the museum offers them, there was still room to entice aesthetic cosmopolitans who expected a broader programme of cultural outreach from the city where they lived. Together with what I term ‘social learners’, their modes of cultural consumption reflected a migrant population with privileged middle-class status seeking a wider social horizon and craving to know more about the outside world. During my fieldwork, two exhibitions were taking place. One of the exhibitions was ‘The display of feature works of He Xiangning’, which was discussed in the second section of this chapter. Another exhibition was the ‘Double Vision: The Culture of China – Overseas Chinese Women’s Invitational Exhibition’, 41 which was held with the support of the OCAC and the municipal cultural industry fund. In these exhibitions the museum was offering two basic frames of representation. On the one hand, He Xiangning’s political support for the revolutionary cause, her loyalty to the party, and her moral virtue, seen as a reflection of the essence of Chinese tradition and as a set of attributes that served the nation were all emphasized. He Xiangning is depicted as a national model to be commemorated by the general public and to be identified with the party-nation. On the other hand, there 41 This is the original English title of the exhibition.

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were also displays of works of overseas female Chinese artists possessing relatively fragmented identities with multiple, fluid expressions, implying a disruption of the essentialist notion of ‘Chineseness’. The ‘Double Vision’ exhibition was principally designed to foster the communication between the overseas artists and the mainland Chinese art world and its audience, and establish a dialogue on the issue of cultural identity. The exhibition featured an array of contemporary artworks in the form of installation, photography, video, performance documentary, and interactive media, by seventeen young overseas Chinese female artists from the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. A huge Post-it wall was erected in the gallery for the audience to post their feedback. Nevertheless, the essentialist notion of ‘Chineseness’ was implicitly expressed in three forms of relationship: a mediated relationship between the ‘Chinese’ artists living in and outside China through a shared participation in a national art venue in China, the relationship amongst overseas Chinese artists being explained in terms of mutual differences that had to be resolved, and a relationship between Chinese artists and Chinese audiences forged by the venue’s location in China. I conducted a total of 59 semi-structured interviews with museum visitors. The random sample comprised 59% female and 41% male visitors. Of them, 69% were graduates and current students at university level, 80% were those who had come to Shenzhen from other provinces for the purpose of work or education, 42 and 73% were aged 20 to 30. 43 . In short, ‘educated youth and visitors from other provinces’ constituted the majority of visitors to the museum. Based on their narratives of their interests and experiences in the museum, I characterized the visitors in terms of the following six distinct identities: ‘culturalists’, ‘utilitarian art learners’, ‘leisure consumers’, ‘revolutionary history enthusiasts’, ‘social learners’, and ‘aesthetic cosmopolitans’. According to how they interpreted the subject matter of the museum, the first four visitor segments tended to integrate themselves with or adapt to the museum production, while the latter two segments were more inclined to adopt a negotiated position in which opinions varied according to their prior knowledge or their prior cultural experience. 42 The remaining 20% were tourists mainly from other provinces in mainland China, except one from Hong Kong, and one New Zealand immigrant who was born in Shenzhen. Out of the 59 interviewees, there was only one native Shenzhen resident. 43 The detailed breakdown is 41% aged 20-25, 32% aged 25-30, 12% aged 30-40, 5% aged 50-60, and 10% aged 60-80.

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Table 3.1 Modes of museum identification of the visitors of He Xiangning Art

Types of identity

Museum Integrative/Adaptive

Negotiated

Culturalists Utilitarian art learners Leisure consumers Revolutionary history enthusiasts

Aesthetic cosmopolitans Social learners

Culturalists refer to those who believe in the Chinese concept of ‘wenhua xiuyang’. These visitors regarded culture as essential for their personal development, and as something that could be acquired and realized through museum visits. In Chinese culture, ‘wenhua xiuyang’ generally refers to cultivated persons who have both knowledge of and refinement in morals and manners. This concept emphasizes the cultivation of cognitive subjects who have attitudes, ways of thinking, and feelings embodying the integration of modes of thinking with theories of values and the pursuit of truth and things that are good (Xu and Huang 2008). This visitor segment, consisting of different ages, generally used the words ‘wenhua xiuyang’ to describe their visiting purposes. In some cases, they defined their experience as cultivating and strengthening art literacy, improving their minds, or enhancing a personal cultural spirit. These visitors exclusively focused their interest on Chinese traditional culture and engaged with He Xiangning’s works to varying degrees according to their previous knowledge. Some felt comfortable engaging with her works because of the accessibility of her realistic art style and their familiarity with Chinese traditional literati culture. Most of them used the method of describing what they saw in the paintings, such as flowers, animals, or images of the tiger or the plum. Others who had previous knowledge of Chinese artistic traditions demonstrated their capacities in communicating about the paintings in a refined way, as in this example below: I had no interest at all in the ‘double vision’ exhibition for I didn’t quite know the (contemporary) works […] It was great to see those traditional landscape paintings. I almost indulged in the ‘yijing’ [Yijing means ‘to write down an idea’ or ‘to express a mood’. It was a Chinese artistic expression for seeking infinite meanings beyond appearance and image, and an artistic style commonly founded in literati paintings presented in simple compositions with strong or delicate brushstrokes in ink.] I remember

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my teacher identified to me the difference between Chinese and Western art. Chinese art is more yijing, while Western art is more realistic and formulated. (A female university student)

Another visitor, a retired university teacher who had a longstanding interest in literature and calligraphy, emphasized that the museum was all about ‘wenhua xiuyang’, and was important for spiritual and cultural pursuits. He highly appreciated He Xiangning’s paintings. He believed that connecting with the artist’s feeling would help him inherit and absorb China’s rich culture. The idea of ‘wenhua xiuyang’ can also be applied to the motives of casual visitors. For example, a university biology student referred to himself as someone with little cultural knowledge, but who thought that the museum visit would help him become more cultivated and knowledgeable. To him, He Xiangning had an amiable character that made it easier for him to understand her works. This visitor segment demonstrated a shared quest for cultivation through engagement with Chinese traditional culture. These visitors considered the museum to be a symbol or a place where they can associate with their cultural tradition, and identify themselves with traditional, ideal types of subjects. Nonetheless, their kind of cultivation can also be seen as entailing an ideological becoming, or a process of shaping personal identity. This context is much different from the collective alignment of the traditional literati, or the formation of masses whose memories and actions were strongly mobilized in the Maoist Communist era. According to David Holmes (1997, 39), personalization is a way for people to know how to consume cultural commodities with a degree of flexibility and choice. In the digital age, they experience the illusion of complete autonomy in relation to those commodities. In this regard, this visitor segment consists of modern cultural consumers who identify the museum with Chinese cultural tradition, and who have gone through a personal process of mediating consumption between what was projected by the museum and what they could comprehend or contemplate based on their previous knowledge or their experience of cultural self-cultivation. Utilitarian art learners refer to those visitors who came to the museum in search of knowledge to enable them to meet educational or professional demands in the specialized arts production system. This visitor segment used the museum as a learning platform and confirmed the museum’s role as an active agent for the production of knowledge. These visitors mainly work in the cultural industries and study art-related subjects. A 25-year-old girl from Foshan, who worked in the art expo field in

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Shenzhen, stated that she came to the museum partly for her job and partly for enjoyment. Finding the museum innovative and inspiring, she sought to update herself about the artworks it contains. Possessing art-related skills and knowledge, she was able to give a detailed account of a photography work that impressed her. Another visitor was a white-collar worker doing a major in language studies. She particularly paid attention to artworks that were related to her communication subjects at university. She stated that she expected to learn more about the thoughts and attitudes of others, and to get inspiration for her language education. An architecture student came to see the museum’s building. He praised the museum space, but he considered it to be incompatible with He Xiangning’s soft artistic expression and her political background. He felt that his visit enhanced his knowledge about light and space in architecture. A 27-year-old designer from Wuhan, who was working in Shenzhen, expected to learn more about people’s ways of thinking and to get some inspiration for his design work. Likewise, a photographer told me that he often visited the museum, because he considered the contemporary works to be inspiring and it gave him new ideas for his creative work. Leisure consumers were those who used the museum for a spiritual retreat or work relief. They can be seen as urban escapists responding to an increasingly materialistic society. Instead of communicating about the exhibitions or artworks, this visitor segment tended to enjoy the museum’s space or its environment. They separated their experience in the museum from their materialistic consumer life. A university student studying English considered her visit as a cultural and leisure activity. She most enjoyed the museum’s serene environment and felt it to be very peaceful and entirely different from her experience visiting shopping malls. A university design student who lived nearby said that she came to the museum to immerse in what she called ‘the atmosphere of art’. This was very unlike her daily life practices, such as shopping and going to the movies, which she described as fast-food experiences. She felt that the art museum was much more educational. A young couple who studied economics came to the museum after a visit to the creative markets in the nearby Overseas Contemporary Art Terminal. The girl who worked in the media industry felt that museum visits could help her with emptying her mind. As a painting student, she believed that art could make her inner self calm and quiet. She said that the art museum led her to another (spiritual) realm and helped her cultivate her mind. Revolutionary history enthusiasts were those whose attitudes resonated with the state’s ethos of nationalism by cultivating nostalgia for the revolutionary past.

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There were one or two elderly visitors expressing a strong sense of having had a revolutionary spirit in the old days, stressing the revolution’s pedagogical function and longing for its continuity. For instance, a 75-year-old man expressed tremendous fondness of He Xiangning. Coming from Hunan, the elderly man said that he used to write down some comments after visiting the exhibition or in front of the statue of Mao Zedong. He commented that the exhibition did not fully reflect the spirit of Liao’s family, but the revolutionary spirit present in Xiangning’s works could offer good instructions for the new generation. He also stressed the importance of reminding people not to forget the past, and his concerns about the dangers of diverging from the revolutionary spirit. He even thought that the behaviour of the 1980s and 1990s generation today might lead to the collapse of the country. Social learners include those visitors who communicated about artworks from a social perspective. They adopted a critical inquiry or a reflective approach, and expected the museum to be a place in which social issues can be addressed. Contemporary works are relatively abstract because they have no fixed meaning, and can be apprehended by the audience in different ways. In the ‘Double vision’ contemporary exhibition, visitors were invited to engage either intellectually or phenomenologically with art. They pondered the issues of individual and social identity, shaped by the different conceptions of gender, belief, and personal affiliation that are roaming the globe and penetrating everyday life today. Most of the visitors belonging to this segment were able to conceptually engage with the exhibition; they tended to navigate the different perspectives on everyday life that came from the outside world. As one visitor said, The works have great powers of influence. Their attitudes and thinking are not the same at all and are so different from mine. I really want to see through these things and get to know the reasons behind their production.

A Fuzhou University graduate, currently a worker in the fashion industry, was on her first visit to Shenzhen. The museum was very different from the artefact museums that she had encountered in the past. To her, the exhibition was concerned with people’s understanding of their own existence and the people around them, and how their experiences can be communicated and participated in. Likewise, a university graduate in engineering considered contemporary art to offer him an alternative perspective about today’s society, and about the way artists express themselves in a fast-changing society.

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The exhibition also enticed visitors who applied a gender perspective to the works. A master’s graduate in business who worked in a media firm showed great interest in the photography works by female artists. She was uncertain about the artists’ intentions, but was impressed by their unique perspectives. A young law graduate was especially impressed by the pictures showing the relationship between a boy and a girl and some female bodies. She described herself as an ordinary girl with sensitivity to beautiful things. Similarly, a male visitor, who studied engineering in university, was fond of a work that depicted a relationship between men and women. It made him wonder about the differences between males and females in terms of thinking and desire. Apart from contemporary works, classical artwork also encouraged visitors to rethink their museum experience in relation to social institutions. Interestingly, a young man who was impressed by the calligraphy of Mao Zedong, wondered why he thought of Mao as a great man. He said it might be because of the communist education he had received, and it was a way for communists to keep their governing power. When expressing this, he was hesitant and said that he considered himself rebellious. This visitor segment also included those who expected culture to play a role in addressing social problems. A 25-year-old university graduate and local resident expressed her disappointment about Shenzhen’s development into a place with no sense of history and culture. In her eyes, it was just a business city where people were impetuous and would only return to their own home places after securing monetary gains. She expected to see exhibitions that could address the social problems of the city. The last visitor segment was the aesthetic cosmopolitans. Aesthetic cosmopolitan is a term used to express those who have a capacity and desire to experience or consume the cultural products of ‘others’ within the context of cultural globalization, or those who immerse themselves in other cultures from the sociological perspective of travel or tourism (Sassatelli 2011, 23). I use the term here to refer to those visitors who reveal curiosity or interest in the art and culture of others. Their responses contain evaluative comments based on their previous cultural experience in overseas or local art museums. Their capacity and desire to consume different cultures was, to a certain extent, associated with an expectation of greater diversity in cultural displays. The multimedia works are mainly from academic artists. They are presenting the complex, inner self of humans, and are related to international relations and sentiments. Whereas the He Xiangning’s exhibition is more

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about political relationships, her work using lions to express her feelings is a metaphorical method commonly used amongst the literati in ancient China. I think it’d be better for people to have more freedom and chances to view foreign works. I hope this will happen in the future. (A middle-aged native woman who had learned art before emigrating to New Zealand)

Other visitors demonstrated a broader cultural imagination. They expected the museum to not only shape the city’s cultural life, but also to increase its relevance to their everyday life. I am interested in art, particularly Expressionism and Dada. They enlightened Western art and were creative thinkers at some point. I have been to the Dafen [Oil Painting] Village. I am very much into the three dimensions projected by the oil paintings […] I hope the museum will give priority to collecting local works, and then works from other countries. (An English student, regular museum visitor) Shenzhen is a creative city and should be inclusive of ‘world cultures’. The folk culture villages are reflective of cultural integration, but little is representing Shenzhen culture. Compared with Hong Kong, Shenzhen is less influenced by the West. I hope that the museum will showcase innovative works with greater diversity. (A university student) I sometimes go to Hong Kong. The cultural events there are more culturally diverse. This museum is more like an off icial cultural exchange programme of the state, and is seldom publicized. I usually go to the OCAT loft which is closer to peoples’ lives and able to reflect Shenzhen local culture. (A young girl and regular museum-goer) Unlike Mongolia and other regions where culture and history are richer, Shenzhen is a young city but with a lot of energy. The museum should be used to reflect the city character […] people now need to improve cultural cultivation. Their standards of living have increased. Cultural activities have not, but they really matter to this city. (A university student majoring in physics) I seldom go to museums […] it is because the museums in China are all about the Communist Party. There is little meaning to me […] I expect to see both Chinese and Western art. They are mutually communicative. (An English university student)

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Overall, visitors rarely revealed a state of mind aligned with the state’s interest in Chineseness, ethnicity, or political patriotism. The museum attracts diverse publics who adopt an integrative or negotiated position in communicating with the state art museum and its contents. Based on the meanings they generate from what they value and experience, ‘culturalists’, ‘utilitarian art learners’, ‘leisure consumers’, ‘revolutionary history enthusiasts’, ‘social learners’, and ‘aesthetic cosmopolitans’ have different modes of orientation towards the museum system. Only ‘revolutionary history enthusiasts’ are closely connected with the state’s political ethos of nationalism, while ‘culturalists’ are inclined towards Chinese cultural tradition. The former group identifies with party loyalty and revolutionary history, while the latter identifies with cultural continuity and the idea of the essence of Chinese tradition. In addition, with academic and cultural elites actively involved in offering new cultural knowledge to the public, the museum has demonstrated its potency in enticing other types of visitors such as ‘utilitarian art learners’ and ‘social learners’. Its contemplative space has also offered a source of relief for ‘leisure consumers’ against the background of a fast-growing consumer society. Yet it falls short of the expectation of ‘aesthetic cosmopolitans’ who situate themselves in a broader cultural imagination beyond the state’s prescription of the national boundaries of China’s culture. They present a form of cultural negotiation in which opinions vary according to previous cultural experiences. Overall, the visitors have different cultural orientations, ranging from personal identification with Chinese traditions, political culture, foreign culture, to the fulfilment of the needs of the cultural industry, leisure, and education. The diversification and fragmentation of public interests, attitudes, and beliefs undermines the formation of the image of a homogeneous national public propagated by the state.

3.6

Concluding remarks

This chapter has presented a new understanding of China’s national art museum reflecting its cultural, institutional, and ideological changes, the emergence of a rational communicative public sphere involving interaction between museum intermediaries, and the dominant cultural needs of the middle class. The He Xiangning Art Museum is institutionally located within a specific national context that reflects the interrelated political, economic, and institutional conditions of cultural production in China from the late 1990s

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to the present. Its institutional arrangements allow for relative autonomy in absorbing additional skills and knowledge through invited curatorship, collaboration with art academics, and a broader institutional network. This dynamic system is found within the state museum enterprise, which is largely occupied by state bureaucrats and under direct ideological supervision. The organizational change is also important for explaining the increasingly influential role of museum intermediaries who work surrounded by a state discourse wrought by nationalistic, diplomatic, and developmentalist ideologies. Although inseparable from the institutional structures affecting them, museum intermediaries have channelled their cultural capital and added their own values and strategic communication components to the museum. More than simply being ‘taste gatekeepers’, they act as reflexive producers who actively interpret, redefine, and negotiate contemporary and modern Chinese art and, in turn, occupy a professional niche in the system of museum regulation. They publicize their approaches to revisiting history based on their disciplinary knowledge, manage geopolitical-cultural relations based on contemporary curating methods and public diplomacy strategies, and generate discussion on the relationship between art and society. Together, they can be seen as contributing to the formation of a public sphere based upon Habermasian ‘communicative rationality’, and demonstrate the attributes of a rational, negotiated nation-state. They have played an increasing role in negotiating meaning at the interface of expertise and official discourse, and at the sites of cultural exchange at both local and regional levels. Within the cultural production system, audiences act as message receivers or contemplators of art. The educated and economically privileged urban elites constitute the core visitors. Mostly coming from other provinces, they have settled in the frontier city of Shenzhen. They present a micro-cosmos of diverse cultural identities that reveal the dynamic juxtapositions between political culture, tradition, and contemporary cultures driven by global forces, the cultural industry and mass consumption that are in operation in Shenzhen. The increasing diversification and fragmentation of public interests, values, beliefs, and lifestyles have undermined the assumed cultural consensus and the conception of a unified national public. The study contributes to explaining how culture and politics are interwoven with the relationship between what is ostensibly an emerging public sphere and the dominant middle-class museum public under a national museum system that exists in South China in its post-reform era. In the first place, this study has sought to query the institutional boundaries set up by nationalist and economic policy agendas and to recognize the agency of

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museum intermediaries in positing values that alter the meanings promoted by the discourses of the state. It reveals a divergent set of ideologies and methodologies that are juxtaposed with (or contradictory to) the cultural practices of the government and illuminate the changing production of signification and the contestation of the nation that has emerged in China since the early 2000s. Secondly, the visitor study has attested to Bourdieu’s distinct (Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu, Darbel, and Schnapper 1991) image of the museum public as a bourgeois public. His pioneering visitor survey in Europe in the 1960s found that only the middle-class segment of the population visited art museums. Bourdieu’s work reveals social processes and institutions as working together to produce the art public and shape their cultural value and conception of art. The sociological-empirical approach provoked debate around issues of class-based culture and homogenous taste (Prior 2005). It has generally raised the issue of access to culture in society. The social profile of the museum’s middle-class visitors, as shown in this case study, has provided a vantage point for us to think of the impact of the museum on social differentiation and to reflect on the matter of cultural inclusivity and exclusivity in the context of the highly stratified society that has emerged in China over the past decade.

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4. Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou Abstract This chapter examines the museum circuit of the Guangdong Times Museum, a private art museum led by a real-estate company in Guangzhou. It argues that the urban private economy has opened up a new space for the development of private museums independent of the state activities, one that arguably favours the development of civil society. The museum’s cultural intermediaries, based upon a strong network of local and global independent cultural actors, arguably have contributed to constructing a ‘public cultural sphere’, which imagines a shared community and directs it towards becoming an autonomous and independent public. The museum’s visitors, mainly educated young adults, can be categorized into six distinct identities. The majority of them can explore new meanings and engage in this ‘alternative museum culture’. Keywords: private museum, contemporary art, private economy, civil society, public cultural sphere

The Guangdong Times Museum (abbreviated as Times Museum) in Guangzhou originated from an architectural and artistic idea for responding to the urbanization process and stimulating artistic production in the Pearl River Delta region. It is located at the northern edge of Guangzhou city and occupies the top floor of a middle-class residential building owned by the company the Times Property. Since its inception in October 2010, the museum’s reflexive artistic and curatorial practices can be seen as striving to transcend the local-global boundary and to construct a new regional identity, making it an alternative institutional model for art museums in the region. This nongovernmental organization offers a distinctive cultural circuit that can help to form a particular kind of cultural public sphere

Ho, S.C.F., Museum Processes in China: The Institutional Regulation, Production, and Consumption of the Art Museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi: 10.5117/9789463723527_ch04

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Illustration 4.1  The rooftop gallery of the Guangdong Times Museum

Photo by the author

that is relatively independent of the state and relies on nongovernment organizations operating under the purview of the private economy in contemporary China. Based on the analytical framework of the ‘museum circuit’, this chapter specifically examines the primary factors involved in the creation and operation of the museum, including the real estate developer, the state and other institutional factors, the museum intermediaries and their practices, and the various types of museum visitors. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section examines how the museum is initiated by creative professionals and regulated by both the real estate developer and the state. It also identifies the museum’s production culture and a range of cultural intermediaries involved in the organizational network and production. In this case, the relatively democratic, autonomous organization structure is the key feature that not only allows the museum intermediaries to impose their cultural agendas in the public domain but also strikes a balance between social representation and commercial interests. To further understand why and how the intermediaries, mainly local and global curators and artists involved with this museum produce their ideas and activities, the subsequent two sections examine in detail their core practices. Section 2 explicates how they have articulated the global

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forms and concepts of contemporary art through their core exhibitions and programmes. It is divided into four parts, which respectively focus on the artistic and curatorial practices for de-commodifying art and life, for addressing the politics of everyday life, for constructing a critical relationship between art and society, and for promoting institutional self-critique and reformulation. Section 3 discusses the museum’s effort to construct a regional narrative of art history and expand its institutional discursive space in order to differentiate itself from the northern capital’s cultural hegemony and set forth the horizons of a southern imaginary. The museum’s entire cultural production suggests that it is relatively autonomous within the fields of economic production and the state. It has served as a critical reference point in society for mobilizing the ‘glocalization’ process, asserting regional agency in the cultural construction of a heterogeneous conception of China. The final section examines the consumption processes in which the visitors orient their modes of cultural identif ication and demonstrate their positions in relation to museum production. Based on the interviews with visitors and my ethnographic fieldwork, it finds that the segment of educated youth makes up the majority of the museum visitors. Based on the interpretation of their visiting experiences, they revealed what I classify as being six distinct identities: ‘the imaginative audience’, ‘participants’, ‘social learners’, ‘meaningful leisure seekers’, ‘committed visitors’, and ‘classic museum visitors’. Amongst them, only the last segment, ‘classic museum visitors’, were inclined to take up a negotiated position concerning their experiences in the museum. All other segments demonstrated their adaptability to or compatibility with the productions of the museum. The museum demonstrates its potency in shaping this educated youth segment by making possible autonomous acts of exploration of new meanings and mobilizing their engagement with an ‘alternative culture’. This alternative mode of cultural consumption would appear to be subversive of the current social and political context in China. On the one hand, the country is moving beyond material necessities, towards the formation of leisure lifestyles in urban areas (Rolandsen 2011), and on the other hand, it is subject to the influence of both state and popular culture propagated by the entertainment media (for examples, Zhao 1998; Donald, Hong, and Keane 2002; Latham 2007). The conclusion of this chapter summarizes the various intersecting types of capital that the museum uses to produce a unique form of public culture. In short, the museum has demonstrated cultural agency in reconciling market interests and state regulations, and has envisaged an alternative culture that responds to the present, the interrelations between local and

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Illustration 4.2  The main entrance of the Guangdong Times Museum

Photo by the author

global, and the internal regional geopolitics, and is increasingly conductive to a transnational cultural sphere.

4.1

Institutional boundaries: the private market, the state, and society

This section explicates the museum’s regulation structures, its production culture (and its culture of production), and the actors involved in it. As a private museum, the Times Museum is founded by a real estate company. From conceptualizing and designing to the final materialization of the exhibitions, the museum reflects the cultural-economic conditions in which the real estate developer has played a role in shaping urban consumption lifestyles and developing corporate philanthropy, on the one hand, and the creative professionals have been involved in generating new ideas and knowledge, on the other hand. At the same time, as a state-registered civil organization, the museum has a certain degree of social autonomy, which is exercised within the borders of state regulation. Separated from the central management structures of the real estate developer, the museum maintains a democratic organizational structure in which cultural producers have secured a relatively high degree of autonomy in cultural production

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activities. The museum intermediaries include both local and global artists and curators/managers, independent art spaces and collectives, and practitioners from other disciplines. This demonstrates that the rise of an urban market economy has opened up a new space for the development of cultural organizations independent of the state. Times Museum originated from an artistic and architectural concept designed by the Dutch architects Rem Koolhaas and Alain Fouraux, with the financial support of the real estate corporation Times Property. In 2005, the architectural thinker and urbanist Rem Koolhaas inspected the atrium of the Times Rose Garden, which was reserved by the corporation for building the new museum. According to Koolhaas, the Delta’s urban condition is a new form of urban coexistence that he calls ‘a city with exacerbated differences’ (abbreviated as CWED) (Chung et al. 2001, 28). When a traditional city strives for a condition of balance, harmony, and a certain degree of homogeneity, the idea of CWED is based on ‘the greatest possible difference between its parts – complementary or competition’ (ibid., 29). Based on his study of the urban landscape of the Pearl River Delta, Koolhaas proposed a new and innovative idea of building the new museum at the top of three residential buildings, and finally came up to a design scheme with Fouraux (Guangdong Times Museum 2017b). Embedded in the Times Rose Garden, a residential building owned by the corporation, the museum attempts to absorb the commercial, cultural, and social content of urban life, and to inject innovative and diverse vitality into it. The project was first showcased in the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial and became part of the Guangdong Museum of Art in 2005. The Times Property group later elicited support from all the apartment owners to materialize the project (Shen 2012). The company has been one of the leading real-estate enterprises in China since the early 2000s, with a mission of ‘helping more people live the lifestyle they are longing for’. Its business activities mainly consist of residential and commercial building projects and creative complexes built in the cities of Southern China. The Times Museum is one of the projects that have been used for building the enterprise’s image. The museum opened to the public in October 2010. Times Museum is located in a newly built nineteen-storey fashionable, middle-class residential apartment building in the Baiyun District at the northern edge of Guangzhou, where the urbanization process has been accelerating since the 1990s. The museum has an exhibition hall, a flower café shop, a reading room, a small archive on the top floor, a museum off ice on the fourteenth floor, and on the ground floor a lobby, an art bookshop, a creative gift shop, and a café, which can be turned into an

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event space.1 The overall configuration of cultural consumption combining art, leisure, knowledge, and activity is compatible with the company’s marketing strategy as reflected in its corporate slogan ‘life stylist’. The ‘art museum’ has become a tool for bridging art and life, and for creating a symbol of a high quality of life involving distinctive design and stylish cultural products. When asked about why the company built the museum in its residential compound, the museum director (also the director-general of the Brand and Marketing Centre of Times Property), Zhao Ju said that the company has a role in contributing to public welfare, and technically it was obliged by state regulations to provide public facilities in the building project. He added that there was a need to develop a unique company brand to distinguish it from other real estate companies.2 The company’s image of ‘art and life’ has been used as a marketing strategy to associate gallery experience with living experience in contemporary China’s commodityfocused capitalist culture. In the fast-developing urbanization process occurring in the PRD region, the company has played a role in shaping an urban consumption lifestyle, rather than simply using art to achieve economic gain in the name of ‘public welfare’. In addition, the company has played a philanthropic role in developing the museum into a centre of public life. In a local media report, Zhao Ju expressed the view that the museum is a charitable contribution to art and culture; it is academic and community-oriented rather than being an investment in the art market or cultural industry (Guangdong Times Museum 2017a). This museum model reflects ideas of corporate social responsibility, and leads us to reimagine the role of developers, who are commonly criticized for their use of ‘starchitecture’ or museums for selling their real estate projects, or attracting buyers from the burgeoning middle class. Furthermore, Zhao Ju, with an educational background in both economies and art management, is an active spokesman for the field of private museums, and plays a key role in strategic positioning and operational strategy of the museum (Pan 2015). Through him we can see that the role of museum intermediaries is not limited to dealing with art/objects, exhibitions/activities, or audiences, but extends to directing the museum and defining the roles and functions of museums in society. 1 During my visit at the end of 2017, a temporary book corner had replaced the flower café shop; and the art bookshop on the ground floor had become a café. In addition, to be more receptive, the museum accommodates a reception counter, a monitor introducing its patrons and partners, the Banyan Commune Space, and a multifunctional hall on the ground floor. 2 Interview with museum director Zhao Ju, 10 June 2015, Guangzhou.

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Private museums in mainland China are registered as private companies or civil organizations. The Times Museum is registered with the Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Civil Affairs as a nongovernmental organization (NGO, or minjian zuzhi) placed in the category of nonprofit institutions. As Yu Keping (2011) notes, China has a broad range of classifications of civil organizations. It is important to clearly identify here the prominent characteristics of the museum. First, it is an independent organization that does not represent the state and its government. Second, it is a nonprofit entity. The museum does not take profit-making as the main purpose of its existence, but it nonetheless earns income through the sale of creative design products, contracting out its ancillary facilities, and levying entry charges.3 To diversify its financial and social support base, the museum has created a patron system and a membership programme targeting private enterprises and individuals. In addition, it formed alliances with other art spaces to run a fundraising campaign in 2016, despite the fact that the museum is financially dependent on the Times Property and its charity foundation, which has an annual budget under ten million RMB. 4 Third, it is relatively independent in terms of administration and management. The director of the museum is appointed by the Times Property, but he is mainly responsible for financial issues. Decision-making is carried out by a committee through a voting system. Fourth, cultural producers connected with the museum are professionally paid. The full-time staff is paid according to their job duties, professional qualifications, and experience. They are also entitled to undertake annual training through field trips to international exhibitions and events. The Times Museum is a nongovernmental organization, but like other civil organizations in China, the museum is under micro-institutional regulation and subject to supervision by the government.5 In an effort to maintain greater autonomy, the museum has seldom collaborated with government organizations or state museums. Its exhibition or programme partners range from artists’ collectives and independent art spaces to art academies, foreign 3 The policy has become effective since the introduction of a new managerial system in 2017. Currently, the museum’s entry fee is 30 RMB (approximately 4 US dollars), and it offers free admission for children and senior or disabled citizens, and 50% discounts for students and teachers, and group visitors. 4 The figure was given by Zhao Ju, during his interview (10 June 2015). 5 According to Yu Keping (2011, 79-83), in China, the macro-institutional environment is generally favourable to the growth of civil society, but in terms of micro-institutions, particularly government laws and regulations, civil organizations in China are all subject to the hierarchical registration and multiple supervisions by the government at different levels.

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consulates, or cultural organizations. However, the museum model does not reflect the Western notion of civil society as something separated from the state and the market economy. On the one hand, although separated from the party-state, the museum does not maintain an antagonistic relationship with it. It has been officially recognized as a 4A social organization (the highest rating amongst all art institutions at the provincial level) by the government of Guangdong in 2017.6 It also started considering project grants from the government. On the other hand, the museum has formed a civil-led public sphere dependent on the market economy but increasingly moving towards greater social representation since the introduction of a new managerial system in 2017. The system is led by two independent committees: an academic committee comprised of Chinese and international Asian curators and scholars7 and a trustee board comprised of art patrons who contribute their profitable returns on their investment in the Times Property group. The committees respectively aim to achieve the academic independence and financial autonomy of the museum. The new system is an experiment for institutionalizing minjian art museums in Chinese society, which is understood in Chinese as ‘meishuguan shehuihua’ (literally meaning ‘socialization of art museums’) (Qu 2017). Although founded and funded by the Times Property, the museum’s internal organization is an autonomous entity with decentralized leadership and relatively democratized decision-making. As of 2016, there are fifteen full-time staff members working in four main units, namely, administration, exhibitions, public programmes, and marketing. The museum director, seconded from Times Property, works as the head of administration and is mainly responsible for financial issues. The exhibition and public programmes are core production departments. The former consists of two curators, two assistant curators, and an installer. The latter comprises a director, two managers, a communicator, and a designer. The heads of both departments have received Western educations covering fine arts, contemporary curating, and visual culture. Before 2017, the museum had appointed two distinguished scholars and curators as advisors on Chinese contemporary art8 and it occasionally sought advice from local artists and 6 ‘Guangdong Shidai Meishuguan bei ping wei 4A ji shehui zuzhi’ (The Guangdong Times Museum was rated as a 4A social organization), Read01.com, 22 October 2018, https://read01. com/zh-hk/0eegz83.html#.Wo4JhahuaUm, accessed 14 June 2019. 7 Members of the Academic Committee of Guangdong Times Museum (2017-2019) include Hou Hanru, Pi Li, Liu Xiaodong, Kim Sunjung (Seoul, Korea), and Patrick D. Flores (The Philippines). 8 They were Wang Huangsheng (artist, scholar and the Director of CAFA Art Museum) and Hou Hanru (an international Chinese curator based in France).

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critics.9 The museum staff made all the decisions and did not need to get approval from the company. Programme and exhibition proposals were initiated and discussed in the team before being submitted to a committee, consisting of seven members comprising the museum director, the two official advisors, the two curators, and the programme director. Full votes were required for passing large-scale projects while four votes were sufficient for smaller projects.10 Since the introduction of the new managerial system in 2017, the five members from the newly established academic committee have joined the internal committee to assess the yearly programme plans, which are not exclusive to internal departments, as well as examining external proposals through an open application system.11 In short, the Times Museum has striven to build up a programme with professional leadership, and an internal system that can accommodate greater democracy in the decision-making process, and wider social representation and participation in museum production. Nonetheless, internal curatorial and programme leaders and the appointed external academic committee members remain the key initiators and mediators regulating the design, selection, and directives of exhibitions and programmes. Based on its exhibition and programme records, the museum has involved a wide range of cultural intermediaries. Firstly, mid-career and emerging contemporary artists, designers, performers, filmmakers, and architects are engaged in interdisciplinary exchange and help to integrate new ideas, technologies, and knowledge from other fields into the art field. For instance, in the Bishan Project of 2011, artists, architects, rural construction experts, writers, directors, designers, musicians, local scholars engaged in studies of rural culture, folk handicrafts people, and folk opera artists all joined together to explore methodologies for the reconstruction of public life in rural villages. Secondly, the museum has frequently engaged artists and curators from diverse cultural backgrounds coming from across the globe. In addition to organizing debut shows for some well-known international contemporary artists,12 the ‘Open Studio’, a short-term residency, was set up for artists to 9 For example, Chen Tong, the founder of Libreria Borges Institute for Contemporary Art in Guangzhou, and Xu Tan, the member of the ‘Big Tail Elephant Group’ (Da Wei Xiang), an experimental artistic group formed in Guangzhou. 10 Interview with Zhao Ju, 2015. 11 Dabianlu (2017) ‘Minying meishuguan de yang he dao: Zhao Ju he Sun Li de tanhua’ (A news report on an interview with [the museum director] Zhao Ju about the development of nongovernmental art museums), Read01.com, 22 October 2018, https://read01.com/2LoGLo. html#.WnQAoqiWaUl, accessed 24 June 2019. 12 For example, Tino Sehgal and Nobuyoshi Araki.

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create site-specific works where they responded to the production context and stimulated the audience’s engagement in the process of artistic production. For example, in the ‘Shift-Exhibition’ of 2011, a group of young American resident-artists created works by utilizing the materials from the wholesale markets in Guangzhou. Seminars were held to facilitate their exchange with five other young and mid-career artists from China. In another notable programme, the annual seminar entitled ‘the para-curatorial series’, the museum has regularly engaged international and emerging curators in dialogue on various topics, including curatorial and artistic practices, art research, and collection. Thirdly, self-organized and independent art collectives and private institutions are commonly involved in the museum’s activities. In 2014, an exhibition entitled ‘Positive Space’ was mounted to represent twelve active self-organized institutions in China. In spite of the differences in their organizational structures and methodologies, the institutions shared common goals with the museum in promoting art research and production and in building a bond with the local art community. Collaborators and supporters of the museum are wide-ranging, including academics, independent art spaces, private art organizations, foreign consulates, cultural organizations, and media companies. Its media support mainly comes from private or independent art platforms and social media such as Weibo and WeChat.13 In particular, WeChat has been used as an interactive tool for the audience to register for events and communicate with the staff. The museum also has a strong alliance with local independent art organizations and spaces. It is affiliated with a local research-led, nonprofit art-making institution: HB (Huangbian) Station. In 2016, the museum formed a coalition called ‘Wu Xing Hui’14 with other local art spaces,15 with the aim of fostering the contemporary art ecology in Guangzhou. The coalition has co-organized a fund-raising activity to auction artwork donated by artists, and to seek the support from collectors and private companies. To summarize, the museum as a contemporary private art museum has reflected China’s distinctive economic-cultural conditions in which the active private economy has used art to shape the lifestyle of a growing middle class in urban areas. With financial support from the Times Property group, 13 Like WhatsApp and Line, WeChat is a social media platform for small groups of friends. It is different from Weibo, which is a more open public platform for information, news, stories, and for speaking publicly. 14 ‘Wu Xing’ refers to the Five Elements (wuxing) defined by Chinese Astrology. 15 The organizations are Libreria Borges, Video Bureau, HB (Huangbian) Station: Chinese contemporary art research centre, and Observatory.

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the museum has a role in supporting private corporate interests, and in developing corporate philanthropy. In addition, as part of the strategy of the creative labour, the museum was designed to be a creative hub promoting the revitalization of space and communities. The museum is a social organization under the micro-regulation of the government. At the same time, it has an autonomous organizational structure and a strong local-global network, with independent, organic, and collective forces and creative workers that have enabled individual agency in the museum. This dynamic system manifests itself as being proactive within the private cultural enterprise, which is largely preoccupied with the art market. It has become a salient site for accommodating the increasing ambitions of art and interdisciplinary intermediaries in absorbing the influence of globalization and empowering themselves as active agents in local and regional cultural constructions. It has demonstrated a new space for independent cultural organizations, which exist with the support of both the private economy and the cultural sphere.

4.2

A developmental perspective of cultural globalization

From the outset, the Times Museum has positioned itself at the intersection of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’. It is committed to ‘facilitating the dialogue between China and the world and providing a platform for artistic production beyond borders’16. In this section, I explain why and how the museum has represented contemporary art through its engagement with both global and local cultural capital. The process can be abstractly understood from the ‘developmental perspective’, a term coined by Doreen Wu (2008, 3). It is ‘a perspective that is beyond the liberal and critical perspectives and conceptualizes cultural globalization as a process of “glocalization” – as a dialectical process between the global and the local forces in cultural change and formation’. As she notes, the notion of ‘glocalization’ was first presented by [Roland] Robertson (1995) in the attempt to overcome the weaknesses in the notion of ‘globalization’ which emphasizes the development of cultural convergence, suggesting a rigid, one-way process from the West to the rest of the world and slighting the heterogenized force of local cultures in the change process. (Wu 2008, 3) 16 See the webpage of the Guangdong Times Museum, ‘Introduction’, http://www.timesmuseum. org/about, accessed 20 December 2018.

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Through forums or exhibition praxis, artists and cultural agents review their own practices and actively negotiate the theories of others in their work. These practices are interiorized by the agents involved for the purpose of de-commodifying art, addressing the politics of everyday life and the critical relationship between art and society, and providing institutional self-critique and reformulation in contemporary China. These are the prominent forms of agency that have been mobilized by the museum intermediaries in their cultural production undertakings that operate at the global-local nexus. Critique of art commodification The museum demonstrates a local embeddedness in the global context of contemporary art, with common resistance to the commodification of art accelerated by the global art market. In my interview with her in 2015, the museum curator Nikita Cai said that the purpose of the museum is not to establish an (academic) canon but to explore the possibilities for negotiating and openly discussing issues that concern society. In addition, she pointed out that private art collecting in China was now measured in terms of economic value, and it was simply used for the accumulation of and speculation with capital. To her, the private museum works like a Kunsthalle, which is more or less a gallery with art exhibitions and different kinds of activities, but not necessarily with a permanent art collection. Presented in the form of installations, multimedia projects, archival materials, performances, workshops and forums, the types of art or art practices exhibited in the museum are largely conceptual, nonmaterial, performative, interactive, collaborative, and process- or dialogue-based. They have encouraged diverse conversations and encounters, which shape the art museum as an active discursive space. The discursive practice of contemporary art arising from a global phenomenon is a critique of the commoditizing of art and the use of the white-cube exhibition space in the service of the bourgeois public (von Osten 2005). In addition, since the alternative museum is apparently free from the influence of fixed identities, institutional viewpoints, and official rhetoric, it has the potential to produce new knowledge that transcends the limits of existing norms of social or political communication and engagement, and to create dialogue and generate a powerful transformation in the consciousness of participants (Kester 2005). Over the years, the museum has invited artists to perform or create temporal works that oppose the conventions and commerciality of art. For instance, in 2012, the international artist Tino Sehgal, who openly rejected any

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physical documentation of his works, presented two ‘constructed situations’ in the museum and other art institutions across China to generate different interactions in the venues. The museum has also presented immaterialized and de-commodified artistic production to promote discussion amongst local artists. In the show ‘Pulse Reaction – an exchange project on artistic practice’ (2012), Chinese contemporary artists intensively discussed their artistic production, particularly their moments of creation and the material and nonmaterial considerations in their practice. They also shared their struggles and processes when negotiating different elements in their work for the creation of temporal social encounters (Shen and He 2012). Thus the museum serves as a local site for experimenting with artistic production operating independently of the global art market, and for creating art of social value. Social-political critique of everyday life By virtue of being embedded in a local community, the museum has a role in connecting art with life. Instead of introducing art as a way to develop one’s good taste, the Times Museum has prioritized curatorial and artistic practices that address the politics of everyday life. Major methods include critiques of the consumption culture in everyday life and diverse artistic interventions in existing situations, structures, and relations. Through relational aesthetics, conversations, encounters, and participation, the museum has not only destabilized the Chinese audience’s conventional perception of art. It has also mobilized the audience as an active participant in everyday life, by presenting space, identity, and social relations as ways of initiating micro-social modifications. Nevertheless, the ‘interactions’ are not without challenges. They have incited various conflicts involving the power relationship between public and private, and the interaction between reality and fiction, and between native and foreign cultures. The everyday as a theme of contemporary art with potential for individual transformation has found expression in the museum primarily as a critique of the burgeoning materialistic consumption culture in China. For instance, in 2011, the Chinese museum artist-resident Zhang Xiangxi staged a display promoting reflection on consumption. He transformed the ground-level space of the real estate company’s property into a second-hand shop and displayed television sets. Some of the TVs showed programmes while others were installed in miniature living spaces as showrooms for reflecting on the material conditions of modern consumption. In another museum project in 2016, the Baiyun Commune invited the Swedish artist Gunilla Klingberg,

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who proposed a critique of the collective unconsciousness in contemporary consumer culture and sought to create a new aesthetic experience in the space. The artist collected a wide range of consumer logos and images from shops and local supermarkets from the Huangbian neighbourhood to create an installation with a giant mandala pattern covering the museum’s glass wall facing the street and interacting with the space and the outside light. The museum is embedded in a residential building, but its activity is not limited to the gallery space. Located in Baiyun District at the northern edge of Guangzhou, at the intersection of city and countryside, Huangbian is a neighbourhood made up by people from different social classes. Artistic intervention was extended into a public space and its community, namely the Huangbian neighbourhood. However, in some cases, ‘conflicts’ did occur between public and private spaces and between native cultures and those from outside. For example, in 2011 the museum published a ‘newspaper’ called The Yellow Side Daily, which circulated daily news and served as a creative and critical medium for communication about the surrounding neighbourhood. The editors received a lot of feedback on the newspaper content. A female visitor complained that a photograph of her and her son was used for illustrating the report titled ‘Young Destroyers Attack Deconstruction Gardens’ and that it had seriously harmed the reputation of her family. As a result of her demands, the museum issued a written statement of apology and distributed it to more than 3,000 residents. The dispute revealed the public tension that can exist in the interstices between reality/society, art/fiction, and publicity/privacy. Another dispute resulted from the differences between native and foreign cultures. In the 2013 ‘Gentle Wave in Your Eye Fluid – A Pipilotti Rist Solo Exhibition’, the artist created a unique space with a fantastical, dreamlike atmosphere through a video installation and works made of local materials. She also worked with the audience to create an installation of lanterns in the estate garden by using recycled plastics. The project coordinator, Jacqueline Lam, revealed that an elderly resident complained about the work because the lanterns were white, which is associated with death and mourning and is considered inauspicious in Chinese culture. To resolve the conflict, the artist agreed to change the colour.17 Furthermore, at the 2nd community festival, ‘Wrong Place, Right Time’ in 2014, Hong Kong artists Gum Cheng and Clara Cheung built a mobile art museum by using a tricycle from Huangbian village. The artists invited passers-by to sketch and exchange their portraits and then displayed the 17 Interview with Jacqueline Lam, 9 June 2015, Guangzhou.

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Illustration 4.3 The artist Gum Cheng and a passer-by drawing portraits of each other in a public area near the Huangbian village, 2014

Photo by Clara Cheung

portraits in the mobile museum. The project intended to question the role of an art museum in society, and to problematize the roles of artist, viewer, and collector in an era in which elitist white-cube aesthetics are no longer the dominant artistic preference, and everyone can be an ‘artist’. The ‘museum’ was mobile and was parked at different sites in public spaces around the neighbourhood. As Lam recounted, when they were asked to leave one day by a private security guard in a residential area, some residents showed their support for the museum by arguing with the guard. The ‘dispute’ revealed the growing hierarchies of wealth that have become entrenched in society through the stipulation of property ownership as the criterion for determining who can use spaces and how these spaces should be used. The dispute provoked questions about where and how public space can be claimed in an urban environment with increasing corporatized space. It also addressed citizens’ rights to define and use ‘public’ space in the city. Moreover, in an exhibition in 2014, a local art collective, Polit-SheerForm Office, appropriated everyday practices to challenge the way people understood the issue of identity. In order to examine ideas of individualism and the collective in two social contexts, China and the United States, public

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performances were held with participants involved in the repetitious and collective cleaning of two public spaces, washing a bus in Guangzhou and mopping the floor in Times Square, New York City. The exhibition encouraged local people to reflect on their identification process in different social spaces.18 Overall, the museum advocated that these public art practices should directly interact with the people who lived and worked in the area, to invite them to interact with the spaces they inhabited, and to confront the micro-politics that govern their everyday lives. The critical relationship between art and society With the design of a large single white cube, the museum is presented as intending to ‘suggest a space without a single host, where visitors search for their temporal stances in relation to visual experience and imagination in a structure similar to an open street, where artworks can be explored as random street scenes’.19 With an emphasis on visitors’ positioning being based on their experience and imagination, the museum has recognized the place of visitors and their potential for exerting agency and inter-agency in cultural production. In addition, based on their curatorial exhibitions/ projects, art and cultural intermediaries were involved in presenting their ideal of society/community both from local and global perspectives. Their practices have foregrounded the relationship between art and social autonomy, the social problems brought by urbanization, and the network of ‘villages’ in a global context. For instance, in 2012, during the first community art festival, the museum ran a special programme called the ‘Art Clinic’. By creating a clinic-setting and calling for a medical solution to artists who were depicted as social patients with problematic mindsets, the programme served as a platform for visitors to meet face to face with artists and cultural practitioners, and tell them what they thought about art, art spaces, art pieces, artists, and 18 The exhibition questioned the similarities and differences between the two countries in appropriating the meanings of individualism and collectivism. It stated that in China, ‘doing good deeds’ can often turn into a kind of mass movement while in American culture, individualism is supposedly a core value, yet a new understanding of the need for the collective has emerged. Similarly, while collectivism has been said to be a core Chinese value, there has been increasing interest in individual pursuits. The exhibition also posed the questions of ‘whether “doing a good deed” […] [is] a need of human nature or a need for ideology?’, and ‘what is the real content and meaning for collectivism?’. 19 The webpage of the exhibition, ‘You Can Only Think about Something if You Think of Something Else’, http://www.timesmuseum.org/exhibition/view?id=125, accessed 14 June 2017.

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what they suggested for resolving their problems. Through conversation, they were able to put forward the relationship between artist and society as a public issue. In another exhibition, the ‘Times Heterotopia – You Can Only Think About Something if You Think of Something Else’ of 2014, the museum conceptualized heterotopias as complementary functions or contradictory realities that co-exist within a real site. By setting up a yoga workshop, an artist-run weekend store for drinks, a souvenir shop, and facilities for photo uploads, and generally fostering social interaction, visitors were invited to negotiate the boundaries between art and the everyday, the individual and the institution, and the public and the private. The built-in temporary sites or situations were a means for the museum to rehabilitate an imagined heterogeneous society. With respect to relational aesthetics, a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud (2002, 16), the practices can be referred to a ‘social interstice’, a space where ‘human relations fit more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggest other trading possibilities than those in effect within this system’. The role of artists is to demonstrate ‘ways of living and models of action within the existing real’ (ibid., 13), while art is supposed to encourage ‘inter-human commerce’ for producing ‘communication zones’ (ibid., 9 and 16). In short, the exhibition offered a chance for visitors to envisage and perform their own alternative ways of living in the existing system. In addition to mobilizing and engaging participants or visitors in social deliberation, the museum has articulated the relationship between art and society through the concept of autonomy. The concept was explicitly expressed in the 2013 ‘Zizhiqu (Autonomous Regions)’ exhibition, curated by the museum adviser Hou Hanru. In the exhibition, autonomous regions were conceptualized as two possibilities of geopolitical organization, namely as a relatively autonomous, self-governing zone within a nation-state, or as a model relevant to utopian and more conceptual and temporary projects of social life (Hou 2013). By showcasing sixteen artists (groups) from around the world, the exhibition aimed to reflect: the particular role of the language and regime of artistic imagination and experiments in the social transformation today, that needs much effort in envisioning and creating autonomous zones within the social and political structure to intervene and interrupt the dominant and hegemonic system of political, economic and cultural power. (ibid.)

Instead of following the tradition of art’s autonomy promoted by classic modernism, the exhibition emphasized the connection between art and

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real life in the present as an important condition for claiming autonomy. Autonomy was presented as not only residing in the field of contemporary art, but as also being present in the social sphere, so both art and the public can be free and independent entities. The artistic proposition aligns with Grant Kester’s (2005, 182) discussion of the modern constitution of the public and the aesthetics around the concept of autonomy. Following his concern that the public be freed from the self-interest of the market through the experience of advanced art, Kester suggests that the growing autonomy of art in the modern period can be understood as a property of the audience itself, in that the presence of freedom and autonomy among the public are the preconditions for art’s autonomy. The distinctive characteristics of this modern public, as he stresses, are its indeterminate and independent nature and the capacity of its members to choose freely and to invent the form of government most appropriate to its needs. Similarly, the museum officially presents itself as being aimed at an autonomous public with an independent capacity for influencing both society and art. In 2016, the Baiyun Commune, a community project space, was created to assert the role of the art museum in its residential community and its relationship with the ever-changing surrounding space amidst intensive urbanization in southern China. In an artist-residency and exhibition programme in 2017, the international artist initiative My villages was invited to develop a global neighbourhood project, called the ‘International Village Produce’. They showcased village practices from Germany, Russia, and the Netherlands around themes such as neighbourhood and social life, natural resources and materials, and the history of production and culture. They also organized social activities to gather different kinds of residents from the Huangbian neighbourhood and to engage them in making use of Huangbian’s resources to create a ‘product’ and then to publicly display their works and the process of production. This project emphasized the representation of a shared community, collective awareness of the traditions and histories that have been discarded by urbanization, and the inter-referencing of global community projects for seeking a transnational community utopia. The art practices discussed in this sub-section have liberated participants and communities from fixed identities. The museum’s activities have transcended the limits of existing social norms and political communication, and extended global communication to a civil society level. In the process of circulation, these practices have incited conflicts involving the power relationship between public and private and the interaction between reality and fiction, and between native/local and foreign cultures. Nonetheless, the museum’s activities have created a dialogical and interactional process,

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which has transformed art visitors from ‘spectators’ into active participants and public actors, arguably helping them to create a more ‘independent and autonomous’ public. Institutional self-critique and the reformulation of the museum As a locus of proactive curatorial and artistic practices, how has the Times Museum defined itself as an institution? Why and how does it approach the question of art institutionalization in China? ‘Institutional critique’ is a concept originating from the Western artistic critique of an institution, which is usually a critique of a museum or an art gallery. The curators of the Times Museum have not implanted a single doctrine of what a museum or an institution should be. Inspired by the concept of ‘institutional critique’, through art they have questioned the traditional forms and fixed definitions of institutions, proposed alternative concepts of institutionalization, and expressed what an institution or a museum could be. On the one hand, the museum presents itself as a self-reflexive institution and an agent of institutional critique, questioning existing art institutional practices, interrogating the relations between artists and institutions, and broadening the public imagination to art institutions in a wider, global critical network. On the other hand, it positions itself as an undefined institution, which is subject to ongoing social construction and imagination. In other words, the museum serves as an ongoing experiment for accelerating a local discourse for debate and reflection on the formation of the art institution in China. For instance, in a notable event, the exhibition of A Museum That is Not in 2011, artists created various settings to express their ideas of what a museum could or could not be. Presented in the form of an installation, a performance, and a series of events, all characterized by undefined purposes and by spontaneous encounters with visitors, their works served as a critique directed at the modern institutions of art as a social and political realm entailing the exercise of cultural hegemony. Visitors were invited to experience the works and to interpret their settings in terms of the venue being seen as a museum space or not. As the curator Nikita Cai (2011, 13-14) put it, the exhibition was rather like an instance of the practice of micropolitics involving an open and equal dialogue amongst individuals that would lead to imagining other possible ways of acting or forms of art and institution. Furthermore, in July of 2015, the gallery was turned into a black box where the film works of Taiwanese film director Tsai Ming-liang were installed. Furnished as a living space with sleeping mattresses and cushions, visitors were immersed in the images from different angles. An overnight event,

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which occurred inside the gallery, further redefined the function of the space and the audiences’ experience of art and their imagination of the museum. In another event, a three-day long seminar in 2012, ‘No Ground Underneath; Curating on the Nexus of Changes’, curators, artists, and critics from China and abroad were invited to share their reflections on the ramifications of their practices. They explored the conditions and strategies for curating and artistic praxis, the methodologies for institutional construction, and the changing roles of artists and curators in exhibition-making. They particularly highlighted two concepts relating to the institutionalizing of art, namely ‘self-historicization’ and ‘proactive parasitism’. The former concept was coined by Slovenian curator Zdenka Badovinac to describe artists’ survival strategies and the role of artists as archivists or historians in the Eastern European region. The concept was applied in the seminar to explore the possibility of self-institutionalization in curatorial and artistic practice, which could serve the production of knowledge at the local level and the creation of dialogue among localities faced with weak infrastructure or struggling for artistic independence. The other concept, ‘proactive parasitism’, was used as a strategy for individuals to negotiate with institutions about fluid and flexible working models and new possibilities in cultural production (Cai and Lu 2014). In 2013, the exhibition ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back – Us and Institution, Us as Institution’ displayed self-institutionalizing artistic practices with a strong presence of artists and collectives from China, South East Asia, the former Eastern Bloc, and Palestine. The exhibition demonstrated the evolving relationship between artists, institutions, and the state, along with the internationalization of contemporary art in a larger global critique network. In her curatorial statement, Biljana Ciric (2013) described the position of the museum as an alternative model opposing market-driven art institutions. She expected a greater shift to the New Institutionalism that flourished in Europe in the 1990s.20 In addition to the exhibition, a two-day seminar titled ‘Active Withdrawal – Weak Institutionalism and the Institutionalization of Art Practice’ was held to expand the definition of institutional critique to diverse histories of artist dissent and to present new emerging organic forms of institutionalism. 20 As quoted by Ciric (2013), James Voorhies (2016), in Whatever happened to New Institutionalism?, states that new institutionalism is a mode of curating that originated in Europe in the 1990s and evolved from the legacy of international curator Harald Szeemann and the relational art advanced by French critic and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, among others. The dispersed and varied approaches to curating sought to reconfigure the art institution from within, reshaping it into an active, democratic, open, and egalitarian public sphere.

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In summary, the various forms of critical mediation focus on curatorial and artistic production, the changing roles and relationships of art practitioners and institutions, and the new proposals that go beyond the discursive and practical limits of defined ‘institutions’. These practices have broadened the museum audience’s imagination of art institutions and challenged China’s institutional culture discourses by criticizing the art market and other institutional controls. They have also considered new emerging, more organic forms of institutionalism through the inter-referencing of practices in different countries.

4.3

Artistic regionalization: southern imaginary vs northern hegemony

The Times Museum emphasizes its geographical position to reflect the unique social, economic, and cultural conditions in the urbanization processes in the Pearl River Delta, and to stimulate artistic practices in the region through research, exchange, and support of artistic creation, and in critical relation to globalized mechanisms of cultural production and distribution.21 This section considers another major initiative connected with regionalization by examining the museum’s recent core project, ‘Operation PRD’ (PRD is an abbreviation of Pearl River Delta region). The project combines research and an annual exhibition to construct a regional cultural identity connected with the cultural production and distribution of the ‘global south’ as a response to the northern cultural hegemony in China. By defining PRD as an ‘alternate history’, the museum seeks to reconstruct history by representing the artists who have actively defined the region, and by producing new knowledge of the region based on ‘southern theory’. Since its inception in 2016, ‘Operation PRD’ has launched an exhibition ‘Big Tail Elephants: One Hour, No Room, Five Shows’ and a research fellowship programme, ‘All the Way South Research Fund’. The exhibition was a retrospective of the artist group ‘Big Tail Elephants’ active in Guangzhou in the 1990s. The group was recognized as an alternative model of modernization, which was neither ‘Western’ nor ‘Chinese’, but that strived for ‘the autonomy and legitimacy of artists and artistic production, and self-conscious modes of critique and resistance to the modernist binaries of West/China, central/local, public/private and avant-garde/ 21 See the webpage of Guangdong Times Museum, ‘Introduction’, http://en.timesmuseum.org/ about/, accessed 7 January 2019.

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conservative’, amidst the social situation complicated by ‘the notions of “freedom and openness”, globalization, the commodity economy and consumerism’. In addition, this alternative positioning occurred in the 1990s at a time when art institutions and spaces were absent and the group had to show their conceptual works and performances in non-art spaces such as cultural palaces, bars, the basements of commercial buildings and outdoor venues. Overall, the exhibition was meant to recognize the work of this artist group and their impact on the artistic ecology in the region. It sought to construct a regional art history by verifying the PRD as ‘an independent and unique site for experimentation’. ‘All the Way South Research Fund’ is a research platform for artists, researchers, and writers to produce knowledge specific to the PRD based on the following principles: firstly, engaging with the regional perspectives of the PRD and the writing of local art history that intersects with globalization; secondly, examining the history of cultural exchange between China and other countries of the Global South in terms of artistic ideas, production, and exhibitions; thirdly, challenging Northern-centric perspectives and exploring new networks of theoretical reflection and action; fourthly, developing a critical analysis of the issues of colonialism, nature, gender, class, and race under the framework of ‘Southern Theory’. On the one hand, the museum considers the region as having an ‘alternate history’, which can offer new vantage points for viewing culture and art. It imagines the region by ‘unifying’ different alternative cultures such as those of Hong Kong and Macau and independent artistic forces in the region, while at the same time allowing the coexistence of their own distinct identities and the artistic differences between them. The following statement clearly reflected the museum’s making of its cultural imaginary of PRD: From the ‘Southern Artists Salon’ of the 1980s, to the ‘Big Tail Elephants Working Group’ and ‘Libreria Borges’ a decade later – as well as more recent additions ‘Vitamin Creative Space’ and the ‘Yangjiang Group’– these groups and other independent artists have, without exception, helped to establish this atmosphere. At the same time, Hong Kong and Macau, each with its own distinctive East-meets-West hybrid culture, contribute to this ‘alternativeness’ through their own specific identities. Together these discrete yet interconnected places represent both a critical creative force in the Chinese and international-contemporary art scenes, and a liberated stance of unwavering independent thought. The independent perspective

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put forward by PRD artists is regionally unified, while at the same time exhibiting specific differences between (artistic) methodologies.22

On the other hand, the museum reimagines PRD according to the history and context of the region. Through tracing the original history of Cantonese labourers during their southbound migration, the museum constructs a ‘southern theory’ as a way to eliminate the inequality between the (colonialized/neo-colonized) Global South and the (imperial/neo-imperializing) North and to construct southern narratives based on cultural workers’ interpretations of, resistance against, and negotiations with, global capitalism: Located on the Southeast coast of China as an urban centre of the PRD, the city of Guangzhou possesses many historical, cultural, and geopolitical attributes of the Global South. Our commitment to the southern-turn does not intend to reiterate the geographic division or sociocultural hierarchy between the South and the North; rather, it situates the Museum in a rich and complex constellation of Southern narratives and imaginaries by focusing on artists, filmmakers, writers, scholars, and self-organized activities that negotiate between global capitalism and local forms of interpretation and resistance.23

The previous two sections highlighted the two major methodologies – glocalization and regionalization – of the museum’s cultural production, and explicated the agencies that have been mobilized by museum intermediaries in the process. Firstly, the museum intermediaries use the developmental approach to orient cultural globalization and mediate the process by drawing critical imperatives in cultural production and driving sociocultural changes in China. By favouring immaterialized and de-commodified artistic production and various kinds of artistic intervention and curatorial proposals, the intermediaries have questioned the unprecedented force of art marketization; addressed the politics of everyday life embedded in consumer culture, public space, community, and broader capitalist life; highlighted the critical relationship between art and society, which emphasizes the agency of the audience and the relationship between art and social autonomy; and contributed to the formation of art institutions in self-critical and reflexive 22 See the webpage of the project ‘Operation PRD’, www.timesmuseum.org/exhibition/ view?id=118, accessed 7 January 2019. 23 ‘Press Release’, Ran Dian, 16 May 2017, http://www.randian-online.com/np_announcement/ open-call-for-operation-prd-all-the-way-south-research-fund/, accessed 9 September 2019.

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ways. Secondly, they have helped to construct a southbound ‘alternate’ art history of the PRD region by representing local forms of artistic resistance in the southern part of China and the Global South more broadly. These attributes can be seen as a sign of a growing critical culture. Together, their practices support the argument that the museum has contributed to the formation of a ‘public cultural sphere’, which imagines a shared community and directs it to becoming an autonomous and independent public through rational discussion, negotiation, alternative ideas, social and cultural critiques, and direct participation or confrontation in public issues. Instrumentally speaking, the dialogic and communicative conditions shaping consumption are not meant to ascribe any fixed identities, but rather to define the visitors as differentiated and active meaning-making individuals. Considering production and consumption are closely interlinked, the museum has used multiple methodologies for collecting feedback from visitors. On a regular basis, there is a corner at the entrance of the gallery for visitors to write their comments on Post-it notes. The museum has also tailor-made workshops and activities for collecting the ideas of visitors. In 2015, it collaborated with the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies on a research project which examined the art perceptions of the communities surrounding the museum. To entice its public, the museum has built a strong volunteering team, which consists of around 400 members.24 The volunteers support exhibition installation, guided tours, visitor reception, educational activities, and administration, thus forming an active community in the museum. In terms of ideology, the museum’s publics are never treated as mere spectators of artworks. They are presented as active participants. The differences in their visiting experiences will be explored in depth in the following section.

4.4

Educated youth and the consumption of ‘alternative culture’

Focusing on the consumption side of the Times Museum, this section specifically focuses on how its visitors make sense of their museum experience and relates it to their cultural orientations. The museum has attracted the young and educated, reflecting the rise of young consumers of alternative culture in the region. They mostly reside in the city of Guangzhou and other cities in Guangdong province. Being highly receptive to contemporary art, they tend to 24 The figure was given by Jacqueline Lam, during her interview on 9 June 2015.

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accept the challenges of the museum’s practice and engage themselves with this practice by trying to make sense of what they have viewed and encountered. Based on my ethnographic study of visitors, I argue that the museum has demonstrated its potency in engaging a section of educated youth in autonomous acts of creating new meanings and mobilizing youth to participate in ‘alternative culture’. This alternative mode of cultural consumption appears to be salient in the context of consumption in China where urbanites are, on the one hand, moving beyond a lifestyle of leisure, and, on the other hand, are subject to the influence of mass culture largely manipulated by the state or economy. The study consisted of interviews with a total of 45 visitors and four volunteers. The sample was random, with 59% female participants and 41% male participants. The vast majority (90%) were university students or graduates, 39% were studying and working in art-related fields, including fine art, design, architecture, art management, and the museum sector. Most visitors were residents of Guangzhou, but a number of them came from other cities in Guangdong province. There were only a few tourists from Hong Kong and one businessman from the United States. The audience was largely made up of young people between eighteen and thirty years old (65% aged 18-25; 30% aged 26-30). They usually received the museum’s exhibition news from Internet platforms such as weibo and weChat. Their interests included listening to music, attending concerts, watching films, reading books, going to the theatre, and visiting exhibitions. During my fieldwork in 2015, the exhibition ‘Roman Ondák: Storyboard’ was taking place. Ondák is a Slovakian contemporary artist with a high international profile. He is known for generating participatory installations and performances to appropriate space as a ‘place’ in which a series of events occur. In this way, he redefines both the physical dimensions and identity of a space. The theme of the exhibition was an extension of his piece ‘Storyboard’ (2000). Various drawings were created by the artist’s friends and relatives based on the descriptions he made of the space of the Times Museum through telephone conversations with the museum curator. Additionally, a selection of his installations, photographs, and performances created between 1997 and 2015 was redisplayed in the gallery. During the entire exhibition period, there was an ongoing on-site performance based on his performance piece Swap (2011). A museum volunteer acting as an actor sat at a table holding a single object left behind by the last visitor and invited other visitors to ‘swap’ something for the item. The entire exhibition was meant to ‘allow space for a series of parallel narratives which describe, question, deny, stage, expand, and reject the physical boundaries of the museum, emphasizing the relevance of space and its migrations – physical and temporary – in the

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Illustration 4.4  Visitor at the ‘Roman Ondák: Storyboard’ exhibition, 2015

Photo by the author

artistic practices of Roman Ondák’.25 With much emphasis on the relationship between art, space, and audience, the exhibition served as a platform 25 The webpage of the exhibition, ‘Roman Ondák: Storyboard’, http://en.timesmuseum.org/ exhibition/view?id=122, accessed 14 June 2017.

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for challenging visitors’ spectatorial relationship to art and re-emphasizing the position and experience of viewers. To facilitate visitors’ understanding of the works, the museum provided a free exhibition booklet containing a detailed explanation of each work and a set of bookmarks explaining some keywords in contemporary art.26 Under the rubric of the exhibition system, audiences were not defined as single passive recipients but as diverse participants with equal status. To avoid the display of a unitary artistic representation, the museum constituted visitors as part of the artwork and engulfed them in what can be seen as democratic social exchange. Based on their interpretation of their visiting experiences, I categorized the visitors into six distinct identities: ‘the imaginative audience’, ‘participants’, ‘social learners’, ‘meaningful leisure seekers’, ‘committed visitors’, and ‘classic museum visitors’. Only the last segment, ‘classic museum visitors’ were inclined to take up a negotiated position in relation to what they experienced in the museum. This is because their conventional view of art being an autonomous object had been challenged. The other segments revealed different types of engagement with the museum. Table 4.1 Modes of museum identification of the visitors of Guangdong Times

Types of identity

Museum Integrative/Adaptive

Negotiated

Committed visitors Social learners Participants Imaginative audience Meaningful leisure seekers

Classic museum visitors

Those categorized as the Imaginative audience included those who engaged with the spatial forms of the content in the museum. These visitors were able to expand their spatial imagination by communicating with the works conceptualized by the artist in literal or metaphorical ways. The imaginative capacities they demonstrated implied their potential to break with preconditioned reality and to look at things differently. These visitors were particularly drawn to content that was closely related to their daily experience. Many of them were impressed by the work that 26 The keywords included the human body in art, author, audience, conceptual art, velvet revolution, instruction, situation, performance, relational aesthetics, the everyday, art projects, participation, reality, and representation.

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involved a door handle titled ‘leave the door open’, and were encouraged by it to imagine an ‘unseen condition’. For instance, a 30-year-old woman found the work impressive because it offered a direct reference to her daily life experience. Another work that she highlighted was a depiction of a father and a son (the artist) who were doing different things in the same space at the same time. She added that it would be difficult to express this kind of relationship with words in real life. Two university art students were both happy with the exhibits. One of them initially felt that the space was empty. After she walked through the gallery, she noted many interesting works and imagined the ‘door handle’ as a real door. Another visitor thought that although the artist had filled up the space with only a few works, there were many interpretative possibilities that emerged from the works. Although the visitors did not make the connection to larger social contexts and histories, their imaginative capacity enabled them to break with a fixed reality and to experience a different way of seeing or interpreting. As the educational philosopher Maxine Greene writes: To call for imaginative capacity is to work for the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise. To ask for intensified realization is to see that each person’s reality must be understood to be interpreted experience – and that the mode of interpretation depends on his or her situation and location in the world […] To tap into the imagination is to become able to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real. (2000, 3)

Participants made up another group of visitors who demonstrated a certain level of engagement in the museum. This label refers to those who were willing to engage in ‘interactive’ works (such as the ‘swap’ exchange activity) and were able to generate meaningful interaction. For instance, a 29-year-old man, living nearby and working in the advertising industry, was a new visitor. To him, the museum was very creative and progressive. During his visit, he quietened himself in the gallery and enjoyed the sunshine reflecting through the windows. He had not read the exhibition catalogue, but he walked through the gallery many times to explore the details of the works. He even followed the artist’s instruction to take off his shoes and squat down to see the works. To him, the space was intended to connect with the idea of the artist and let him open his mind. The ‘swap’ activity was a unique source of inspiration. Two commerce students, first-time visitors, came to the museum for casual enjoyment. Although they did not participate by exchanging items, both thought that

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their conversation with a volunteer was meaningful. They said that they used to be passive viewers, but at the moment of exchange, they strongly felt like participants. Another visitor, a recent graduate in electronics, stopped by the museum after a job interview at a nearby location. Impressed by the exchange activity, she swapped her whistle for a handkerchief: the item was bought by a couple during a trip to Korea. I feel the exchange is really interesting, since now I’m receiving an item from a stranger whom I have never met and would never know […] it is sort of a place of inspiration, where I might find out how people think.

I also met an art design student who was excited to show me the whistle he got from the exchange. I did not tell him that it was from my previous informant. Instead, he told me that the whistle had been kept for many years by a Sichuan girl who unearthed it during the earthquake. He swapped his own drawing for the special whistle, which he kept in his hand. To him, the visit was important since it allowed him to explore many possibilities and innovative things and activities, which he seldom found at other cultural venues. Two family members living nearby came with their friends. They all enjoyed the temporary activity which was taking place in the gallery. One of the members eagerly shared his experience of imagining the space described by his partner, and then drawing it. In the end, he did not find any significant difference between what he drew and what he later saw in the real space. He was strongly aware of a change in his position from being a passive spectator to becoming a participant. Nevertheless, in his opinion, a museum was a place where he could find the best art and inform himself on the works of world masters. Social learners were those who could reflect on their daily lives and on social conditions. They commonly learned from the artist how to relate mundane things, unnoticed in their daily lives, to broader social issues. A young woman who studied sociology was travelling from Zhongshan (a prefecture-level city in Guangdong province, and one of main cities in the Daya Bay Development Aera). She came to the museum because of its reputation in the field of exhibition-making. She thought the artist expressed the aesthetics of familiar objects and enabled her to learn more about life. After pointing out the ‘postcards’ and their ways of reflecting the real condition of people, she recounted the recent social changes in China where people leave their hometowns for the sake of development and national construction. She was even stimulated to think critically about

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social conditions in China, particularly the gap between the rich and the poor and the media coverage of this issue. A science university student from Guangxi was interested in reading, architecture, and modern Western literature. He said the exhibition was expressing the artist’s attitude towards life and drove him to think of the difference between two spaces – a realistic space and an artistic space where the artist recorded people’s daily experiences and creatively presented them. He contended that there was no separation between art and life, and this made him ponder about future ways of living, while he also questioned the city’s simple logic of development. He was also a participant: in search of the intention of the artist, he followed the instructions, stated in the work, to take off his shoes and take a picture of himself. A 22-year-old law student had been volunteering at the museum for four years and was mainly responsible for design, translation, and organizing programmes. She developed her interest in art during childhood thanks to the guidance of her parents. When asked about her relationship with the museum, she referred to it as a relationship between the questioner and the answerer, and between the observer and the observed. To answer the question, ‘What is art?’ (raised by herself), she explained that art had become increasingly abstract and conceptual, and it could be interpreted by everyone, with each person having his/her own way of interpreting works. She further asked, ‘What is the nature of art?’ and ‘What does an artwork intend to express?’ Her own answer to these questions was that artworks were generally used to reflect on society. She said she would like to find out the perspectives taken by artists on why society had become the way that it is, and why people consider matters in the way that they do. She thought of herself as being in the position of observer and questioner. In addition, by comparing contemporary art with classical art, she thought that the former was more related to society, since it addressed different issues such as war, environment, people’s lives, and their social relationships, while the latter would give her a sense of aesthetics. To her, old art was primal and eternal, and represented the cultural roots that would help her understand other things. Influenced by her volunteer work, she no longer viewed the art museum as a holy sanctuary, but instead thought that art was simply a part of her life. Meaningful leisure seekers were casual visitors who wandered cursorily through the gallery and did not express a strong purpose or expectations about their museum visit. They treated their visit as a means to combine knowledge and life inspiration, rather than to merely find excitement or enjoyment. They sought to incorporate meaningful leisure practices into their daily lives.

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A young woman in her twenties visited the museum to relax after her work at an airline company. She had little to say about the works but felt the gallery was an open place where all could participate. In addition to making herself feel invigorated, she viewed the visit as a chance to enrich her knowledge by exploring other perspectives and seeking inspiration. The reason she seldom went to museums was because of their monolithic and old-fashioned character. Instead, she preferred going to creative clusters where she felt there was greater intimacy and more room for rest. A couple, in their mid-twenties, living in a nearby middle-class estate, were regular visitors. The woman worked in human resources and the man worked in Internet data analysis. Both did not quite understand the artworks but enjoyed their visits. Interested in cultural history, the man recalled an exhibition he liked in the museum that made him consider the juxtaposition of the social histories of Tokyo, Beijing, and Nanjing in a meaningful way. Treating his visit as a leisure activity, he came for relaxation and sought a kind of cultural exchange by learning from other perspectives. Classic museum visitors held a rather negotiated position. Their conventional understanding and spectatorial relation to art, which had been constructed by their previous museum experience, was challenged. A few of them initially felt completely lost in the museum. A local medical university student was a new visitor. When I asked her what she had seen in the gallery, she replied that the gallery was empty with nothing on show. She was confused when I told her there were exhibits on the wall, and she expressed a profound interest when I further explained the works. Treating her visit as a leisure activity, she expected a quiet place with artworks that would make her rethink her personal matters and help relieve her boredom. In another case, a Guangxi woman who said she had studied fine art but worked in the advertising industry, considered the art museum a place for profoundly enhancing her aesthetic understanding. She thought there were no beautiful works in the museum, but then wondered whether she really knew anything about art. Finally, committed visitors were those who supported the practices of the museum. They included the museum’s volunteers and cultural and academic practitioners. They highlighted the significant role of the museum in the city and its potential for paving the way for a more pluralistic society, where people were more likely to be receptive to different ideas and tolerant of other people’s beliefs. They viewed the Times Museum as a desirable and alternative cultural institution in China’s precarious cultural environment. A dance troupe manager was organizing a weekend body movement workshop for kids inside the museum. As a frontline cultural practitioner, he

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gave a rather positive comment on the wider cultural ecology in Guangzhou. Although he did not think it was comparable to Beijing and Shanghai (he described the former as having more discussions about artworks and the latter having the support of an active art market), he thought Guangzhou was developing into a more diversified model. Based on his work experience, the audience he met in the city was open-minded, receptive, and full of curiosity about the world. Although he and his circle of friends were mainly interested in dance, they came regularly to see the multimedia and cross-disciplinary works in the museum. A 29-year-old university art teacher was a regular visitor. To him, the exhibition differed from wall displays and the regular practices of art spectatorship; it offered a refreshing spatial arrangement with photos and readymade objects, and created various opportunities for communication with the visitors. He commented on the museum as follows: it is so energetic and refreshing – what is shown in its space, its architecture, and its connection with the community. In particular, its curating practices are exceeding those of traditional museums and bringing vibrancy to the city […] I think a museum is a local place, but Western culture can provide a perspective for us to understand our local culture. This sort of alternative is necessary for such precarious conditions as those we have in China.

He further talked about how art control has increased in China since the President gave his speech on the role of art in China [in 2014]. He cited a case of a state museum where a work showing the symbol of the cross was ordered to be removed from the show. Moreover, he said that in his university, a supervisory meeting is held every month in addition to more frequent random investigations of staff and students to make sure that no ideologies out of the official ‘scope of teaching’ were taught in class. The system he described was open for the most part, but censorship of art still existed, especially in regard to works that expressed themes of violence, political ideology, or social criticism. A museum volunteer and intern reporter on cultural and health news, who had graduated from art management, hosted the ‘swap’ activity. According to him, the museum was very influential among the PRD art community, and its activities were highly attended by community members. To him, the museum was an academic place for individuals to obtain cultural knowledge. He thought that a gap existed between academia and the masses because his colleagues at the newspaper company still associated the museum with a particular kind of lifestyle, associated with Western suits and ties, and glasses of fine red wine.

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Overall, young and outgoing consumers were attracted to the museum because it played a key role in sustaining a unique, alternative, and critical culture. The public was primarily characterized by their desire and ability to expand their imagination and heighten their abilities to think and act. Their recognition of the museum as an alternative institutional entity supporting social pluralism reasserted the agency of the private museum in diversifying meanings to the urban youth in ways that counter the dominant rhetoric of state and market values in Chinese society. Meanwhile, by motivating the urbanites to create their own meanings and to take up the role of active participants, the museum has contributed to fostering the independence and autonomous will of citizens who are sympathetic to the development of civil society in China. In addition, the museum has fulfilled a particular type of leisure for consumers who come to seek meaningful experiences and personal reflection, rather than pure enjoyment and entertainment, as a way to enhance their quality of life. The museum has challenged the audience’s preconceived ideas of what art is and what art should look like.

4.5

Concluding remarks

The Times Museum illustrates a structure of contemporary art representation based on the confluence of different processes, including the input of private capital (in terms of value-added symbolic capital and economic capital) and the active involvement of creative workers and the conjunction of local and global non-state cultural elites (cultural capital, combining symbolic competence and authority), and the formation of an independent and autonomous public (social capital). The private museum is predominately regulated by a private corporation, which serves as a source of economic capital and is an agent taking corporate social responsibility, managing art for symbolic rewards attached to urban consumption. Instead of being a company, the Museum is registered as a civil organization under the state’s micro-institutional supervision. It enjoys a certain level of social autonomy exercised within the limits of state regulation and illuminates both the social function of private companies and the proactive role of creative labour. In addition, the museum has adopted a new managerial system to expand its social support and representation, serving as a model for institutionalizing minjian art museums in Chinese society. Due to the autonomous and democratic organizational structure of the museum, key museum intermediaries are able to exercise their agencies. As reflected in its dynamic production process, the museum has formed

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a civil-led public cultural sphere dependent on the market economy, but distant from the state’s cultural production activities. Local intermediaries have consciously and strategically responded to the forces of globalization by inter-referencing the contemporary art practices and concepts of different countries, and by professing an institutional identity created on its own terms and in a publicized way. They contribute to constructing a ‘public cultural sphere’, which helps forming a shared community and an autonomous and independent public by engaging rational discussion, alternative ideas, visitor experience, negotiation, and participation in public issues. In addition, they have initiated a regional ‘alternate’ art history project responding to China’s geo-cultural politics, and a research cum exchange project addressing the subaltern and postcolonial perspectives of the Global South. By illuminating the process of representation that unfolds in the museum, this study revealed the role of the museum in articulating art as a critical culture and as a key field for developing an autonomous civil society in China. Under the museum’s production system, audience members are not defined as single, passive recipients, but as active participants and meaningmakers. They have demonstrated a positive response to the challenges of their spectatorship and have readjusted the authority of their positions, enabling them to explore different experiences. They have also demonstrated their imaginative, participatory, and thinking capacities, their desires for seeking meaningful experience, and their complicities with the museum’s values and beliefs. All these tendencies have reflected these participants’ agency in breaking away from the control of a fixed or essentialized culture, and in developing their own ways of expression and practice that differ from the market and the state. Instead of representing nationality or tradition, the museum has envisaged an alternative culture that responds to the present, the interrelations between local and global, and the internal regional geopolitics. It is also significant for a segment of the younger generation who share common attitudes and social aspirations. In short, the private museum has demonstrated significant cultural agency in reconciling market interests and state regulation, mediating local, global and regional artistic interventions, and cultural networks, and constructing a public that is oriented to independent views and autonomous values. The Times Art Centre Berlin, as the first civil-led Chinese art centre set up in the West, was opened in Germany in December 2018. The Centre represents the museum’s mission to develop a transnational critical sphere for extending its potential in engaging with global cultural politics. It will strengthen the museum’s role and its influence in globalized mechanisms of cultural production and distribution.

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Bibliography Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002). Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance, and Fronza Woods (Paris: Les Presses du reel). Cai, Nikita Yingqian (2011). ‘How to Perform an Imagery of Negation?’ in A Museum That is Not, trans. Ouyang Xiao, and Yuan Jing (Guangzhou: Guangdong Times Museum), exhibition catalogue. Cai, Nikita Yingqian, and Yinghua Lu (2014). No Ground Underneath Curating on the Nexus of Changes (Beijing: China Youth Publishing Group). Chung, Judy Chuihua, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, and Sze Tsung Leong (2001). Great Leap Forward (Cambridge, MA: Taschen/ Harvard Design School). Ciric, Biljana (2013). ‘Introduction’, in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back – Us and Institution, Us as Institution (Guangzhou: Guangdong Times Museum), exhibition catalogue. Dabianlu (2017). ‘Minying meishuguan de yang he dao: Zhao Ju he Sun Li de tanhua’ [A news report on an interview with (the museum director) Zhao Ju about the development nongovernmental art museums], Read01.com, 22 October 2018, https://read01.com/2LoGLo.html#.WnQAoqiWaUl (accessed 24 June 2019). Donald, Stephanie, Yin Hong, and Michael Keane (2002). Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis (London: Curzon). ‘Guangdong Sidai Meishuguan bei ping wei 4A ji shehui zuzhi’ [The Guangdong Times Museum was rated as 4A social organization], Read01.com, 22 October 2018, https://read01.com/zh-hk/0eegz83.html#.Wo4JhahuaUm (accessed 24 June 2019). Guangdong Times Museum, ‘Introduction’, http://en.timesmuseum.org/about/ (accessed 7 January 2019). — ‘Operation PRD Big Tail Elephants’, www.timesmuseum.org/exhibition/ view?id=118 (accessed 7 January 2019). — ‘Roman Ondák: Storyboard’, http://en.timesmuseum.org/exhibition/view?id=122 (accessed 14 June 2017). — ‘You Can Only Think about Something if You Think of Something Else’, www. timesmuseum.org/exhibition/view?id=125 (accessed 14 June 2017). — (2017a). ‘Shengchan, Zhao Ju: cong Guangdong Meishuguan shidai fenguan dao shidai meishuguan’ [Zhao Ju, production from the branch museum of Guangdong Museum of Art to the Guangdong Times Museum], https://read01.com/zh-hk/ yOMKJkD.html#.WzX0L9UzaUl (accessed 11 April 2018). — (2017b). Detour in Time, 16 December 2017- 4 Feburary 2018, exhibition captions. Greene, Maxine (2000). Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass). Hou, Hanru, ed. (2013). Zizhiqu [Autonomous Region] (Guangzhou: Guangdong Times Museum), exhibition catalogue.

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Kester, Grant (2005). ‘Conversation Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially Engaged Art’ in Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, eds. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (Oxford: Blackwell), 76-100. Latham, Kevin (2007). Pop Culture China!: Media, Arts, and Lifestyle (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO). Pan, Hui-min (2015). ‘Guanchang shuo, Zhao Ju: cong dichan yingxiao zongjian dao “shequ meishuguan” guan chang’ [Words from Museum Director Zhao Ju: from real estate marketing director to community art museum director], 2 March, artron.net, https://news.artron.net/20150302/n717482.html (accessed 24 June 2019). ‘Press Release’, Ran Dian, 16 May 2017, http://www.randian-online.com/np_announcement/open-call-for-operation-prd-all-the-way-south-research-fund/ (accessed 9 September 2019). Qu, Baojing (2017). ‘Guangdong Sidai Meishuguan shehuihua zhilu: minying meishuguan chixu yunying de weiyi chulu’ [Guangdong Times Museum on its road towards socialization – the only way out for the sustainable development of nongovernmental art museums?], artron.net, 14 July 2017, http://news.artron. net/20170714/n944663.html (accessed 24 June 2019). Rolandsen, Unn Målfrid (2011). Leisure and Power in Urban China: Everyday Life in a Medium-Size Chinese City (Abingdon, Oxon/ New York, NY: Routledge). Shen, Ruijun, and Congbian He (2012). Maichong fanying – yige guanyu yishu shijian de jiaoliu xiang mu [Pulse reactions – exchange project on artistic practice] (Guangzhou: Guangdong Times Museum), exhibition catalogue. Shen, Ruijun (2012). ‘A Report on the Times Museum, Guangzhou, China’, comp. Mo Xiaofei, and rev. by Jane DeBevoise, Asia Art Archive, www.aaa-a.org/programs/areport-on-the-times-museum-guangzhou-china/ (accessed 26 January 2018). von Osten, Marion (2005). ‘A Question of an Attitude – Changing Methods, Shifting Discourses, Producing Public, Organizing Exhibitions’ in In the Place of the Public Sphere?, ed. Simon Sheikh (Berlin: b books), 142-166. Wu, Doreen, ed. (2008). The Discourses of Cultural China in the Globalizing Age (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press). Yu, Keping (2011). ‘Civil Society in China: Concepts, Classification and Institutional Environment’ in State and Civil Society: The Chinese Perspective, ed. Zhenglai Deng (Singapore/ Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific), 79-83. Zhao, Yuezhi (1998). Media, Market, and Democracy in China: between the Party Line and the Bottom Line (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press).

5.

Hong Kong Museum of Art in Hong Kong Abstract This chapter examines the museum circuit of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, an off icial art museum in Hong Kong, which was shaped by national, local and global forces, and colonial legacies. The museum’s intermediaries, mainly in-house curators, have demonstrated potency in articulating cultural representations for diplomacy, cultural nationalism, leisure consumption, global gratification, and interpretation of the local, tending to produce a feudalized public sphere that discourages critical thinking and public debate. Visitors to the museum are demographically diverse and characterized by six distinct identities. Critical audience and activists oppose or resist the strategies of consumption that the museum’s structures enjoin. The museum reveals the tension between the government and its counter-publics and has created a cultural circuit of contested values and identities. Keywords: Hong Kong studies, cultural politics, feudalized public, critical audience

The Hong Kong Museum of Art was the only art museum established by the British colonial government in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Since 1997, it has continued to operate under the authority of the Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Government. The museum now positions itself as the leading art museum in the region which ‘connect[s] and share[s] with everyone using the language of art to foster creativity’. Its mission is to conduct cultural heritage research and make collections accessible by providing a significant platform for artistic talents both locally and globally, on the one hand, and to promote artistic appreciation and lifelong learning and vitalize the cultural lives of people through means of innovation and

Ho, S.C.F., Museum Processes in China: The Institutional Regulation, Production, and Consumption of the Art Museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi: 10.5117/9789463723527_ch05

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Illustration 5.1 The exterior of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, at the stage of renovation, December 2018

Photo by the author

creativity in collaboration with the art community and all social sectors, on the other hand.1 The museum is located at the waterfront in Tsim Sha Tsui, a hub of international and cultural activities and the paradise of tourists. The museum is now undergoing renovation for the expansion of its exhibition spaces and an upgrade of its facilities. This chapter examines how this off icial museum is institutionally regulated, how it has represented art with shifting styles of curatorial interpretation, collection development, and art display extending from the colonial to the postcolonial periods, and how the museum’s publics orient themselves in the process of cultural consumption. Examining the changes in cultural governance practices since Hong Kong entered its postcolonial era by returning to the political control of the Chinese state, Section 1 outlines the bureaucratic system and networks through which museum producers are regulated. The core museum staff members are mainly civil servants, functioning as the key cultural mediators between the government and the public; they work with a supporting network of state-level organizations, individual art stakeholders, collectors, and members of art societies. 1 See the webpage of Hong Kong Museum of Art, ‘Vision, Mission & Values’, www.lcsd.gov. hk/CE/Museum/Arts/en_US/web/ma/18.html, accessed 26 June 2017.

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For more than half a century, the Hong Kong art museum has built a comprehensive collection of more than 15,000 items that cover Chinese antiquities and historical pictures, Chinese fine art including the Xubaizhai Collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy, and Hong Kong art.2 Thematic exhibitions of items from the permanent collections and temporary exhibitions of art treasures from the West and China make up the majority of the museum’s exhibitions. In sections 5.2-5.5, I will identify the dominant art discourses in the museum, and how these are represented; this will be based on an analysis of the museum’s strategies for collection development, exhibition interpretation, curatorial practice, and display. Each section deals with a core collection or a type of art exhibits and exhibitions that involve the historical painting collection, international blockbusters, exhibitions of Chinese art and cultural materials, and local artworks. These categories were regularly displayed in separate galleries in the museum, and their representations have undergone significant changes in post-1997 Hong Kong. In the sections, I explore for what purposes these representations were made and how they were organized, appropriated, and interpreted, so as to regulate cultural identity in Hong Kong, both in terms of its culture and its subjects. I argue that the Hong Kong Art Museum occupies no neutral position in these struggles, and uses art to project an apolitical appearance; it produces a representation of ‘a feudalized public’ in which critical-rational thoughts and debates are discouraged. The museum intermediaries nevertheless have demonstrated their potencies in articulating art representations that encompass the local, national, global, and colonial components for different uses such as cultural diplomacy, aesthetics nationalism, leisure consumption, global gratif ication, and reinterpretation of Hong Kong local culture. The last section 5.6 deals with the consumption processes that operate in the museum. The museum has drawn a broad range of adult visitors in terms of their demographic background. They can be classified into six distinct identities: ‘leisure consumers’, ‘curious explorers’, ‘enthusiastic/ utilitarian learners’, ‘amateur connoisseurs’, ‘cultural tourists’, and ‘the critical audience’. The first four segments tend to integrate with or adapt 2 As of April, 2007, the Hong Kong Art Collection features 3,800 works, the Chinese Antiquities and Historical Pictures Collections over 5600 works, and the Chinese Fine Art and Xubaizhai Collection of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy over 5200 works. The collections were built largely upon the donations of connoisseurs, art society, and some artists. Purchase of works was mainly made by the former curators and chief curators based on their visions and interest. The accessibility of its collection has been increased by the museum’s online Collection Databank and its recently launched Art Google project.

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to the museum entity, while the ‘cultural tourists’ are more inclined to a position of contestation or interrogation of the museum, expressing opinions that vary, in accordance with their pre-existing knowledge and their previous cultural experiences. The ‘critical audience’ together with the ‘activists’ are prone to occupy an oppositional position in relation to the museum. They represent the forces of social dissonance and action, upholding values that conflict with the government/museum’s ideologies. In conclusion, the bureaucratic-led local museum unveils its distinctive positions in relation to the colonial legacy and when articulating the discourses relating to globalization, nationalism, and local culture. The chapter ends by highlighting the museum’s counter-publics that have, in general, contested the formation and operation of its distinctive cultural circuit, and have urged the museum for institutional reform and improved curatorial practice.

5.1

Museum bureaucracy and its institutional network

The Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA) has long been the key official art museum in Hong Kong; it was established by the British colonial government in 1962. The museum has served the purpose of exercising the power or cultural governmentality for more than half a century. Since 1997, the museum has adopted a more centralized system of management and is directly governed and financially supported by the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (HKSAR) government. Emphasizing the institutional regulation of the museum, this section demonstrates how the museum continually adapts to a bureaucratic system and builds up its network to increase aesthetic credibility and strengthen the cultural legitimacy of the new government. In 2001, all the official museums in Hong Kong were placed under the authority of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD). Under this bureaucratic system, museum staff members are subject to the government’s rules of conduct and are obliged to maintain political neutrality. HKMoA now has around 30 curatorial staff out of a total of around 80 staff members. These staff members are mainly permanent civil servants with an educational qualification in art history or fine arts (some assistant curators are employed on contract basis). Being administrated by bureaucrats, the art museum is directly funded by the government and has to submit every proposal for an exhibition to the LCSD for approval. Each proposal is prepared by the Museum Programme Planning Committee, which is composed of the chief

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curator and his subordinates, which includes curators from the Modern Art department, Chinese Antique Department, the Xubaizhai Collection, as well as the head of the Design and Venue Management departments. Moreover, the LCSD has formed advisory panels of which about 80 members are specialists in art-related areas. Although it lacks official power, the art panel has aligned itself with the elite stratum of academics, artists, and art professionals and has gained their support in safeguarding the museum’s aesthetic credibility. ‘The Friends of the Hong Kong Museum of Art’ is another supporting body, one which is institutionally independent from the museum. Founded in 1991, the charitable organization, mainly formed by art enthusiasts from upper- and middle-class backgrounds, has supported the museum’s public programmes primarily in the form of sponsorship. In addition, the museum has become associated with a host of art stakeholders that help with organizing exhibitions and programmes. These include collectors, established artists, and societies of art connoisseurs. The Min Chiu Society, a well-known local collectors’ society for Chinese art and culture, has, for example, staged its anniversary exhibitions in the museum since 1985. In addition, the museum has engaged local artists by showcasing their works and inviting them to lead workshops and educational programmes. In particular, the museum has a long history of displaying local works chosen after a selection process by an adjudicatory panel that comprises local art academics and professionals. A typical example was the local biennial, which ran from 1975 to 2001. The early biennials included invited artists as well as those who won entry through open competitions. Since the early 1990s, the biennale had become a competition event for solo artists. In addition, the presentation of Hong Kong solo artist’s exhibitions or thematic exhibitions has incorporated both established and emerging artists whose works accord with the museum’s preferred media and aesthetics principles. Institutional networks such as those comprising exhibition co-organizers and museum sponsors have included foreign consulates, national and international museums, and private corporations. The museum has collaborated with nongovernmental art organizations, independent art spaces, and academia, usually in the form of fringe or educational activities.3 However, art critics 3 A notable example was the local biennial in 2001. The museum expanded the scope of the biennial through partnership with various local art organizations and institutions to create a series of fringe programmes involving varied activities celebrating the artistic achievements of the city. The recent collaborations with Asia Art Archive on a research project relating to local art history and with MaD and Hong Kong Society for Education in Art on art learning programmes are other examples.

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and independent curators are engaged with its activities only in limited ways. 4 In short, HKMoA has generally used bureaucratic leadership structures and a top-down administrative decision-making model. In the structures of the collection-based museum, art is depicted as authentic material and valued for its artistic, historical, and cultural merits. Curatorial staff members are the key cultural producers, but their curatorial autonomy is limited within the institutional structure. They primarily favour aesthetic interpretive modes and seldom use reflexive or critical approaches in curation and programming. Their practices are supported by a selective network of individual art stakeholders and state-level institutions; art critics, independent curators, and art spaces are underrepresented.

5.2

The historical painting collection: from the colonial legacy to aesthetic differences

The historical paintings collection was the first collection acquired by the Museum and served as the foundation for the City Museum and Art Gallery, the predecessor of the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Painted by artists of both Chinese and Western origins, the pictures depict the scenery and lifestyles of the people in Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, and other trading posts on China’s south coast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The collection was first built up by private collectors, comprising the Ho Tung Collection, the Charter Collection and the Law and Sayer Collection, and has been further developed by adding the works of representative painters. Exhibitions in the 1960s focused primarily on the collections of private collectors.5 Subsequent exhibitions mainly viewed collections in two ways: firstly, as pieces of visual evidence of the region’s past, which was useful in historical, topographical, or ethnographical studies, and secondly, in terms of the aesthetic achievements of the artists who produced the pictures. The first approach involved portrayals of the daily activities and customs of the people and the topography of a particular locality, such as Hong Kong, 4 The ‘Hong Kong Art: Open Dialogue’ (2008-2013) was the only project that involved independent curators in a total of five exhibitions. They included ‘Looking for Antonio Mark’ (curated by Valerie Doran), ‘Digital@logue’ (curated by Ellen Pau), ‘New Ink Art: Innovation and Beyond’ (curated by Alice King), ‘Charming Experience’ (curated by Grace Cheung), and ‘The Origin of Dao: New Dimensions in Chinese Contemporary Art’ (curated by Chinese Professor Pi Daojian). 5 Examples of these are the exhibitions entitled ‘Pictures from the Charter Collection’ (1966) and ‘Historical Pictures and Prints from the Law & Sayer Collection’ (1967).

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Macau, Canton, or the larger Pearl River Delta region.6 The second approach focused on the aesthetics of the genre of trade painting. This approach was influenced by the economics of imperialism and by the interests of art anthropologists in defining certain apparent ‘aesthetic’ qualities in defining the formal features of foreign objects,7 and by the role of Western art historians in sanctioning artistic styles that generally privileged the contribution of Western artists.8 Since 1997, the museum has continued to display its collection by reconnecting the subject to an imagined local or national past. ‘The Charter Legacy: A Selection of the Charter Collection’ of 2007 served as a continuation of the 1997 ‘Selected Works of the Charter Collection of Historical Pictures’ exhibition in depicting the historical features of coastal China, Hong Kong, and Macau, constructing a collective memory of the South China coast’s past. In 2004, the exhibition ‘Hong Kong Memories: Selected Historical Pictures of the Nineteenth Century’ portrayed the themes of ‘Opening of the Port’, ‘The Export Paintings by Chinese Artists’ and ‘The Era of Construction’, projecting the imagery of Hong Kong’s past in a progressive manner. Pictures with some distinctive export goods including silverware, porcelain, lacquer ware, and Canton enamel were displayed in a ‘royal’ design, surrounded by a red (symbolic colour of China) wall to represent a sense of national glory.9 6 Examples of these are the exhibitions ‘Hong Kong the Changing Scene’ (1979) and ‘Pearl River in the nineteeth century’ (1981) which were devoted to geographical themes, with detailed mapping and charting of the features recorded in the pictures of a locality. By depicting the exact scenery of the places and what was happening in the pictures, the exhibitions offered a nostalgic journey to an imagined past of Hong Kong. 7 For example, the exhibition ‘China Trade Painting’ (1976) was used to depict the manufacture of porcelain and the cultivation, preparation and sale of tea, silk, and cotton. Even in the 1982 ‘Late Qing China Trade Paintings’ exhibition, which emphasized the artistic characteristics and achievement of a special group of the nineteenth-century Chinese painters, the subject matter was magnificent port views, picturesque river scenes, floral sprays, birds and insects, and the daily life activities of Chinese people of the time. In the 1976 exhibition for an individual Chinese painter, Tingqua (1809-1870), the only known Chinese pupil of George Chinnery (1774-1852), the subject matters were presented thematically as creeds and customs, processions, marriage, domestic scenes, river scenes, and trade, which implied anthropological and topographical interests and ethical judgement. 8 The exhibition ‘George Chinnery – His Pupils and Influence’ in 1985 was held in recognition of a British artist who had travelled to the Far East, and documented his influence and contribution to popularizing trade painting among European visitors to China. Art historical scholarship was successfully delivered through a contextual narrative narrating the artist’s biography, including his pupils, his ‘English Grand Style’, and his influence on trade painting. 9 The data was excerpted from an unpublished paper on the painting collection of HKMoA, written by me in 2004, at the University of Leicester, United Kingdom.

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These exhibitions were mounted to support a master or generic narrative of ‘real’ historical images, and to eliminate the complex representational principles and contexts that underlay the collection, such as the contradictory histories of the places involved, the confrontation between colonizers and settlers, the gaze of colonizers, and the interaction between local and Western people. In reality, the collection reflected a colonial gaze reflecting the economic interests, imperialistic ideologies, tastes, and outlook of the European merchants and tourists who were the main clients for trade art objects and the principal collectors of the images. In the cultural artefacts displayed, the margins, peripheries, and limits of the Hong Kong colonial world were pictured and imagined, and a universal, complete, and centralist worldview of the West was presented. In addition, the collection involved the politics of collecting and offered a representation of the dominant social actors in colonial history and their values. The museum tended to negate critical reflection on colonial history but which alternatively used the material as a tool for expressing the local/national imagination. In recent years, the presentation of the collection has shown greater concern with popular interests and has prioritized the aesthetic engagement and educational-entertainment needs of the audience. The ‘Artistic Inclusion of the East and the West: Apprentice to Master’ exhibition in 2011 reimagined the encounter between the two different cultures by comparing the artistic styles, techniques, and concepts of local Chinese painters and their Western masters. With a focus on the aesthetic and technical aspects of the pictures, the exhibition explored the role that Western art traditions played in Chinese export painting and considered the pictures to be a timely contribution of the Chinese artists to meet the flourishing ‘Chinoiserie taste’ in Europe. By juxtaposing the works of the Chinese apprentices with their Western masters, the exhibition focused on identifying the differences and commonalities in their appropriation of perspectives, forms, and compositions, and in their employment of aesthetic and cultural elements. The other two exhibitions, ‘The Ultimate South China Travel Guide – Canton’ (2009) and ‘The Ultimate South China Travel Guide-Canton II’ (2012), were attempts to revitalize a popular engagement with the collection. The curator, Maria Mok, noted that the Chinese words of the exhibition title, quangonglve (which means the strategy of a war conqueror), were adopted from the vernacular language found in popular travel guides, and used to ease communication with local Hong Kong people.10 The exhibitions were successful in engaging visitors to undertake an imaginary journey to the 10 Interview with curator Maria Mok, 22 September 2015, Hong Kong.

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places once visited by foreigners and still popular today. While highlighting the areas accessible to foreigners in Canton city as a trade port before the outbreak of the First Opium War, the first episode toured destinations such as a pagoda, a light tower, a square set aside exclusively for foreigners, a street surrounded by shops and trade activities, and a popular temple for leisure excursions. Descriptions were concerned with when these structures were built, what they looked like, their construction features, and how they were used by foreigners as retreats (HKMoA 2009). Based on a map used for recording the military operation in the Pearl River in 1847, the second episode led visitors to explore the areas where foreigners were allowed to travel after the Opium War in 1839. Descriptions focused on the changes in traveller interest and the information crucial to travelling at a time when China was in regular conflict with Western powers (HKMoA 2012). The journey navigated through the shopping meccas and places for sightseeing, entertainment, and accommodation, and had a reminder about the increased hostility expressed by Cantonese people towards foreigners, including riots and attacks against trespassers. The side trips to Hong Kong and Macau shaped the visitors’ imagination of both places as favoured tourist destinations, with iconic tourist heritage sites, harbour views, pleasing scenes, and exciting entertainment such as gambling and horse racing, which remain popular tourist foci today. Diverging from the dominant logic of the master narrative of a national past, the two episodes proposed a lively and imaginative way of presenting the conflicts of the past. They offered historical facts and fantasies connected with past ‘social realities’. By linking the past to the present, they were able to accommodate the present-day public desire for tourist enjoyment and consumption with historical concerns.

5.3

International blockbusters and global cultural capital

In the colonial era, the Hong Kong art museum was a stage for presenting modern aesthetics, emphasizing the status, artistic progression, and innovation associated with art objects. It played a significant role in naturalizing the tensions in the East-meets-West discourse in the aesthetics of colonial Hong Kong. In order to maintain an international character and in line with the government’s policy for promoting Hong Kong as a global Asian city, the museum has presented a series of blockbuster exhibitions of foreign art treasures, mainly from Britain and France. Starting from its inauguration show titled ‘Too French’ (1991), blockbuster exhibitions in the Hong Kong art

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museum have followed almost every year, in collaboration with embassies, national museums, overseas art foundations, and sponsors ranging from corporations to auction houses. In particular, exhibition partnerships with France have been frequent,11 especially following the launch of the Le French in May 1993 by the Consulate General of France in Hong Kong. The exhibitions have mainly represented established modern European masters and prominent Western art movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, culminating in 2005 with the launch of ‘Impressionism: Treasures from the National Collection of France’, a touring exhibition that went to Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong in celebration of ‘The Year of France in China’. Moreover, some blockbusters have been organized with the support of corporate capital, global collectors, art auctions, and galleries. For example, the ‘Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal’ exhibition in 2012 was co-organized with the Andy Warhol Museum, a famous private collection in the United States, and was sponsored by an American world investment company and a British leading auction house. These shows of world-class art have demonstrated the government’s capacity for mobilizing global cultural capital and pursuing economic and cultural ties with its global capitalist allies (including global players in the art market). However, these exhibitions may not necessarily attest to the professional standing of the museum in the international arena. The retrospectives of canonic male artists in fields ranging from Impressionism, Neo-impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism to abstract and pop art, presented the core works of Western modernism. They inscribed the significance of Western modes of art production from bygone eras. Their representations were limited to the presentation of traditional academic formulas, which view art history as an inexorable progress towards the production of great art and see the artist as a genius and icon to be worshiped and admired but not fully understood. In addition, the content of these blockbuster exhibitions was mainly determined by the source organizers. They controlled the exhibitions’ production, limiting the creation of new or 11 They included ‘Rodin Sculpture’ (1993), retrospectives devoted to Chagall (1994), Balthus (1995), and Giacometti (2002), and thematic exhibitions such as ‘From Beijing to Versailles: relations between China and France’ (1997), ‘Masterpieces – The Origins of Modern Art in France, 1880-1939’ (1999), ‘Nice Movements – Contemporary French Art’ (2000), ‘New Museums in France, 1990-1999’ (2001), ‘The Golden Section (1912-1925) – French Cubism’ (2001), ‘Artists and Their Models – Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou, Paris’ (2006), ‘Paris 1730-1930: A Taste for China’ (2008), ‘Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation’ (2009), ‘Touching Art: Louvre’s Sculptures in Movement’ (2012), and ‘Paris. Chinese Painting: Legacy of the twentieth-century Chinese Masters’ (2014).

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alternative meanings of the works, while also fending off other local initiatives. For example, the 2012 ‘Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal’ exhibition was a retrospective of Warhol’s work from the start of his career in the 1950s through to the 1980s. It emphasized the subjects of celebrity and notoriety, iconic figures and images, and the diverse range of mediums and techniques he employed as an artist. When the exhibition was on tour in Singapore, Japan, Beijing, and Shanghai, the storyline was more or less the same. It did not explore the local relevance of this great American pop artist or consider the artist’s influence in revolutionizing the relationship between art and consumerism, an ideology which is highly pertinent to city development and to the daily life of urbanites in a place like Hong Kong. Interpretative intervention in the exhibition was extremely limited. When talking about this matter, the chief curator, Eve Tam, replied that the museum had added a few paintings of Chairman Mao into the series of celebrity portraits and featured items from Warhol’s visit to Hong Kong and Beijing in 1982. For entertainment and education purposes, as I observed in the exhibition, there was a popular interactive display for the audience to process and project their chromatic portraits on a wall as a gesture to paraphrase Warhol’s iconic statement, ‘In the future, everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes’. In addition to modern Western art, the story of civilization is another common subject of blockbuster exhibitions. ‘Egyptian Treasures from the British Museum’ (1998) and ‘Treasures of the World’s Cultures from the British Museum’ (2007) both were events that celebrated the Handover. The former exhibition recorded the largest museum audience with up to 310,029 visitors.12 ‘The World of the Etruscans’ (2006) and ‘Otium Ludens Leisure and Play: Ancient Relics of the Roman Empire’ (2008) were both supported by the Italian embassy. The former was a highlight event for the Year of Italy in China, a cultural gala for enhancing Sino-Italian bilateral ties. The latter was a show of support for the Beijing Olympics. These exhibitions primarily served the purpose of cultural diplomacy in strengthening political partnerships or economic and cultural ties with foreign countries. In addition, these blockbusters, which emphasized the primacy of the ‘great civilizations’ of ancient Greece and Rome and China’s national heritage, offered limited possibilities for new interpretations. They endorsed a particularly Western perspective of ‘universal’ culture derived from the Enlightenment. Museums such as the British Museum present themselves as having escaped the cultural constraints of the eighteenth 12 The figure was listed on the webpage of HKMoA, ‘Featured Articles’, www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/ Museum/Arts/en_US/web/ma/article02.html, accessed 16 January 2018.

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century and have claimed to provide ‘a universal resource for the citizens of the world’ (MacGregor and Williams 2005, 59). Shows, such as those in Hong Kong, converted the museum into a site of ‘the consumerist populism of heterogeneous culture that can maximize attendance’ (West 1995, 75). The international blockbuster exhibitions circulating amongst the capitals and metropolitan cities around the world have become an important aspect of globalization that we can argue is causing a broader restructuring of world cultural systems along Western-European and American lines. As reflected in its display of Western treasures, the Hong Kong Museum of Art has demonstrated great respect for the pursuit of diplomatic relations and to catering to mass popular appeal. With titles proclaiming ‘Masterpieces of’ or ‘Treasures from’, these blockbusters used art to project an apolitical appearance rather than acting to explicitly serve a cultural agenda. It is precisely the autonomous and symbolic nature of art that made these shows both attractive and useful to diplomacy (Balfe 1987, 195-217). With limited curatorial intervention, the museum professed to educate and entertain their public through these exhibitions. Despite having recordbreaking visitor numbers, the blockbuster exhibitions were not successful in enticing Hong Kong audiences. A qualitative study of the ‘Andy Warhol’ exhibition, conducted by Dr Vivian Ting and me in 2014, has indicated that curious explorers and leisure wanderers formed the majority of those in the museum audience cohorts. In addition, as shown by the official audience statistics (2002-2014), the museum was unable to entice visitors to undertake repeat visits in post-blockbuster shows.13 In short, the blockbusters were characterized by masterpiece and treasure themes, diplomatic values, and mass appeal. With constant displays of ‘Western’ exhibits, the museum has attracted leisure seekers and fostered their identity as ‘global’ citizens through the direct importation of Western art and cultural knowledge.

5.4

National representation and the grandeur of dynastic art

Chinese fine art and dynastic antiques have been central in the collections and displays of the HKMoA, but their representations in exhibitions have 13 For example, in 2007, the blockbuster exhibitions, ‘The Pride of China: Masterpieces of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy of the Jin, Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasties from the Palace Museum’ and ‘Treasures of the World’s Cultures from the British Museum’ were held. The attendance figures for the year rose to 621,682. However, the number of visitors in the subsequent five years was around 300,000 only. The figures were provided by HKMoA in email communication on 14 January 2015.

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changed in the postcolonial era. This section of the chapter focuses on the museum’s collection and exhibition strategies for Chinese paintings, calligraphy, and cultural relics, and examines how the national culture of China has been represented. Chinese antiquities including ceramics, bronze, lacquer ware, jade, cloisonné, and embroidery made up one of the main collections in the early formation of the museum (The Government of Hong Kong 1972, 200). In the early period, the museum’s permanent displays of the collection were limited to revealing the intrinsic properties of the antiques. Since the opening of the Gallery of Chinese Antiquities in 1991, thematic exhibitions have covered the antiquities’ craftsmanship, material forms, techniques, decorative motifs, their symbolic meanings, and original social functions. The object-based displays have been used to proclaim Chinese artefacts as entities that are luminous, grand, or gem-like,14 to encourage visitors to contemplate the beauty and perfection of objects, and to recognize the past cultural achievements of China. Yet a few changes have been observed in recent exhibitions. The exhibition titled ‘Ming and Qing Chinese Arts from the C. P. Lin Collection’ in 2014 told the story of the collector, and highlighted the relationship between the object and the individual. Another exhibition, the ‘Living with Bamboo: Museum of Art is Here’ (2016), consisted of a commissioned work by an independent local cultural research institution. It showcased the museum’s diverse collection of bamboo artefacts, extending across different genres and periods, from ancient times to the present. To emphasize the important role bamboo has played in traditional Chinese art and culture, the exhibition demonstrated how art can assimilate itself into people’s lives by means of bamboo, and how the aesthetic aspects of bamboo are elevated through living with it. The exhibition proposed a new way of seeing both the material and philosophical aspects of the social life of things,15 and was successful in building a creative link between the past and present. Since the first acquisition of a landscape painting by Liang Yuwei of the Qing dynasty in 1966, the museum has established a sizeable collection of 5,800 Chinese paintings and calligraphy, dating from the early Ming dynasty to the twenty-f irst century, through strategic purchases and generous 14 Exemplary exhibitions include ‘From the Realm of the Luminous: Art Relics of the Ming Dynasty’ (1986), ‘The Grandeur of the Chinese Empire Art of the Han and Tang Dynasties’ (1986), and ‘Gems of Antiques Collections in Hong Kong’ (2002). 15 According to anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1986, 5), this perspective highlights culturallyoriented studies of things/objects and how their meanings are inscribed in their forms, uses, and trajectories. This approach offers a way to understand how people encode things with significance in a specific space and time.

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donations (Hong Kong Museum of Art 2013). There was a notable shift in the 1990s towards a broader historical and chronological representation of Chinese art. In 1992, the Xubaizhai Gallery of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy was built to provide a permanent home for the collection donated by the renowned art connoisseur Low Chuck-tiew. The collection encompasses works dating from the Northern Dynasties (386-581) through to the twentieth century, with a strong focus on the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) Dynasties.16 The museum’s collection of Chinese painting and modern calligraphy has been further strengthened by the donation of Lau Siu-lui’s Taiyilou Collection, and Fan Jia’s donation of twentieth-century works. In the twenty-first century, the museum has extended the scope of its collection into Chinese works from the 1980s and 1990s. The late Wu Guanzhong donated his works and Linda Chang donated ‘new literati paintings’, which were painted by artists who were recovering from the effects of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. The additional purchase of contemporary Chinese art pieces17 has further strengthened the museum’s narrative of recording cultural modernity in China. The overall collection development has served to ‘present the evolution of Chinese paintings from traditional to contemporary and demonstrate the significance of Guangdong painting as part of the Chinese art history’ (ibid., 3). Exhibitions are commonly used to highlight the themes, genres, styles, subject matter, and cultural inspiration of works. Exhibition themes have included winter landscapes, gardens, a Qing dynasty woman, figure paintings, the ideals of nobility and virtue, and brush styles. In addition, retrospective shows of Guangdong painters and modern Chinese painters of the twentieth century are common, organized in terms of a cultural model structured by the categories of Chinese tradition and innovation or of ‘East meeting West’.18 Temporary exhibitions by guest curators have sought to initiate cultural reflection on Chinese contemporary art (including emphasizing the ongoing influence of its traditional philosophy). They have 16 See the webpage of HKMoA, ‘Museum Collections Xubaizhai Collection of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy’, www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/Arts/en_US/web/ma/collection06.html, accessed 26 January 2018. 17 They include ‘The Book from the Sky’ presented by Xu Bing, ‘The Temple of Heaven’ by Gu Wenda, and works by Wu Shanzhuan, Lin Tainmiao, Zhang Xiaogang, and Wang Tainde. 18 For example, ‘Twentieth-Century Chinese Painting: Tradition and Innovation, Homage to Tradition: Huang Binhong’ (1995), ‘Vision and Revision: Wu Guanzhong’ (1995), ‘No Frontiers: The Art of Ding Yanyong’ (2008), ‘East Meets West: Wu Guanzhong Art Retrospective Exhibition’ (2010), ‘A Passion for Tradition: The Art of Li Yanshan’ (2011), and ‘Revitalizing the Glorious Tradition – The Retrospective Exhibition of Pan Tianshou’s Art’ (2011).

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attempted to strategically propagate China’s position in the global cultural arena by putting together the works of artists in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan along with overseas Chinese artists.19 As reflected in the collection development and in its permanent and temporary exhibitions of Chinese paintings, the museum has been playing a significant role in representing the historical and cultural changes that modern China has undergone. Furthermore, since China adopted the Open Door Policy in 1978, the HKMoA’s collaboration with museums in mainland China has grown. Starting from 1997, blockbuster exhibitions featuring Chinese national cultural heritage organized in collaboration with China’s State Bureau of Cultural Relics and with national and provincial museums have increased signif icantly. These exhibitions of artefacts and artworks loaned from China, consisting largely of national treasures and items from the imperial collections, have highlighted the opulence of China’s culture, the glory of its civilization, and the nature and effects of the imperial gaze expressed in royal commissions, tastes, and aspirations. In the year of the Handover, the ‘National Treasures-Gems of China’s Cultural Relics’ was typical of this kind of exhibition and extolled the longevity and cultural richness of China’s civilizations by displaying the finest Chinese treasures, covering all the major periods from the Neolithic to the Qing dynasty. In subsequent years there was a boom in exhibitions of national treasures.20 In particular, the talk-of-the-town exhibition ‘The Pride of China’ (2007) was held to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China. The most popular exhibit, ‘Along the River during the Qingming Festival’ by Zhang Zeduan of the Northern Song dynasty, attracted an enormous crowd. Visitors were gripped by a craze for this handscroll treasure, flocking to pre-booking exhibition tickets and queuing up just to view the treasure for one minute. While the Chinese state has been effective in implanting in museum visitors a sense of collective engagement with the memory of imperial rule, with the government’s action to preserve the imperial collections functioning as signs of its political authority and legitimacy 19 For example, the touring exhibition of ‘Inside Out: New Chinese Art’ (2000) (presented by the Asia Society Hong Kong Centre and curated by US-based Chinese scholar Gao Minglu) and ‘The Origins of Dao: New Dimensions in Chinese Contemporary Art’ (2013) (curated by Pi Daojian, Professor of South China Normal University). 20 For instance, ‘Warring States Treasures-Cultural Relics from the State of Zhongshan, Hebei Province’ (1999), ‘Relics from Yuanming Yuan’ (2000), ‘Origins of Chinese Civilization – Cultural Relics from Henan Province’ (2002), ‘The Prosperous Cites: A Selection of Paintings from the Liaoning Provincial Museum’ (2009), and ‘A Lofty Retreat from the Red Dust: The Secret Garden of Emperor Qianlong’ (2012).

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(Hamlish 2000, 158), the national treasure exhibitions in Hong Kong were primarily political commissions. They were meant to strengthen the sense of national identity amongst the people of Hong Kong by constructing an image of a unified, mighty nation with a civilized culture, inviting Hong Kong people to see themselves as part of this nation.

5.5

Different notions of the local: from East-meets-West to a local-national-global nexus

The museum has long endeavoured to define what is distinctive about Hong Kong art. Since the postcolonial era, the museum’s displays of local art have foregrounded the ‘in-between’ local artistic identity framed overwhelmingly by the cliché of ‘East meets West’. In the museum’s first year, the exhibition ‘Hong Kong Art Today’ was held to present an overview of modern art in Hong Kong. It was followed by survey shows of established and emerging artists taking place every year through local biennials or art competitions. More than vehicles for artistic demonstration and appraisal, these exhibitions were platforms for expressing local artistic identity. In the ‘Contemporary HK Art 1972’ exhibition, then assistant curator Wucius Wong highlighted the notion of a ‘Hong Kong Style’ and interpreted it as the multiple ways in which Eastern and Western ideas were emerging together in Hong Kong (Hong Kong Urban Council 1972). The idea of the ‘in between’ as a location where East and West cultural inter-fusion takes place, has formed the core notion of modern Hong Kong artistic identity. Largely focused on aesthetics, materiality, style, and cultural symbolic elements, the narratives and works of Hong Kong art were constructed in these exhibitions and displays as an expression of the discourse and practice of cultural manoeuvring between Chinese tradition and Western modernity. This principle was restated in the New Ink Movement of the early 1970s, which was led by the ink painter Lui Shou-kwan, in which the artists experimented with modern Western techniques to revive Chinese ink paintings. Through various displays and exhibitions, the narrative of a unique style of Hong Kong painting with a spiritual link to Chinese tradition and with methodological ties with Western modernity was constructed. Critically, this entailed an ideological separation from Communist China and a strategic mediation between Chinese and Western culture. The ‘in-between’ local artistic identity constructed and narrated under the cliché of ‘East meets West’ was found in the exhibitions of works in Western media by local artists, for example, ‘City Vibrance – Recent Works in Western media by Hong Kong Artists (1992)’ and penetrated into the

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subsequent series of the artists’ solo exhibitions in the lead-up to 1997. The works of these artists were understood as reflections of the modernization of tradition and a progression towards important artistic innovations. Since the Handover in 1997, HKMoA has organized exhibitions to pay tribute to senior or deceased local modern artists. Survey shows for celebrating creativity and for branding a city image that is characterized by the idea of vitality have become common.21 The museum has continued to produce and reproduce exhibitions on Hong Kong ink paintings. On the one hand, it has retold the story of Hong Kong modern ink painters under the rubric of ‘East-meets-West’,22 but on the other hand, it has brought modern ink art back into connection with the origins of traditional Chinese ink painting, imbuing it with a narrative of broader evolution conjured through the artists’ response to changing surroundings and the adoption of different cultural elements. In short, the story of Hong Kong modern ink-paintings has been reframed in a ‘national to global’ discourse. Exemplary shows include ‘Hong Kong Cityscapes – Ink Painting Transition’ (2003) and the ‘Legacy and Creations – Ink Art vs Ink Art’ (2010). The latter exhibition was held at the Shanghai Expo. It was notable because it extended to the works that used new multimedia and digital techniques, treating them as constituting a distinctive style established under global influence. Moreover, by organizing thematic shows exhibiting local contemporary art, the museum has tended to reconstruct narratives of Hong Kong cultural identity. Prior to the ‘Open Dialogue’ (a series of exhibitions conducted by guest curators from 2008 to 2013), Eva Tam, who later became the new chief-curator of the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 2012, has curated the ‘Chinglish-Hong Kong Art Exhibition’ and the ‘Made in Hong Kong – Contemporary Art Exhibition’ in 2007. Both exhibitions appropriating local art with a curatorial perspective have made a great difference from the museum’s previous local art exhibitions, which highlighted either the artistic achievement of an individual master, or a group of works selected by panels. Greater curatorial autonomy and creativity seem to be more possible in the public museum, though the ‘Made in Hong Kong’ was criticized for its exclusion of female local artists. Particularly in the ‘Chinglish’ exhibition, curator Eve Tam stated that a notable shift in the narrative of Hong Kong 21 For examples, ‘Hong Kong Visual Arts: Vibrant City’ (1999) and ‘Hong Kong Visual Arts: City Rhythm Impressions of Diversity’ (1999). 22 For example, ‘Ink Paintings by Lui Shou-kwan’ (2002), ‘Lui Shou-kwan – New Ink Painting’ (2002), ‘Secret Codes -The Art of Hon Chi-fun’ (2005), and ‘At the East-West Crossroads – The Art of Wucius Wong’ (2006).

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culture away from ‘East-meets-West’ to the idea of embracing different cultures in the era of globalization had occurred (Tam 2007, 4). The exhibition exemplified Hong Kong’s unique culture – Chinglish, a mixture of Chinese and English – by showcasing works of local artists, who use different ways of appropriating this distinctive language for reflecting how lost they are in addressing language and identity in a global village. In addition, the museum has highlighted the idea of an everyday aesthetic in its latest exhibitions, ‘In the Name of Art – Hong Kong Contemporary Art’ (2015) and ‘Art upon an Island’ (2017). Both emphasized the quality of ‘everydayness’ as a distinctive feature of Hong Kong contemporary art, but the former, held at MOCA Taipei, focused on using art to raise questions about life and to initiate social critiques, while the latter, with a Hong Kong audience, was more about the phenomenological aspects of their life experience in both public and private spaces. Contemporary local art has been drawn closer to the expression of what is distinct about Hong Kong culture and everyday life. Yet the notion of the everyday is more about the potential for individual gratification or personal transformation than an invitation for a critique of the broader social structures and contexts in which people live. Furthermore, over the past ten years, the condition of being ‘lost in translation’ is more contested in the national realm than in the global village. The story of local language deserves re-exploration, as it may enable the creation of a public space for further negotiating the issue of local identity. Hong Kong-based art historian David Clark (1996, 16) has proposed that the museum should serve as ‘a site for debate about cultural identity, a space in which competing notions of cultural identity are articulated’. It is worth scrutinizing further how local culture has been officially interpreted, while the museum has picked other, less contested ways to tell the story of Hong Kong. In short, in place of a political void – the situation of the museum in the colonial era, when culture/aesthetics were never (or rarely) discussed in terms of politics, and the dilemmatic tension that exist in the East-meetsWest discourse were naturalized – the postcolonial period has seen the museum make a dramatic shift of cultural representation towards China imagined as a national structure, and evoke popular imaginations of local culture and global identity. As reflected in its main collection and exhibitions, the art museum has organized itself around the subject of cultural identity. The story of Hong Kong’s colonial legacy has been trapped within the grand narrative of China’s history or in nostalgia for a national past, and the museum has gradually oriented itself towards greater populist concern and prioritized the educational-entertainment needs of the audience. The museum’s collection of Chinese fine art and antiquities has been expanding

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to represent the complete course of China’s art history, which is seen as a source of progressive and ongoing modernity, and as the origin of Hong Kong regional culture. The blockbuster exhibitions of loaned Chinese treasures were used to promote the national virtues of China and the glory of its long history and great cultural heritage. Blockbuster presentations of Western treasures or ‘universal resources’ were organized to extol the image of Hong Kong as an Asian global player, while also pragmatically serving the purposes of diplomacy and offering popular appeal. Such exhibitions have become a spectacle through which those who see themselves to be global citizens accumulate symbolic capital. These blockbusters are unfortunately restricted to essentialist views of the history of Western art, modernity, and the history of human civilization. Finally, Hong Kong art, which once was understood in terms of a connection between modernized tradition and Western modernity, and through an ideological separation from the Communist state, is now more attached to a concept of the global-local nexus. The story of Hong Kong modern ink-paintings has been reframed in a ‘national to global’ discourse, while contemporary local art has been drawn closer to the frame of global networks and the idea of everyday aesthetics. Diverging from the East/West dichotomy, Hong Kong art has been used recently to reflect Hong Kong culture. Local art can be deployed in multiple ways within this national-local-global imaginative nexus, so long as it involves officially acceptable interpretations. Overall, the displays of the permanent collections and the loan exhibits represent discrete forms of art and seldom generate cross-cultural dialogue or public discussion on the issues of identity. They serve to create a feudalized public sphere where ‘representation and appearances outweigh rational debate’ (Holub 1991, 6). The notion of a feudalized ‘public’ was developed by Jürgen Habermas. 23 In his book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ([1962]1989), he describes the decline of the ‘bourgeois/literary public sphere’. Rational-critical debate has waned, as newspapers and magazines change their functions from distributing 23 The feudal public originally referred to a particular political individual such as king, prince or lord, who embodied higher power. Habermas called this ‘representative publicness or ‘representative publicity (1989, 7) as rulers saw themselves as the state and not as representatives of the state – meaning that they represented their power to the people and not for the people. He observed the emergence of the ‘bourgeois/literary public sphere’ in the early stage of capitalism when citizens could critically and rationally debate public policy, and demanded a more democratic type of representation that is ‘critical publicity’ in his terms. The term ‘public’ became the legitimate mode of exercising power rather than the representation of a man with authority.

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political ideas to distributing advertising messages linked with prof its ([1962]1989, 165). Debate has regressed back into a mode of representative publicity that Habermas terms as ‘the refeudalization of the public sphere’ (ibid., 195). Habermas claims that late consumer capitalism attempts to turn people into unthinking mass consumers on the one hand, while contemporary political actors, interest groups, and the state try to turn people into unthinking mass citizens on the other (ibid., 285). I use the term, ‘feudalize(d)’ here to describe the form of museum production that discourages public debate on cultural issues and limits social representation in the museum’s activities. According to Habermas, ‘publicity once meant the exposure of political domination before the public use of reason […] The “suppliers” display a showy pomp before customers ready to follow’ (ibid., 195). With the refeudalization of the public sphere, ‘the public sphere becomes the court before whose public prestige can be displayed – rather than in which public critical debate is carried on’ (ibid., 201). In other words, the public reverts to its passive status with citizens waiting to choose what is available for them to be consumed in the museum. The government-museum discourages rational-critical thought through sophisticated manipulation of representation, seeking to create ‘apolitical’ aesthetics around their ‘consumer products’. By inclining itself towards ‘representative publicity’, the Hong Kong Museum of Art has done little to secure its cultural legitimacy by means of greater social representation or diffusion of curatorial authority. Instrumentally speaking, the museum’s signification practices have regulated the cultural identity of the subjects who visit it by privileging the production of a depoliticized aesthetics. In addition, the museum tends to treat its visitors as well as their visiting experiences primarily in quantitative terms. Its feedback mechanism is limited to Post-it notes and quantitative visitor surveys. The surveys have been conducted every two years by a marketing consultancy company, which, on a commission basis, collects the visitors’ demographic data and measures the visitors’ level of satisfaction with various aspects of services and facilities in all official museums. The museum public is treated as an undifferentiated mass, which amounts to a measure for the effectiveness of museum management. Moreover, this concept of the public follows the government’s principle of fairness in handling public services. However, in terms of methodology, the application of the principle of fairness is determined by the ‘intentional production condition’ and entirely neglects the conditions for the consumption of public goods (Boran 2006). I argue that the interlinked relationship between production and consumption should not be neglected. Both processes – production

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and consumption – constitute the moment of circulation, which articulates production in relation to consumption and draws consumption back into the process of production (Nixon 1998, 181). There is an urgent need for examining the differences amongst museum visitors and researching their agency in museum consumption.

5.6

Public and counter-public: museum consumption in a city-state

In light of the complex relationship between different types of cultural representation, what does the museum really mean to its public? How do the visitors make sense of their museum experience and reflect their cultural orientation? This section attempts to answer these questions through an ethnographic study that includes visitor interviews, public statements, and news articles. The HKMoA has drawn a broad spectrum of adult visitors. The majority of them are between eighteen and thirty years old. Based on the visitors’ narratives of their museum experience, I categorize them into six distinct identities: ‘leisure consumers’, ‘curious explorers’, ‘enthusiastic/utilitarian learners’, ‘amateur connoisseurs’, ‘cultural tourists’, and ‘the critical audience’. The first four groups tend to integrate with or adapt to the museum entity, while the ‘cultural tourists’ are more inclined to a negotiated position, expressing opinions that vary according to their previous knowledge and cultural experience. The ‘critical audience’ together with the ‘activists’ are prone to adopt an oppositional position. They represent the force of social dissonance and dissenting action, upholding values that conflict with the government/ museum’s ideologies. My fieldwork was conducted before the museum was closed for renovation and at a time when five exhibitions were taking place. Here I briefly describe these exhibitions to contextualize the experiences of the visitors. ‘Tempting Touch – the Art of Tong King-sum’ was a retrospective exhibition of the work of the local modern artist. The exhibition emphasized the form and texture of his sculptures, which reflect his passion for nature and life, and spring from the artist’s inner capacities, such as his physical ability, perseverance, and willpower. By featuring a selection of his torso sculptures, a video presenting a glimpse of his life and art-making, and a room modelling his workspace, the sculpture show was successful in creating a narrative of a devoted artist and of the important role of art in life. Visitors were able to appreciate the artist’s capacity to overcome his

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physical limitations and to draw inspiration from his perspective on life and on positive life energy. The thematic exhibition ‘All are Guests-Homecoming’ was another exhibition representing local artists and art groups. The exhibition tour returned to Hong Kong after the Liverpool Biennial 2012 and Taipei’s Hong Kong Week 2013. With an interdisciplinary approach combining visual art, community design, literature, and other media, the exhibition was meant to examine the relationship between self and city in light of the intricate yet subtle host-guest dynamics of the contemporary global world. Visitors generally associated the exhibition with local Hong Kong culture and reflections on daily life. The video work ‘Out of Place’ by the artist, Leung Mei-ping was highly noted by visitors. By presenting solitary figures in cities across Asia, the work explored the identity of city drifters swept by the tide of urbanization. A visitor who left his feedback in a note described the exhibition as one that ‘flows with integrity, mixed with a sense of isolation, all the while sparking the interest of the community as one whole functioning machine; they are truly mind and soul expanding’. The ‘Random Moments’ exhibition of contemporary media works was the least mentioned, although it contained the well-attended documentary work by Pak Sheung-chuen. Wondering how much air he might be consuming in his apartment, the conceptual artist blew up transparent plastic bags, piled them up, and completely filled the apartment space. Visitors who enjoyed the work were attentive to the intention of the artist and the process of his repetitive performance. ‘The Four Gentlemen: A Selection of Flower Paintings from the Hong Kong Museum of Art Collection’ presented a large selection of the museum’s collection of the works by calligraphers and literati painters extending from the Ming dynasty to the modern period, who all employed the theme of ‘The Four Gentlemen’. The phrase traditionally refers to plum blossoms, orchids, chrysanthemums, and bamboo, which are each seen to have their own noble characteristics, reflecting the sentiments of a gentleman. In addition to learning about the aesthetic and technical aspects of the works, the audience showed their interest in understanding the essence of traditional Chinese culture and familiarizing themselves with the characters of the ‘Four Gentlemen’. The ‘Donation of Works by Wu Guanzhong’ was a relatively small exhibition of paintings donated by the renowned artist himself. Visitors generally liked his paintings but had little overall impression of them due to the small size of the exhibition. In the visitor study, a total of 47 visitors were interviewed. The sample was 57% female and 43% male. The majority were young people aged 18-30

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(64%). A quarter of the visitors were middle-aged (30-40 years old), and 11% were retired and over 60 years old. Amongst them, 12% were tourists from mainland China, including Guangxi, Hunan, Fujian, and Beijing. In addition, there was one Malaysian who worked in Hong Kong and one Taiwanese who came to Hong Kong to meet a friend. The museum attracted a broad audience, with visitors from a variety of educational backgrounds, ranging from secondary schools to universities, pursuing different study specializations and covering a wide range of occupations. They included a doctor, journalist, financial analyst, restaurant waitress, dental assistant, and clerk. As they came from diverse backgrounds, their engagement with the exhibition or works varied considerably. Those who were professionals and had a higher level of education did not necessarily possess a higher level of engagement in art. Those who had formally specialized in art-related subjects demonstrated a greater and more meaningful or sentimental attachment to artworks. In addition, young people showed great interest in contemporary works as well as Chinese paintings and artefacts. When asked about their perceptions of their identity, they tended to identify themselves as Hong Kongers or as Hong Kong Chinese. In addition to local art, they expected to see a greater variety of art offering alternative perspectives. In contrast, under the influence of their family or previous education in Chinese history or culture, the elderly were exclusively receptive to Chinese cultural material from the period up to the early twentieth century. Those who were born in China were fond of Chinese culture and identified themselves as purely Chinese. Based on their own interpretation of the museum and their art engagement, the purpose of their visit, and cultural interests and expectations, I categorized visitors into six main types: ‘leisure consumers’, ‘curious explorers’, ‘enthusiastic/utilitarian learners’, ‘amateur connoisseurs’, ‘cultural tourists’, and ‘critical audience’. ‘Leisure consumers’ and ‘curious explorers’ were two types of casual visitors forming a signif icant part of the museum public. Together with ‘enthusiastic/utilitarian learners’, they tended to adapt themselves to the museum’s agendas. ‘Cultural tourists’ were negotiation-oriented, expressing varied experiences based on their cultural backgrounds in mainland China. ‘The critical audience’ was a public segment expressing an array of contested readings of what they saw that were incongruent with or oppositional to the state/ museum’s symbolic system. In addition, there were ‘activists’ whose social action concerns revealed values and ideologies conflicting with the government/museum. Together with the ‘critical audience’, they have made it more difficult for the art museum to sustain the image of being

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a trustworthy public institution and thus more difficult to legitimatize official representations. The seven modes of identification are explicated in the following table. Table 5.1 Modes of museum identification of the publics of Hong Kong Museum

Types of identity

of Art Integrative/Adaptive

Negotiated

Oppositional

Leisure consumers Curious explorers Enthusiastic/ Utilitarian learners Amateur connoisseurs

Cultural tourists

Critical audience Activists

Leisure consumers refer to those who enjoyed the museum’s space or environment and considered it a desirable site for pursuing entertainment or leisure. This segment included the elderly visitors, and visitors from both professional and working classes who come for relaxation. The former looked exclusively at Chinese cultural materials, while the latter casually picked the exhibits that most interested them. They both showed little interest in further understanding the exhibits. Retired people were frequent museum-goers. They did not show much interest in the works and cursorily browsed the objects on display. Nevertheless, they commonly demonstrated their exclusive preference for Chinese cultural materials. For example, a retired couple who completed secondary education and previously worked as clerks visited the museum twice a month. They considered their visit a leisure activity. They would look exclusively at Chinese paintings and checked for new exhibits. However, of the visit that I observed, they had only a very vague impression of what they had seen and felt contented with the quiet environment of the museum. Another retired couple came for the Chinese artefacts in the museum. With no particular purpose for their visit, they were happy with every exhibit except the modern artworks because they found them difficult to understand. For example, they could not accept that a contemporary work (entitled ‘Out of Place’) was a piece of art. Leisure-seeking casual visitors would often come for a break after work. As they came from disciplines or occupations outside the art world, they appreciated the opportunity to enjoy the aesthetics of the museum objects. For example, a waitress would visit the museum every month, usually going before the start of her working day. She said she considered the museum visit

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as an entertainment activity which made her relax and release work-related stress: The museum’s environment is so nurturing. I feel refreshed every time and sometimes I get some life inspiration […] I quite like the image of ‘street drifters’ [in the ‘Homecoming’ exhibition]. It makes me think of those who are neglected in society […] and I prefer seeing Western art. It keeps my eyes open.

By contrast, a young dentist assistant was only interested in Chinese culture and history. She had developed this interest during her secondary education. As she was only interested in history, she could not find an art exhibit that interested her. A professional also simply selected what he liked. A local young doctor stated that he often frequented museums and galleries for relaxation. He preferred seeing installations and multimedia works. Of the visit that I observed, he said he found the moving images innovative and interactive. He identified a work as follows: I see a short film. It shows a few foreign informants incessantly saying ‘I love you’ in Cantonese. I find the work very interactive. They seem to be speaking directly to me […] but I think the sculptures are very like those displayed in a traditional museum […] and the exhibits are of different types here; I do not find any clear cultural positioning in the museum.

Curious explorers did not have any particular reason for their museum visit. Like some of the leisure consumers, they were motivated by a personal interest in exploring the artworks. They had a broader interest in art and culture than the leisure consumers, and were able to motivate themselves to explore the subjects of their interest. A radiologist graduate who had lived in Australia for eight years said he went to the museum every one or two months. He is a fan of Western impressionist art. During the visit, he enjoyed the works in the ‘Four Gentlemen’ exhibit and Wu Guanzhong’s paintings. He explained this was because of his preference for works with a realistic form, intricate colour, and good composition. He was curious to see some works relating to Lingnan culture, the regional culture of Hong Kong, and the Pearl River Delta. Another visitor, a university student majoring in tourism, was attracted by the exhibition poster of ‘The Four Gentlemen’ (illustrating the four plants representative of the sentiments of a gentleman in ancient China) hanging outside the

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museum. She decided to visit the museum because of her interest in plants and her curiosity about what the ‘Four Gentlemen’ represent. She said she clearly understood the artist’s expression in the sculpture exhibition, but the works shown in the other two contemporary exhibitions puzzled her: I am surprised that [the sculptor] is physically disabled, but he is full of positive life energy […] there is another interesting work with an artist blowing air into bags and filling the entire room with them. I am not sure why he is doing so, but it is quite fascinating.

Another university student in business management came to Hong Kong from China as a child. She was interested in ‘good’ art, regardless of whether it was Eastern or Western art. She tended to mention works that touched her personally. She was particularly moved by a phrase by a sculptor, and attempted to reiterate it: It is that life is a ‘theatre’, and one should perform perfectly on his own stage […] besides, I quite like looking at paintings, the lines, composition, and subject matter.

Enthusiastic learners refer to those who purposely used the museum for formal, informal, or continuing education. They generally looked for greater interaction or communication with art and considered the museum to be a place for seeking knowledge that could broaden social understanding or encourage individual reflection. This segment demonstrated a higher capacity for or expectation of having a meaningful relationship with art. Included in this group are parents who used the museum as a place of informal learning for their children. For example, a middle-aged housewife said she took her child to the museum every month, as she wanted him to learn more about the world through art and explore knowledge rarely found in books. A primary school teacher with an annual museum pass said she visited the museum once a month. When I interviewed her, she was particularly impressed by the work with the balloons, even though she was puzzled about the intention of the artist and unable to get any meaning out of the work. As a teacher, she considered the museum a place of culture and education, and expected the museum to have more interactive elements such as a hands-on sculpture-making workshop. To students, the museum was a place for developing knowledge and ways of thinking, viewing, and creating art. It offered them possibilities for cultural learning and intellectual and imaginative stimulation. For example,

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three university students majoring in education came to the museum to prepare for an assignment, which consisted of designing a museum visit for school children. They found the ‘Homecoming’ exhibition quite remarkable. They especially enjoyed the mini pictures, which had revealed to them a very vernacular aspect of Hong Kong culture and a strong sense of Hong Kong identity. Moreover, they were interested in the biography of the sculptor and his techniques, which gave them artistic inspiration. They had expected the museum to display more local Hong Kong artists and to organize more art workshops and demonstrations than it actually does. A university student specializing in Chinese was a fan of museums and had the unusual habit of collecting exhibition tickets. Through the influence of her mother and grandmother as well as her Chinese teacher, she had developed an interest in Chinese culture and history, including Xiqu (Chinese opera). As such, she enjoyed the ‘Four Gentlemen’ exhibition very much. She asserted that she had learned something new about the methods used in ink paintings, and the creative works had expanded her imagination: There is a painting by a local artist of the Lingnan School. It is a purple butterfly flying over a bundle of chrysanthemums. It seems to be leading me into another world. It looks as real as it would in life […] I have checked the exhibits one by one and have read each caption to understand each work […] I might check again for further details on some exhibits when I go home.

Two other university graduates, working in communications and the civil service respectively, were occasional museum-goers. They quite enjoyed the exhibition of local artists. One of them found the ‘balloon’ work unique and interesting. He was amazed by the way the artist quantified the air by blowing up balloons. Another male visitor was inspired by the work ‘Out of Place’. He felt the artist’s perspective was very different from the gaze of people on the street in the film and wondered how the artist had followed the street flâneur. Both visitors considered the museum a place for seeking alternative perspectives and keeping them updated about the latest thinking. They thought that the museum should take the role of education seriously and disapproved of measuring performance with attendance figures or profits. Although they viewed themselves as Hong Kongers who did not reject a Chinese identity, they held that there was a cultural difference between Hong Kong and China. They expected the museum to play an active role in local cultural discourse by provoking thought rather than providing information. Retired people used the museum for lifelong learning, but their reception was limited to the subjects related to Chinese cultural materials. One

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couple, who had both previously worked in the educational field, visited the museum once every few months. One of them preferred the paintings of Wu Guangzhou because they motivated him to learn: I learn through the detailed descriptions of why the artist did the paintings, how he felt and what the context was while he was painting […] but I am not used to the contemporary art and Western works. I do not get what contemporary artists express […] of course, Chinese culture is my root. I think it might be because I was educated in the 1960s.

Another retired couple were regular visitors. The man was a retired hospital nurse and had some collecting experience at an art club and a small-scale auction house. He also identified as Chinese and strongly valued Chinese culture for its profundity and expression of virtue. As he explained, he was born in the 1960s and was influenced by the teachers of the time who had extensive knowledge in national learning. In his communication with the art, he found the representations of the ‘Four Gentlemen’ exemplary and highlighted their reflection on human moral personalities and their influence on people’s ways of seeing and behaving. Utilitarian learners had an educational orientation for professional and utilitarian purposes. As professionals from the art and design fields, they usually came to seek inspiration, ideas, and skills for their creative work. Unlike enthusiastic learners, who sought out art for individual reflection or social learning, they were concerned with artistic styles, technique, and the art production process. They were also interested in materials with other cultural origins. A designer said he usually came with his wife and daughter to museums, parks, and libraries for leisure. Nevertheless, he used this specific museum for inspiration for his design work: I usually look at the shape, material, and design elements in artworks and find out what artists would like to express and how they make their works. This might be useful to my design work […] I like local works, but I am also happy to see overseas exhibits as they might offer other perspectives. I think it is most important to show a variety of things that reflect a cultural difference in a dynamic way.

A young male visitor who works in multimedia design came to the museum during a holiday. He too was concerned with artistic expressions and techniques. In the ‘Four Gentlemen’ exhibition, he learned something about the

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styles and emotions of painters and poets in different periods of time. He especially liked the plum blossom, since it is a type of flower rarely seen in Hong Kong, and described it as ‘cool, lightly lined, and depicted with snow as the background; the flowers and branches all are meticulously drawn’. In addition, he was receptive to all kinds of art, particularly graffiti because of the colour and rhythm of the spray paint. He thought that art exhibitions embraced history and carried serious meanings and expressions. He also thought museum visits could enhance his quality of life. A couple, both with degrees in design, visited the museum on a day trip. It was the fourth time that they had visited the museum. Both were amazed by the Chinese paintings and commented on ‘the superb techniques of the works’. Although they seldom went to the museum, both thought that the different stories expressed through the exhibits had given them a source of inspiration. Both agreed that the museum should be a platform for presenting the real Hong Kong. They felt there had been an overwhelming promotion of Chinese ink paintings and Western exhibits, but little promotion of local art. Amateur connoisseurs were another category of art-related professionals. They were frequent museum-goers who utilized the museum not only for the contemplation and appreciation of art, but also as a social activity for constructing a professional identity of someone with recognized artistic taste and knowledge of art. For example, a collector in his forties had emigrated from Fujian in mainland China twenty years ago. He had been active in collecting twentiethcentury Chinese artworks through auction houses and direct purchase. With the hope of meeting friends with a common interest in collecting, he kept asking me if I knew of any cultural organizations or collectors’ clubs. He had already joined the Friends of the Art Museum at a university. He realized that his interest in Chinese art had developed under the influence of his father, who was born after the Republican era and was a committed follower of Chinese traditional culture. He said he came to see Chinese paintings every week. Although he was an experienced visitor, he tended to define a painting as ‘good’ based on his individual interest and taste. As a devotee of Chinese culture, he expected the museum to increase its collaboration with regional museums for displaying distinguished Chinese exhibits. Cultural tourists were largely well-educated individuals from mainland China. Regarding the museum as a platform for culture and education, they mostly came to the museum expecting to see a unique local culture. Overall, they met challenges in reconciling their museum visit with their ways of seeing art and imagining the city’s culture. They had greater expectations about the museum’s mode of engagement with the public. They also tended to

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negotiate their experience in the museum by comparing it to their previous museum visits in mainland China or Western countries. Some exhibits were challenging to their usual ways of seeing art and the world. For example, a young girl from Fujian was in Hong Kong on her fourth visit. She had difficulty in understanding the sculptures and said they gave her a strange feeling; she thought it might be a personal problem due to her conservative attitude to seeing nudity. In addition, cultural tourists commonly showed great concern about the physical space of the museum and its means for engagement. They felt that the HKMoA was small and should use technology as a way of engaging visitors. For example, two university students from Changsha studying art-related subjects both considered the museum far more modern than the artefact museums they had experienced in the mainland. They liked the sculptural works and felt the work ‘Out of Place’ was very humanitarian in its sentiments. Although they were interested in the concepts and styles of the works, they suggested that the museum should have more interactive platforms and forums for the exchange of ideas, similar to what they had experienced in Western museums. They also believed the museum should make use of technology such as the weChat used in some mainland museums for interaction with the audience. As outsiders, the tourists identified the museum as a place where they would be able to discover the unique local culture of Hong Kong and assumed it would be different from the culture of mainland China. In particular, the ‘Homecoming’ exhibition fostered an image of the city and its social reality. A Hunan University student who specialized in Chinese medicine was moved by the work ‘Out of Place’. She wondered what the drifters were thinking when walking through the streets. To her, it appeared to be a reflection of the local situation of street drifters in Hong Kong. As she had never seen this type of people on city streets, she thought it was a social phenomenon of a bygone period. Another young girl studying art in Hunan said she often visited the museum during her outbound trips. She said she considered the museum a place to reflect on the spirit of a city, to learn about the ideas of different artists, and to cultivate her personality. After the visit, she remarked: Hong Kong is a fashionable and retro city. The shows here reflect the local culture and history of Hong Kong. They are quite nostalgic and look very different from mainland culture.

However, for some visitors, the exhibitions failed to express any local features or unique cultural agenda. A Malaysian young male visitor, who was an

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expatriate engineer, was a newcomer and decided to browse the museum before attending a show in the Hong Kong Space Museum. To him, the ways the artists rendered human body parts (in the sculpture exhibition) was most interesting, but as a foreigner, he found Chinese artefacts and other contemporary works boring and unable to reflect any local features of the city. A university graduate from Beijing had lived in Hong Kong for almost three years and worked in the media industry. She was a first-time visitor. Although she entirely understood the exhibition content and the art styles displayed in the museum, she was not moved at all by the exhibitions and thought that their themes were weak. To her, the modern and contemporary works were different from those from her cultural background, encompassed different thoughts, but expressed no specific meaning or purpose. With the chance of seeing Chinese relics in mainland China and Western works in overseas countries, she expected the museum to offer something different and impactful. Instead, she cited the small bookshops in Hong Kong, and found their book exhibitions, seminars, and forums more interesting and unique for understanding and learning about the local culture. In addition, she expected the museum to be well designed for connecting people and to deploy its charm to entice visitors. Critical audience refers to those who disapproved of the museum’s styles of production and management and the government’s cultural policy. Unlike other visitor segments which were persuaded to deliver positive feedback, the critical audience gave oppositional interpretations that negatively evaluated the museum’s production, identified the government’s problematic policies, and offered critical opinions. They were a type of visitor resistant to persuasion, and revealed ideas, values, and ideologies that conflicted with the museum’s cultural production system and the government’s cultural ideology. On the one hand, they reflected the values connected with a participatory framework in art and institutions, relating to everyday life, the public interest, an open mind, proactive thinking and diversity of culture. They demonstrated their personal capacities in defining art, analysing where and how it is displayed, and describing how it relates to individual people, everyday life, and society at large. On the other hand, the critical audience did not simply reject the content of particular items on display. They evaluated and challenged the institutional position inscribed in the museum text. Their criticism centred on subjects ranging from exhibits and the institutional practice of the museum, to the infrastructure and broader context of the city. This group showed the potential to be ‘politically

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resistant to hegemonic meanings, being motivated for socio-political reasons to make oppositional or subversive readings “against the grain”’ (Morley [1980]1999; Fiske 1987; Radway 1984 cited in Livingstone and Lunt [1994]2002, 72). As the social psychologists and media scholars Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt ([1994]2002, 91) note, as critical judgment draws on social knowledge, critical responses position viewers as public citizens rather than private consumers. Below are some of the exemplary critical responses. A middle-aged man, educated at secondary level, worked in the architecture industry. He had a museum pass, and came to the museum once a month on average. He particularly enjoyed the exhibitions on modern sculpture and Chinese paintings. However, he could not engage with the contemporary exhibitions, as he felt it was like watching television: The creative works in the Umbrella Movement [in 2014] are so impressive. I understand what they stand for and they make me feel participating in the movement […] I really doubt that local artists are very visible in Hong Kong. Our life is not so connected to art […] the government is so tight in managing public spaces such as the highly regulated fenced parks […] Hong Kong should be an open city. Do not limit it to the idea of Greater China […] an open mind is a prerequisite factor in the development of art in the city.

An occasional visitor, a middleman in the media industry, criticized the museum for its outmoded practice of displaying local contemporary works that were created a long time ago. He suspected that the museum was using the works thoughtlessly to fill up its exhibition schedule before it would close for renovation. He also criticized an artist for ‘packaging’ the locally known ‘Lion Rock’ (a mountain in Hong Kong) into a piece of art. In his mind, an ideal museum should be: a place where we can learn about different kinds of culture or somewhere for enhancing local culture. The government indeed should do a better job […] so far, the cultural hardware is good enough. The question may be what sort of displays are of public interest and what sort of display [interpretation] can provoke people to think.

A young university graduate who worked in the media industry said he had a museum year pass and often went to museums. It was the third time he came to the art museum. He responded,

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there is no signature or representative exhibit […] it is rather static in exhibition organization […] I remember the works of the Umbrella Movement. They are far more impactful than any objects in the museum […] In a city with such overwhelming property and finance, it is hard for art and culture to be representative.

Activists refer to citizens from civil society with subversive and resistant orientations. Their expressive acts were part of social and cultural activism supported by democratic values, autonomous identity, anti-consumerist ideology, and humanistic global thinking and networks. Their social actions challenged the museum’s institutional capacity and state policy and ideology, and demanded greater social representation in the cultural sphere. In the postcolonial era, the art museum has encountered two major protests. The first protest, led by artists, was against the 2009 exhibition ‘Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation’, which was co-organized by the museum and the international brand’s foundation. The exhibition featured more than 100 works, including materials and samples of wares tracing the history of the luxury brand, creative works by noted artists such as JeanMichel Basquiat and Cao Fei, and commissioned works by seven Hong Kong artists. The exhibition was allegedly conceived in a bilateral arrangement by a high official on his official trip to France while he was signing an official agreement on wine-related trade and tourism.24 Protesters disapproved of the privileges of market consortia involved in the show and of the museum’s institutional capacities and policy, and of the social inequality and consumerist mechanism underlying the existing capitalistic system. In 2009, a group of about twenty local artists formed the ‘Art Museum Concern Group’ in protest against the exhibition. The Group collected signatures of about 300 citizens and submitted letters of protest to both the Chief Secretary of Bureau and the museum’s chief curator. They urged the government to explain why and how the exhibition was conceived and f inanced, and demanded a direct dialogue with the chief curator. The group addressed three major grievances concerning the issue: Firstly, they complained about deficiencies in the museum’s professionalism and in its procedures for exhibition creation. They pressed the government to increase institutional transparency, accountability, and public deliberation in formulating the museum’s agenda and its understanding of museological 24 Press release by the government of Hong Kong (2008), ‘CS (Chief Secretary) ends fruitful visit to France’, 14 May 2008, www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/200805/14/P200805140286.htm, accessed 24 June 2019.

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Illustration 5.2  ‘Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation’ exhibition at HKMoA, 2009

Photo by the author

and curatorial practices. Secondly, they criticized the museum for privileging the self-publicity of a private foundation of a globalized luxury corporation. They perceived this as a misuse of public funding and resources to encourage consumerism. Instead, they urged the museum to uphold its educational role in nurturing people’s critical thinking by encouraging multiple readings of the exhibition text and by organizing forums on various issues, including the relationship between business and art, the effect of globalization and consumerism on art ecology, and the issue of social equality. Thirdly, they stressed greater public representation in the museum and demanded an open platform for dialogue between the museum, citizens, and stakeholders.25 Besides the actions of this group, similar criticism by art critics and artists were published in the print media.26 The incident ended without any clear resolution. The chief curator officially replied to the protesters and appeared on public radio to stress the museum’s benevolent motives in 25 Art Museum Concern Group (2009), ‘Guanzhu Xiang Gang yishuguan xiaozu gongkai xin (er)’ (An open letter from the Art Museum Concern Group II), Inmediahk.net, 19 June 2009, www.inmediahk.net/node/1003619, accessed 24 June 2019. 26 For example, see Lau Kin Wai (2009) and Ho Hing Kay (2009).

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hosting the show. Since that time, the museum has not collaborated with commercial brands for large shows. The second protest against the museum was staged in 2014 by international animal rights groups. They protested against the display of elephant ivory and rhino-horn artefacts, acquired by a local collector, in an exhibition of objects made exclusively for the Ming and Qing imperial court. The action was initiated by the Hong Kong Humane Education Coalition, an alliance of local and international nongovernment organizations striving for human rights, environmental preservation, and animal protection. About twenty demonstrators accused the show of benefiting from illegal trade, and encouraging the inhumane and unscientific consumption of the items. They collected signatures and submitted a letter requesting the museum to remove the elephant-ivory and rhino-horn artefacts. In response, a LCSD representative spoke to the press and said that the museum displayed the antiquities to celebrate the treasures of their past and to educate the public about them. He restated the support of the museum and the collector for safeguarding the dwindling populations of African elephants and rhinoceroses in the wild and combating illegal poaching and trading (Siu 2014). After seeking advice from international museums, the museum put up labels beside the displays of the artefacts, reminding visitors of the importance of safeguarding endangered animals.27

5.7

Concluding remarks

This chapter has offered an examination of a local Hong Kong museum, which has reflected the centralized modes of museum governance since the political transfer of Hong Kong to China. This transfer has been followed by the dramatic shift in cultural representations and identity-making, and has given rise to a wider public (of visitors with different demographical backgrounds) as well as counter-publics (activists and a critical audience). Firstly, the study explored how the museum is institutionally regulated. Under the governmental structure, curatorial autonomy is institutionally conf ined. Curators construct their professional identity based on management and art scholarship, with the support of individual art advisers, collectors, and artists who donate or loan work to the museum. The museum’s major institutional partners are national-level museums and cultural organizations, foreign consulates, and private corporations. The 27 Interview with chief-curator of HKMoA, Eve Tam, 27 August 2015, Hong Kong.

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network of selected partners is meant to increase the museum’s aesthetic credibility and cultural legitimacy. Secondly, as reflected in its main collection and exhibitions, the art museum has articulated cultural identities in specific ways. In place of a political void, there has been a dramatic shift in representation towards Chinese nationalism. Material connected with the colonial legacy has been used for imagining China’s past, or fulfilling educational-entertainment needs of the audience. Western art treasures have become a spectacle for the accumulation of symbolic capital and for the sake of enhancing economic interests and city status. Chinese cultural materials have been deployed to represent a complete narrative of China’s modernity or to propagate the image of the unsurpassed cultural greatness of China. Hong Kong art is used to express local culture in the depoliticized modality of everyday aesthetics and is embedded in a local-national-global nexus of imagination. The analysis might resonate with the theories of ‘Trinity of Hong Kong-China-the World’ (Man 2010) or ‘cultural parallelism’ (Ho 2013), both of which underline the elements of local, national, and Western art in the museum. In particular, the latter emphasizes their unequal relations expressed in the form of Chinese traditional culture as centre, with the West as spectacle, and local Hong Kong as periphery. In my study, I stress that art is subject to the complex supporting network and interpretation and display strategies in the museum. Here I offered a nuanced understanding of how the museum articulates the representation of these elements by means of collection development and exhibition interpretation, and how its articulation has affected the content and nature of cultural identities, and the construction of its public. In short, the museum intermediaries have demonstrated their potencies or tactics in articulating the representations that serve cultural diplomacy, aesthetics nationalism, leisure consumption, global gratification, and the reinterpretation of Hong Kong local culture. Its logic of cultural production practice that tends to feudalize the public sphere, has led to the increased risk of representative publicity, and a political-cultural tendency of developing people into unthinking mass consumers. Finally, public consumption of its contents should not be denied as an important factor for making the museum a trustworthy public institution. The museum has succeeded in attracting a broad range of visitors, including leisure consumers, curious explorers, enthusiastic/utilitarian learners, amateur connoisseurs, and cultural tourists. Their orientations in the process of cultural identification with what they see are highly varied. However, the critical audience and the activists demonstrate the existence of opinions and cultures that are different from or oppositional to the government/museum’s value and representation system. The latter group mainly draws from the forces of the

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independent art community and international pressure groups. Their actions expose an ideological gap between civil society and the government, and reflect how the museum has been faced with the contestation of Hong Kong’s cultural condition by society. These counter-publics have, in general, contested the formation and operation of the museum’s distinctive cultural circuit, and have urged the museum for institutional reform and improved curatorial practice.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun (1986). ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’ in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 3-63. Art Museum Concern Group (2009). ‘Guanzhu Xiang Gang yishuguan xiaozu gongkai xin (er)’ [An open letter from Art Museum Concern Group II], Inmediahk. net, 19 June 2009, www.inmediahk.net/node/1003619 (accessed 24 June 2019). Balfe, Judith Huggins (1987). ‘Artworks as Symbols in International Politics’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 1(2) Winter: 195-217. Boran, Idil (2006). ‘Benefits, Intentions, and the Principle of Fairness’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 36(1): 95-115. Clark, David (1996). ‘Monologues Without Words: Museum Displays as Art Historical Narratives’ in Art & Place: Essays on Art from a Hong Kong Perspective (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press), 12-18. Fiske, John (1987). Television Culture (London: Methuen). Habermas, Jürgen (1962)1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Hamlish, Tamara (2000). ‘Global Culture, Modern Heritage Remembering the Chinese Imperial Collections’ in Museums and Memory, ed. Susan Crane (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 137-160. Ho, Hing-kay (2009). ‘you gui you cheap: yishuguan de mingpai tuixiao zhan’ [Expensive and cheap: the art museum’s brand promotion show], Hong Kong Economic Journal, 6 July 2009. Ho, Kiu-chung (2013). ‘Musing New Museology: Politics of the Hong Kong Museum of Art’, PhD diss., Hong Kong Baptist University. Holub, Robert (1991). Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (London: Routledge). Hong Kong Museum of Art, ‘Featured Articles’, www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/ Arts/en_US/web/ma/article02.html (accessed 16 January 2018). — ‘Museum Collections Xubaizhai Collection of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy’, www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/Arts/en_US/web/ma/collection06.html (accessed 26 January 2018).

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— ‘Vision, Mission & Values’, www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/Arts/en_US/web/ ma/18.html (accessed 26 June 2017). — (2009). ‘The Ultimate South China Travel Guide – Canton’, exhibition catalogue. — (2012). ‘The Ultimate South China Travel Guide – Canton II’, exhibition catalogue. — (2013). ‘A Selection of Chinese Paintings from the Hong Kong Museum of Art Collection’, exhibition pamphlet. Hong Kong Urban Council (1972). Contemporary Hong Kong Art 1972, exhibition catalogue. Lau, Kin-wai (2009). ‘Bei bao de yishuguan’ [The wrapped art museum], Hong Kong Economic Journal, 29 June 2009. Livingstone, Sonia, and Peter Lunt (1994)2002. Talk on Television: Audience Participation and Public Debate (London: Routledge). MacGregor, Neil, and Jonathan Williams (2005). ‘The Encyclopaedic Museum: Enlightenment Ideals, Contemporary Realities’, Public Archaeology, 4(1): 57-59. Man, Kit-wah (2010). ‘A Museum of Hybridity: The History of the Display of Art in the Public Museum of Hong Kong and its Implications for Cultural Identities’, Visual Anthropology, 24(1-2): 90-105. Morley, David (1980)2005. ‘The Nationwide audience: Structure and Decoding’ in The Nationwide Television Studies, eds. David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon (London: Routledge), 117-302. Nixon, Sean (1998). ‘Circulating Culture’ in Production of culture: Culture of production, ed. Paul du Gay (London: Sage, Open University), 177-234. Radway, Janice (1984). Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press). Siu, Phila (2014). ‘Protesters urge Hong Kong Museum of Art to remove ivory and rhino horn exhibits’, South China Morning Post, 6 July 2014, www.scmp.com/ news/hong-kong/article/1548012/protesters-urge-hk-museum-art-remove-ivoryand-rhino-horn-exhibits (accessed 24 June 2019). Tam, Eve (2007). ‘Culture of Co-existence’, Chinglish-Art Exhibition (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of Art), exhibition on tabloid newspapers. The Government of Hong Kong (1972). Hong Kong Yearbook 1971. — (2008), ‘CS (Chief Secretary) ends fruitful visit to France’, 14 May 2008, www. info.gov.hk/gia/general/200805/14/P200805140286.htm (accessed 24 June 2019). Ting, Wing-yin, and Chui-fun Ho (2014). ‘Meeting Warhol in the Exhibition: Visitors’ Experience with Art in the Hong Kong Museum of Art’ in Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook 2013, ed. Kam-tang Tong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong), 178-195. West, Shearer (1995). ‘The Devaluation of Cultural Capital: Post Modern Democracy and the Art Blockbuster’ in Art in Museums, ed. Susan Pearce (London/ Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone), 74-93.

6. Conclusion Abstract This chapter discusses the different modes of museum circuit of the three museums, and draws out the implications of the findings and the possible agendas for future research in three main areas: firstly, the effects of regulation by the state and economic agents at national, local and international levels, and in the context of cultural economics; secondly, the constitution of museum intermediaries and the capacity of their museological approaches and agency to transform the museum or/and society, together with the museum’s logic of cultural production, and cultural labour issues; thirdly, the main actors in the museum publics, the nature of their agency and its implications for cultural consumption. Keywords: museum circuit, museum research, politics of signification, museum agency

The three detailed case studies in this book reflected a dynamic museum world in which multiple organizational and managerial approaches and different strategies of production coexist and respond differently to the state/government’s regulations and their broader social and economic conditions. They represented the three different institutional frameworks of regulation, production, and consumption operating in each museum, and demonstrated the complex forces affecting cultural representation, including nationalism, globalization, local and regional mapping, and colonial legacies. They also showed how different segments of visitors, characterized by particular sociocultural orientations and positioning, could be observed. The main findings of the three case studies are summarized in the following paragraphs. The first case, the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, displayed a complex interplay between various actors, including the state’s political and economic agents, cultural intermediaries (mainly museum curators

Ho, S.C.F., Museum Processes in China: The Institutional Regulation, Production, and Consumption of the Art Museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. doi: 10.5117/9789463723527_ch06

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and academic stakeholders), and the educated elites living in the city. This second national art museum represents the newly established combination of the legitimacy of Communist-party rule and China’s economic and urban modernity. Through invited curatorship and collaboration with art scholars, the museum’s intermediaries arguably act as reflexive producers, contributing to a public sphere which has links to Habermasian ‘communicative rationality’, and they play a role in negotiating meaning at the interface of expertise and official discourse. They have debunked the political myth of the leading communist figure, He Xiangning, and reinterpreted the figure from the perspective of national art history and disciplinary knowledge. In the ‘Cross-Strait Four-Regions’, they have tactically engaged in public diplomacy for a genuine platform for artistic and cultural exchange that helps to manage the geo-cultural politics between the regions across the Taiwan Straits. In the Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, they have developed a discursive sphere cross-examining the relationship between art and society. The study reflects the museum’s ideological dilemma and the contested nature of the nation driven by curatorial activity that has emerged in a national system in South China since the early 2000s. However, this public sphere led by the cultural elites has yet reached out to a broader spectrum of society. The museum’s visitors, mainly from the migrant educated middle class, reflected their different cultural orientations, ranging from identification with Chinese political culture and tradition to involvement with contemporary culture driven by global forces, the cultural industries, and mass consumption. With the exception of the ‘revolutionary history enthusiasts’ who expressed strong nationalist sentiments, visitors generally displayed limited alignment with the state interest in Chineseness or political patriotism and were oriented to other identities, namely ‘culturalists’, ‘utilitarian art learners’, ‘leisure consumers’, ‘social learners’, and ‘aesthetic cosmopolitans’. The chapter ends with a reflection on the rise of a middle-class museum public, and the issues of cultural inclusivity and exclusivity in the socially stratified city. The second case was the Guangdong Times Museum (abbreviated as Times Museum) in Guangzhou, a private museum designed by creative labour and supported by a real estate company. The company has a role in shaping urban consumption lifestyles and developing corporate philanthropy. Built in a middle-class residential building located at a rapidly urbanizing periphery of the city, the art museum serves as a sign of the sophisticated urban lifestyle of the residents. However, the museum is registered as a civil organization rather than a private company, and it is also known as ‘minban meishuguan’ (an art museum run by a nongovernmental organization). Its

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organizational structure is characterized by autonomy, a democratic culture, and a strong network of local and global actors, who are closely connected with independent, organic, and collective forces. Museum intermediaries, on the one hand, engage in the discourse of ‘glocalization’, combating the commodification of art and life, addressing the politics of everyday life, building a vision of the critical relationship between art and society, and promoting institutional self-critique and reformulation. On the other hand, they construct a regional narrative of art history in order to question the cultural hegemony of the capital in the north, and establish a horizon for the southern imaginary operating from a critical subaltern perspective. They have contributed to constructing a ‘public cultural sphere’, which imagines a shared community experience and directs it towards becoming an autonomous and independent public by encouraging rational discussion, alternative ideas and experiences, and the negotiation of public issues. According to my visitor survey, the people who visit the museum are mainly educated young adults. They can be classified into six distinct identities: ‘the imaginative audience’, ‘participants’, ‘social learners’, ‘meaningful leisure seekers’, ‘committed visitors’, and ‘classic museum visitors’. Except the ‘classic museum visitors’, all segments were able to explore new meanings and engage in this ‘alternative museum culture’. This chapter argues that the rise of an urban private economy has opened up a new space for the development of private museums independent of official state activities in China, one that arguably favours the development of civil society. The final case, the Hong Kong Museum of Art in Hong Kong, has transitioned towards a ‘postcolonial’ environment, shaped by the combination of national, local, and global forces and colonial legacies, since the return of Hong Kong to the control of the Chinese state in 1997. Under a centralized bureaucratic system, the museum’s intermediaries, mainly in-house curators, have demonstrated potency in articulating cultural representations for diplomacy, cultural nationalism, leisure consumption, global gratification, and interpretation of the local. Historical painting collections related to the colonial legacy have been used for imagining a national past, providing aesthetic education and creating lively audience experiences. Western art treasures circulated through international blockbuster exhibitions have become a spectacle for the accumulation of symbolic capital and for the sake of economic interest and city status. Chinese cultural materials are used to promote the cultural greatness of China, and have been expanded to represent a complete narrative of China’s modernity. Hong Kong art is used to express local culture and daily aesthetics in a depoliticized manner, and is embedded in a nexus of imagination defined by the national-global-local

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triad. Overall the museum has tended to produce a feudalized public sphere that discourages critical thoughts and public debate particularly on the issue of cultural identity. However, the museum’s public sphere is not unitary. Its visitors both appropriate and resist the strategies of consumption that the museum’s structures enjoin. Visitors to the museum are demographically diverse, and characterized by six distinct identities: ‘leisure consumers’, ‘curious explorers’, ‘enthusiastic/utilitarian learners’, ‘amateur connoisseurs’, ‘cultural tourists’, and ‘the critical audience’. The ‘critical audience’, together with the ‘activists’ emerging from the independent art community and international pressure groups, represented the forces of social dissonance and social action. The museum reveals the tension between the government and its counter-publics, which has created a cultural circuit of contested values and identities. The art museums surveyed are understood as multiple cultural circuits in which different institutional modes coexist in complex arrangements. The circuits underlie the processes of regulation, production, and consumption and involve different agents for articulating representation and identity. They offer a comparative complement to aid understanding the different museum discourses and practices in the GPRD region of southern China. In this concluding chapter, I will discuss the different modes of museum circuit they involve, and the implications of the findings and the possible agendas for future research. I will juxtapose the three case studies with each other and discuss their in/commensurability in two dimensions: the relations between political-economic, cultural, and social spheres, and the roles and functions of the agents (political and economic agents, museum intermediaries, and museum publics) in each sphere. Finally, I discuss the contributions of this study.

6.1

Museum modes of circuits

The museums, each with their own institutional organization form, demonstrate different circuit modes in mediating the relation between the interlinked political-economic, cultural, and social spheres. The relations between the spheres varied in each of the three art museums. Firstly, He Xiangning Art Museum is a top-down model, in which the state’s political and economic capital and interests are the dominant factors in determining the types of art that are being presented, namely the art of an iconic communist figure together with legitimized contemporary art. The cultural sphere is active in negotiating how art is represented. Museum intermediaries

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play an important, cultural-political role in rationalizing the meaning of art and of the state at the national level. The social sphere consists of an educated public with diversified cultural orientations. Visitors are perceived as knowledge/message receivers, and are relatively underrepresented in the overall workings of the museum circuit. They navigate the choices offered by the national museum, by appropriating a variety of cultural strategies of consumption. As a nongovernmental model, the Times Museum presents a unique circuit for thinking about a particular kind of cultural public sphere that is relatively independent of the nation-state. The art museum maintains its autonomy, largely without over-determination by private capital and the threat of state intervention. At the same time, the cultural sphere demonstrates its agency in the circuit by mediating the social function of art, and treating its public on an equal basis by sharing authorship with audience members and mobilizing them to participate in the cultural production process. This bottom-up institutional model reflects a distinctive kind of social and cultural dynamic, in which an autonomous and independent public arguably supports the development of civil society in China. The Hong Kong Museum of Art constitutes the most contested instance of a museum cultural circuit among the three studied. This top-down institutional model, unlike the He Xiangning Art Museum, does not offer much space for the development of those working in the cultural sphere. In particular, this mode reflects a significant gap between civil society and the government connected with conflicting signifying approaches. It shows how the government limits the exercise of forms of cultural agency in the process of social mediation. Facing the counter-hegemonic and resistance forces thriving in the city, the museum has difficulty in maintaining its own legitimacy, and has met challenges in coping with the social and cultural aspirations of the citizens in the city.

6.2

Implications of the findings

The study of the three cases provides some insights into state and economic regulation, cultural production and consumption. The roles and functions of the agents in each sphere varied in line with the different institutional conditions in which each of them was operating. The following sections discuss, firstly, the effects of regulation by the state and economic agents at national, local, and international levels, and exploring this in the context of cultural economics; secondly, the constitution of museum intermediaries

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and the capacity of their museological approaches and agency to transform the museum or/and society, together with the museum’s logic of cultural production, and cultural labour issues; thirdly, the main actors in the museum publics, the nature of their agency and its implications for cultural consumption. Institutional regulation: political and economic agents The political and economic agents remain significant factors in the development of contemporary museums. They support the museum enterprise for different purposes. The official concerns broadly cover cultural nationalism, diplomacy, developmental/economic ideologies, global gratification, and the construction and legitimatization of official notions of the local. The economic agents create a consumption market for the middle class to develop their urban lifestyle, support the creative economy, and undertake acts of corporate social responsibility. In the cultural policy realm, the findings of the study help us understand the state/government’s attitude in opening or limiting new institutional and signifying possibilities. At the ‘national’ level, the predominant ideological shift from socialism to nationalism or patriotism throughout the state cultural apparatus can be reconsidered from the ‘unique’ case of the He Xiangning Art Museum. This museum reflects the state’s alternative views and strategy in national cultural policy. The new state policy is meant to support developmentalist ideologies and the cultural industries, and to tolerate public diplomacy and the growth of the cultural sphere, as strategic responses to China’s post-reform contexts. At the local level, the state regulates the Times Museum through the rules governing nongovernmental organizations, and by means of rewards or grants. The private company (which manages the Times Museum) and the state-owned enterprise (which manages the He Xiangning Art Museum) both have ambitions to shape an urban consumption lifestyle. They appropriate the urban life of middle-class people, by using different methods. The Times Property is a ‘life stylist’. It is keen to create a unique lifestyle and to add value to where people live. The OCT is the ‘Creator of good urban life’. It upholds the state developmentalist ideology and seeks to improve the city landscape by beautifying public spaces and harmonizing the living environment. In the case of HKMoA, the local government exerts regulatory control over the museum through bureaucratic administration. The museum’s blockbuster exhibitions of Chinese cultural materials and its collecting practice that build up a ‘complete’ narrative of Chinese modernity, are significant moves

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towards the endorsement of China’s national cultural discourse and identity building. Facing the influence of the Chinese state, the local Hong Kong government seeks to strengthen its role in regulating the content and subject of national identity. At the international level, the display of contemporary art or ancient relics in overseas art platforms is often understood as a way for the state to establish its global identity. The findings in this study offered a better grasp of the museums’ different approaches and strategies in connecting with the world outside China. The case studies gave us an understanding of China’s cultural politics in its networking with other states, international organizations, and global actors and groups. The case of the He Xiangning Art Museum offered understanding about how foreign art exhibitions at home, touring exhibitions, and exchange projects are used to facilitate dialogue and diplomacy with other states in the context of imagining a Cultural Greater China, and a globalizing creative economy. The two domains of the ‘Chinese cultural sphere’ and the ‘Creative state’ at the global level can inform research on international cultural politics, creative industry policy, and globalization studies. The political and economic agents both support the cultural/creative economy. To varying degrees, the three art museums all involve artists, independent curators, and creative professionals in their production processes, especially by purchase or commission of their artworks/services. The Times Museum configures a cultural consumption site combining art, leisure, knowledge, and activity, and directly engages local and global creative workers in its production process. The He Xiangning Art Museum absorbs external skills and knowledge, networks with economic partners, and engages with the OCT’s cultural industrial project. HKMoA has participated in global/ world city events (for example, the 2012 Liverpool Biennial – a project for branding Liverpool as ‘The World in One City’) and has cooperated with commercial parties (for example, collaboration with luxury companies and art-market stakeholders in the exhibition of Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation in 2009). These practices have significant possible consequences for the production of creative/cultural life, employment security, and the risk of the emergence of crony cultural economies. It is worth considering further studies on the significance of these practices in the context of the cultural economy of contemporary China. Cultural production: museum intermediaries The study analysed the actors involved in struggles over signification in the art museum. In discussion of the historical trajectories of art museums in

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China, Chapter 2 has highlighted the need for critical reassessment of the actual practices of different agents connected with the museum. In the past, museum workers in mainland China were assumed as the primary gatekeepers controlling art displays to serve the national industry and aesthetic education agendas and communist sociopolitical ideologies. In this research, contemporary museum workers are understood in relation to their actual practices and the possible struggles they undertake within their institutional and contextual environments. They play diverse roles in contemporary societies, ranging from strategic planners, knowledge producers and art/cultural critics and initiators to bureaucrats. They contribute to the creation of different forms of public space that can be seen as ranging from a rational public sphere and a relatively autonomous public cultural sphere to a feudalized public. This study also expanded the spectrum of museum actors from those who off icially work in the museum to those who are directly involved in museum functions, exhibitions, and programmes, especially external stakeholders and institutions. These actors not only constitute particular types of networks and relationships but also play important roles in shaping museum production through commissioned, imported or exchange exhibitions and projects, and fostering a specif ic kind of institutional culture and identity for the museum. In addition to artists, the actors include independent curators, art academicians, official and unofficial organizations (in the national museum case), local and global unofficial curators, nongovernmental art and cultural organizations (in the private museum case), appointed advisers, national or provincial museums, and ‘world-class’ museums (in the Hong Kong museum case). Amongst them, independent/unofficial curators demonstrate greater interpretative agency and play a significant role in the politics of signification in the museum and beyond it. They are mobile creative workers who can work between different sites of production. The intermediaries employ different museological approaches in response to their particular institutional and contextual conditions. The Times Museum, which depends on the private market, can organize itself and maintain a critical distance from the state. It demonstrates the ability of cultural elites to maintain local autonomy in processes of global deliberation, regional identity construction, and ‘community’ engagement. The Times Museum involves an innovative institutional vision and is oriented to critical museology, in Anthony Shelton’s (2013, 18) words, which sustains an ongoing critical, dialectical dialogue seeking to engender a consistently self-reflexive attitude towards museum practices and their constituencies.

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The He Xiangning Museum, although profoundly affected by influence from political and economic agents, struggles to maintain its critical educational functions and emphasize its academic role as a producer of new knowledge. It demonstrates the ability of cultural elites to negotiate meaning at the interface of expertise and official discourse. The museum can be seen as an important model of an institution re-examining its role in society of the Mainland. It displays a notable shift from the old museology, which primarily focused on conservation, display techniques, effective museum management, and the evaluation of success through the criterion of the number of visitors. The Hong Kong Museum of Art reflects professional know-how more pertinent to operative museology (ibid.), which emphasizes procedural and ethical protocols based on the fairness principle, the practical issues of exhibitions and programmes, and administration matters for the effective regulation and reproduction of institutional narratives and discourses. The findings showed that divergent museological approaches exist where museums exercise their symbolic and institutional influences in response to complex contexts. In addition, the study of the collaborative practices of the museum intermediaries offered valuable insights into their capacity to transform society and affect people’s ways of thinking and acting in social and cultural relations. This was evident in my discussion of cultural production in the Times Museum. Although it is difficult to argue that a museum has the capacity to affect political change, and not all private museums registered as NGOs in the Mainland are synonymous with civil society organizations, the Times Museum arguably does reflect the agency of non-state stakeholders in advancing cultural agendas and affecting social relations that accommodate pluralism and the interests and autonomous will of citizens. Overall, the study considered the actual work (exhibitions/programmes) of the museum intermediaries and the production conditions (institutional organization and production network) in which they work, as the key elements for elucidating the logic and effects of museum production. In terms of cultural economies, the three art museums are oriented to the flow logic of cultural production which features a mix of creative personnel and those in ‘generally regular salaried employment’ (Miege 1989, 147). Apart from offering a stable income to their permanent/contract staff, the museums draw on irregular sporadic employment from ‘talent pools’ with a wide range of remuneration. Particularly in HKMoA, there is a big difference in pay and benefits between permanent staff and contract workers, and work (such as research and programming) has been outsourced. Further studies of the quality of the working conditions and experiences of the cultural

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intermediaries (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011) will provide knowledge which can help address the normative issues of equality, justice, well-being, and the democratization of creativity in museum production. Cultural consumption: museum publics This study did not limit its conception of the museum public to the state concept of, or norms for, what society should be. The visitor studies produced useful knowledge about the visitors’ motivations for museum consumption and what characterizes their cultural consumption activities. They explained how the visitors were differentiated according to their museum experience in different institutional and social contexts. They illuminated a cultural theory of China’s museum public based on the interpretations and perceptions of Chinese visitors. In this study, the category of a museum public denoted a complex and diversified segment of visitors who have different cultural orientations, ranging from identification with Chinese traditions, political culture, global/foreign values and culture, alternative and experimental practices, fulfilment of the needs of the cultural industry, education, leisure, consumption, and tourism, to the pursuit of critical or activist roles in rectifying the role of the museum. The findings challenged the state and economic agents’ assumptions of an ideal and undifferentiated public. More importantly, the findings regarding the visitors’ demographic backgrounds and their different modes of museum consumption unveiled the main actors and their characteristics, and implied some notable trends and issues in cultural consumption. In mainland China, art museums have become a prominent site of cultural consumption for the middle class. The findings revealed the divergent cultural choices and orientations the middle-class visitors uphold, which go beyond a simple dichotomy between state ideology and consumer culture (Unger and Barmé 1996). As reflected in the first two case studies, young educated citizens are the majority of museum visitors (64% aged 18-30 in He Xiangning Art Museum; 95% aged 18-30 in the Times Museum). They tended to accept what an art museum offers or negotiate it, rather than actively contest it. Comparatively speaking, the visitors in the Times Museum demonstrate greater agency in determining what and how they experience than those in the national museum. They are potential conscious lifestyle consumers, seeking unique cultural values, and opening themselves up to any experimental form presented in the collection-less Times Museum. Accordingly, the museum arguably does not create a sense of powerlessness for its visitors, but offers a more equal configuration that engages

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them in transformative politics. However, the profiles of visitors to both museums attest to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1991) depiction of the museum public as a bourgeois public and uphold the dominant role of the educated class in the discursive construction of museums. These factors constitute a vantage point for us to think of the impact of museum consumption on wider social differentiation and to offer suggestions to museum professionals about the issue of social inclusivity in museum practices. Further consideration of these factors would contribute to a discursive shift in the understanding of museum authority and the politics underlying public museums and their constituencies in China. The art museum in Hong Kong, on the other hand, is a popular place for a comparatively wide range of citizens in the city to visit. Its postcolonial development does not really reflect the growing cultural ambitions of the middle class, nor accommodate the culturalists as those who seek cultural refinement experiences in mainland China. Located in a major global city, the museum has attracted a distinctive visitor segment – cultural tourists. These are mainly well-educated individuals from mainland China, seeking cross-cultural experiences in the museum as well as the museums in Western countries. This visitor segment resonates with the ‘aesthetic cosmopolitans’ who expect a broader cultural outreach and highlights foreign cultural components should be part of their consumption experiences. They are potential global cultural consumers, considering ‘cultural experience’ as the primary reason for visiting museums. Further study of the Chinese visitors’ concept of ‘cultural experience’ will help improve the museums’ practices with regard to international or domestic tourism and will help enhance knowledge about the Chinese middle-class’s cultural consumption practices. Above all, HKMoA has faced a unique counter-public. They are the critical groups (visitors who disapproved of the museum’s style of production and management, and the government’s cultural policy) and activists (Art Museum Concern Group and international pressure groups). Their critical deliberations and social actions reveal the contradiction between their own values and the official ideologies. The activists are proactive, taking up the role of civil society advocates in regulating the museum. Their existence foregrounds the contestation between the government and civil society in Hong Kong and, perhaps, in the world more broadly. The visitors to the three museums share two common modes of museum consumption. Firstly, the leisure/lifestyle consumers or the ‘meaningful leisure seekers’ have a range of characteristics including the desire for escape, spatial or environmental enjoyment, and casual/meaningful engagement with the museum space. They defined the purpose of leisure consumption as

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being to improve one’s quality of life and capacities. This visitor segment has led us to contemplate a particular type of cultural consumption combining knowledge and life inspiration. It provides us with a vantage point to think about how museums function in the leisure industry to transform people’s everyday life and contribute to the well-being of society. Secondly, utilitarian or social learners are educated people and partly work in cultural industries. They considered the museum as an intellectual portal that could help enhance their aesthetic skills and social and professional knowledge. This visitor segment tended to want to learn about aesthetics or social issues, by the method of critical inquiry or reflective approach, or by referring to other peoples’ thoughts and perspectives. They demonstrated ability in selecting and negotiating the knowledge to be consumed, and in addressing the issue of the accessibility of information and communication in the museum. In this sense, the museums provide important platforms for educational gratification. They are expected by this audience segment to play a more proactive role in public education, by use of critical and reflexive learning methods, alternative perspectives, and effective media strategies.

6.3

Contributions of the research

To understand the current state of museum discourse and practice in China, the key factors of state, economy, culture, and society cannot be analysed in isolation from each other. This study deployed a multi-perspective theoretical framework for examining museums and for identifying the diverse processes involved in museum interpretation. The ‘circuit view’ revealed that the study of a museum or any cultural institution with a public component should consider institutional regulation changes, the process of cultural production which inevitably depends on a network of museum intermediaries, and the process of consumption as a practice of appropriation, negotiation, or resistance by society. The modified circuit also offered a model of the dynamic interplay between the political-economic, cultural, and social spheres, and teased out the power relations in and between the different spheres. It invited us to look beyond the dimension of cultural determination by the state/economy, and consider the possible intervention of cultural agents and the different modes of museum consumption as sociocultural practices. The circuit approach gave consideration to diverse museal processes and saw the various actors as active interpretative and participatory agents. It contributed to illuminating the complex body of signifying processes and relations, explaining what a museum is doing, how it works, by whom it is

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produced, who it is targeting, whose interests it is representing, and how it is received by the public. Thereby, museal processes embody spatial and temporal differences and tensions in the discourse of cultural production and related regulation and consumption processes. The findings are not intended to produce absolute museum ‘models’. Museums do not operate in a linear fashion, as different variables or actors inevitably come into play in various museal processes. The ‘circuit view’ can be used to evaluate the relations between China’s museums of any type, their founding agents, and the interactions between the museums and the cultural producers that are internal or external to them, stakeholders and public(s), who each might adopt different ways to interpret messages. It is also offered as a potential basis for future museum research work to analyse and possibly change sociocultural realities, and also to enable museum professionals to reflect upon their own actions in relation to the publics they serve. Empirically, the study illuminated the signifying processes of the three art museums within their specific institutional and social contexts. It analysed the dynamic discourses and practices of the three art museums located in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong respectively. As shown in this book, these art museums have appropriated cultural materials and concepts from quite a broad range, ranging from national history to various forms and strategies of aesthetic and cultural interpretation and display motivated by transnational cultural exchange, the cultural industries, globalization, localization, regionalization, and postcolonial reorientation. They appear as important sites of cultural mediation and contestation in China’s fast-changing social worlds and demonstrate the different museum discourses and practices that are deployed in the GPRD region. The three detailed cases have addressed the ‘politics of signification’ in three ways. Firstly, the study analysed the historical-institutional changes of the museum, which are the result of the central and special administrative governments and the state and private enterprises imposing their own agendas and values. Secondly, it analysed how different networks of museum intermediaries have been involved in signification struggles, in their response to national, regional, local, global and postcolonial representational forces and agents, including the state, the market, and the public. Thirdly, it analysed the visitors’ cultural orientations and social actions towards the museum based on their signification capabilities. It identified the different segments of the public based on their modes of museum consumption, which are compatible or in conflict with the production models of the state/ government or the museum.

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In addition, the cultural plurality and diversity of the museums opens possibilities for negotiation of and resistance to political/economic meaningmaking and for comparisons between a variety of production and consumption practices. The case studies were compared with reference to two dimensions: the relations between political-economic, cultural, and social spheres, and the roles and functions of the agents (political and economic agents, cultural intermediaries, and museum publics) in each sphere. The analysis addressed these interconnected phenomena with reference to each of the distinctive and asymmetrical museum contexts. It raised the political, social, and cultural-economic implications of the phenomena in the museum world and offered new insights for reading that world. The final contribution of the case studies is one to the methodology of regional studies. The Chinese historian, Ching Maybo (2018) has offered an incisive examination of the relationship between regional culture and national identity through the lens of ‘Guangdong Culture’. She argues that the concept of ‘Guangdong culture’ that had been propagated by Guangdong literati since the late Qing, was closely aligned with the rise of nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century in China. Her concept of ‘region’ is not limited to an administrative or geographical definition, nor is it restricted to a government policy (Wu 2011). It is more about the literati’s subjective definitions of their home area or how they demarcate their region in order to distinguish themselves from the ‘Other’ and express their ‘Self’. In a similar vein, my study is not about what a unified/integrated regional/ museum culture is. Inclined towards the framework of ‘differences’ rather than ‘unities’, it contributes to the studies of why and how actors define a regional culture, and publicly express or deny a regional identity. In this intracultural study of three art museums in GPRD, great variations are visible but there are also similarities between the way museum agents produce cultural meaning and define their regions. The case studies painted diverse and complex pictures of how the museums map the boundaries of their representations and use different approaches to address a region. He Xiangning Art Museum represents a new state strategy for promoting national and local (Shenzhen) culturaleconomic interests and seeking cultural alignment with the places and cities that are considered to be part of the Greater China region. The second national art museum emerged against the background of Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 inspection of South China. During the inspection, Deng repositioned Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta Region in general for a more ambitious reform and opening to the world. Shaped by its location in Shenzhen, the museum has a role in proclaiming the state’s

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interest in Greater China, and carrying out the work of cultural diplomacy in that region. It implies the emergence of a new geo-cultural relationship with North China, and raises doubts about assumptions regarding the power of China’s central state that previous studies that primarily focused on Beijing have accepted. The small-sized Times Museum represents another type of local variant; it strives to build local-global connections and to articulate a unique regional artistic identity based on contemporary art and life, and it has succeeded in attracting a young audience from the region. It has contributed to creating an identity and consciousness linked to the people, the land, and the culture in the region (Paasi 1996). In addition, the museum has demonstrated its ability to present regional artists, maintain collective networks and articulate distinctive spatial imaginaries, by reproducing the symbolism necessary for constructing a regional identity (Paasi 2001). The museum intermediaries involved display a self-proclaimed consciousness of the values of their own community (such as the ideas of autonomy, decommodification, and citizens’ rights), and their understanding of the world (such as their invocation of the cultural hegemony of the northern capital and its neocolonization of the Global South). Unlike the Guangdong literati who built a close relationship between regional culture and national identity (Ching 2018), these intermediaries engage themselves in both internal and global politics, creating a unique voice of regional culture that questions the nation and other hegemonic powers in the world. Finally, Hong Kong Museum of Art claims to be a leading art museum of excellence in the region. It has preserved and displayed its collection of the artefacts of traditional Lingnan culture. This development can be seen as resonating with an exhibition of Guangdong antiquities that took place in the Fung Ping Shan Library of the University of Hong Kong in 1940. As Ching (2018) finds, the organizers (mostly Guangdong immigrants) actually made use of this exhibition to express their national identity. In the same vein, during the British colonial rule, the museum collected and displayed Guangdong/Lingnan regional cultural materials to represent a cultural link with the Chinese nation. Towards the 1990s, while Hong Kong struggled with questions of local politics, national and superpower rivalry, and a global-city status, regional representation was beyond the pale in official rhetoric. In the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the significance of Guangdong paintings/Lingnan cultural materials has been subsumed into a narrative of national art history. In the last decade, the interpretation and representation of what counts as Hong Kong culture, has become more prominent and contentious in Hong Kong society. This book has mapped the different and changing trajectories of three art museums in GPRD. It leads us to see museum discourse and practice

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more broadly in China as a volatile process affected by structures of cultural capital, the contingent operations state and market, and the formation of different publics. This study draws on evidence uncovered in material on Chinese history, official policies and statements, a variety of academic studies, and case studies at national, private, and special administrative governmental levels. Its limits and strengths are obvious. Findings and conclusions are bound to the particular case studies. Other case studies will perhaps provide different views of how the state/government seeks to maintain a museum or how a museum seeks to create an ideal public. The study of the He Xiangning Art Museum offered an alternative way to understand Beijing’s cultural policy for museums. There is no reason to assume that this model, at least at the present stage, is found in NAMOC, the national museums governed under the SACH in Beijing, or other museums at the national level in other provinces and municipalities. Yet, the study offered a more nuanced picture of how museum actors exercise their curatorial agencies under a national museum model that exists in South China in its post-reform era. It contributed to a new understanding of how museum and politics are interwoven with an emerging cultural sphere shaped by museum actors and academic stakeholders in the state museum. The study of the Times Museum illustrated the role and function of a private museum at local level, independent of the state, and developed in form of a nongovernmental organization under the purview of a private company. The study contributed to the understanding of how cultural agents are involved in institutionalizing and socializing private museums, and exert their power in producing a critical, alternative museum culture, and a more autonomous public in China. However, the model of this realtor and cultural elite-led private art museum might not be applicable to other private museums that are owned by individuals or registered as companies. How these private museums deal with the relationship between social representation and individual or commercial interests, and construct their public dimension deserves further examination. Similarly, the case of the HKMoA might not be applicable to government-run museums in other special autonomous regions, such as Macau or the autonomous regions of particular ethnic groups. The study, nevertheless, recognized the unique context of the autonomous region, and closely observed the influence of the Chinese state, and other dynamic forces. It offered a nuanced understanding of how the official museum articulates representation by means of collection development and exhibition interpretation, and how its counter-public turns the museum into a contested site, in which the establishment’s discourses can be challenged.

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Since 1949, new institutional arrangements led to the separation of bowuguan (museums) and meishuguan (art museums) in mainland China. Because they are under the administration of SACH, a study of bowuguan would yield different research results regarding production and consumption in museums. In addition, since 1997, about 100 museum and heritage sites have been identified by the Central Publicity Department of the CPC as bases for providing national patriotic education to primary and secondary school students. These bases were used to tell the story of Chinese history, people’s resistance to imperialist invasion, revolutionary history, and socialist construction. It is likely that these official cultural institutions are confined by more restrictive regulations and impose a more linear and essentialist narrative than do the art museums. However, far too much has been assumed about the government’s attitude towards museum production, and there is far too little research on museum consumption. Assumptions about China’s ‘essentialist’ museum narratives and production as well as about reception practices also deserve greater academic scrutiny. In addition, this book challenges the museum enterprise in China as a state monopoly and offered a new perspective to the state-centred methodology of studying China’s museums by recognizing the role of individual agents and the competitive agendas raised by them. The ‘circuit view’ demonstrates that the study of China’s museums should incorporate reflection upon institutional-regulatory changes, processes of cultural production by networks of museum intermediaries, and processes of museum consumption as practices of appropriation, negotiation, or resistance. It offers a method for negotiation of and resistance to political/economiccultural meaning-making and for comparisons between a variety of production and consumption practices. The views of art museums offered in this book provide a starting point from which future research on China’s diverse museal processes and regional developments may begin. More comparative case studies would help to complement the ‘circuit’ model proposed in this book. A final caveat: conducting research inside China’s museum organizations is still difficult. There is no difficulty in accessing the public exhibitions and the museum publications. However, I did have some difficulty when interviewing the curatorial and managerial staff in the museums. I approached most of the interviewees through mutual friends and acquaintances or through formal invitations. Those who refused to be interviewed or who did not respond at all to the interview request were mainly those from the official museums. The Times Museum was the most welcoming of my study and assisted me in scheduling all the interviews with their staff. I contend that some cultural practitioners in official museums are far from ready to cope with an open museum research culture. In addition, when I was doing

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my research, the conditions in the places that were the object of my case studies changed dramatically. The He Xiangning Art Museum was closed for renovation in March 2015. Its permanent exhibition was revamped when the museum was reopened in November 2016. In 2018, the OCT started to retreat from its managerial role. The HKMoA was entirely closed in August 2015 for its three-year long renovation project. The project was seen by the museum director as a precious opportunity to reposition the institution, reconstruct its identity, and identify unique ‘localization’ perspectives for telling both personal humanistic and global stories (Chan 2015). The Times Museum also adopted a new managerial model in 2017. Such dramatic changes show that the museum world is never static. Ongoing research is needed to capture the evolving nature museums and their responses to the precarious and contested sociopolitical, cultural, and economic situation in China. In a nutshell, this book has broadly traced the art museum from its origin as a tool of nationalism and adoption as a vehicle of modernization in both nationalist and early communist periods, till its role in the present, as it reflects the contested and alternative representations, diverse publics and fissured identities in the post-economic reform period of China. It achieved two main objectives. First, it suggested a new conceptual framework for studying institutional-regulatory changes, processes of cultural production by networks of cultural intermediaries, and processes of museum consumption seen as practices of appropriation, negotiation or resistance. The ‘circuit view’ provided a multi-perspective approach to the processes of institutional regulation, production, consumption, as well as an analysis of representation and identity issues. Second, it offered empirical evidence that sheds light on the way that China’s art museums can be socially and culturally understood. The three case studies explained why and how political-economic forces play a role in art museums, what the types of meanings and ideologies conveyed by the modes of production are, how museums are changed by cultural intermediaries over time, and how visitors can be differentiated based on their relationship with and response to the museum. Under different institutional conditions, the museums demonstrated different circuits for mediating the relations between different spheres, and had a range of implications for museum discourses and practices as discussed above. Overall, the study cross-examined the institutional boundaries constrained by political and economic agendas. It furnished a research paradigm that highlights the sociocultural processes in which actors demonstrate their agency and negotiate different representational forces, including through the constitution of diversified publics orienting themselves towards alternative cultural identities and values.

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Index activism 30, 38, 65, 68, 89, 90, 209 aesthetic cosmopolitans 100, 127-129, 133, 135, 216, 225 agency 14, 16, 18, 20, 25, 29, 32-33, 35-37, 39, 99, 115, 126, 136, 143, 151-152, 156, 163, 173-174, 197, 215, 219-220, 222-224, 232 alternative culture 143, 162, 164-165, 174 art and society 29, 85, 100, 121, 136, 143, 152, 156-157, 163, 216-217 art history 74, 91, 105, 107, 109-110, 143, 162, 164, 174, 180-181, 186, 190, 195, 216-217, 229 art museums 16, 18, 28-29, 40, 43-44, 46-47, 50, 63-66, 68-74, 78-86, 91, 98, 103, 133, 137, 141, 148-149, 173, 218, 221, 223-224, 227-229, 231-232 art production 73, 75, 115, 186, 204 autonomy 28-29, 41, 81, 105, 130, 136, 144, 147-148, 156-158, 161, 163, 173, 182, 193, 211, 217, 219, 222, 229 blockbusters 179, 185-188, 195 bowuguan 17-19, 29, 40, 63-64, 67, 70-71, 75, 231 bureaucracy 73, 180 Chinese art 24, 42, 78-79, 81-83, 85-86, 98, 105, 107-108, 110-111, 115, 117, 119, 128-130, 136, 174, 179, 181, 183-184, 189-200, 205, 207 Chinese paintings 68, 80, 111, 189-191, 199-200, 205, 208; also see Chinese art Chineseness 85, 97, 119, 127-128, 135, 216 civil society 30, 65, 90-91, 121, 141, 147-148, 158, 173-174, 209, 213, 217, 219, 223, 225 Communist Party 18, 36, 44, 64, 71-73, 97, 99, 134, 216 consumption 13, 23, 25, 32-36, 38-41, 43, 46, 48-51, 63, 84-85, 90-91, 103, 123-124, 126-127, 130, 136, 143-144, 146, 153, 164-165, 173, 177-179, 185, 196-197, 211-212, 215-228, 231-232 contemporary art 26, 42, 45, 74, 80-83, 85, 88, 98-100, 103, 106-107, 112, 118, 120-121, 123-124, 126, 128, 131-132, 143, 148-153, 158, 160, 162, 164-165, 167, 170, 173-174, 182, 190-191, 193-194, 204, 218, 221, 229 counter-public 177, 180, 197, 211, 213, 218, 225, 230 critical audience 177, 179-180, 197, 199-200, 207, 211-212, 218; also see counter-public cultural circuit 33, 141, 177, 180, 213, 218-219 cultural diplomacy 91, 99, 112-113, 118, 179, 187, 212, 229 cultural globalization 115, 133, 151, 163 cultural nationalism 20, 23, 90, 99, 126, 177, 217, 220 cultural policy 77, 87, 207, 220, 225, 230

cultural politics 14-16, 44, 79, 86, 174, 216, 221 cultural production 13, 26, 32, 37, 40, 47, 49, 72, 99, 103, 107, 115, 135-136, 143-144, 152, 156, 160-161, 163, 174, 207, 212, 215, 219-221, 223, 226-227, 231-232; also see art production curatorial 17, 28-29, 45, 47, 50, 83, 85, 97, 99100, 105-107, 111-115, 117-118, 120-121, 124-126, 141, 143, 149-150, 153, 156, 159-161, 163, 178-180, 182, 188, 193, 196, 210-211, 213, 216, 230-231 curious explorers 179, 188, 197, 199-201, 212, 218 feudalized public 177, 179, 195, 218, 222 globalization 21, 27, 43, 65, 81, 114, 116, 162, 174, 180, 188, 194, 210, 215, 221, 227; also see cultural globalization Greater China 44, 99, 117, 208, 221, 228-229; also see Chineseness identity 21, 23-25, 27, 30, 33-34, 36-38, 40, 42-43, 49, 67, 76, 83, 89, 99-100, 105, 109, 113-115, 117-118, 126, 128-130, 132, 141, 153, 155, 161, 165, 167, 174, 179, 188, 192-196, 198-200, 203, 205, 209, 211, 218, 221-222, 228-229, 232 learners 100, 127-130, 132, 135, 143, 167, 169, 179, 197, 199-200, 202, 204, 212, 216-218, 226 leisure consumption 85, 177, 179, 212, 217, 224-225 localization 14, 17, 50, 63-64, 67, 114-115, 227, 232 market 13, 16, 23, 26, 32, 36, 40, 46, 49-50, 65-66, 73, 75, 77-82, 84, 88, 91, 99-100, 106, 143-146, 148, 151-153, 158, 160-161, 172-174, 186, 209, 220-222, 227, 230 meishuguan 18, 29, 63-64, 68-71, 73, 85-86, 103-104, 148-149, 216, 231 middle-class 37-38, 85, 97-98, 100, 127, 136-137, 141, 145, 171, 181, 216, 220, 224-225 modernization 13, 18, 41-42, 50, 64, 67, 70, 72, 75-76, 78, 82, 90, 102, 121-124, 161, 193, 232 museal processes 13-14, 49, 91, 226-227, 231 museology 14, 17, 28, 81, 85, 91, 222-223 museum circuit 13, 33, 36-38, 40, 49, 51, 91, 97, 141-142, 177, 215, 218-219; see also cultural circuit museum intermediaries 13, 16, 36-40, 46, 50-51, 79, 99-100, 107, 109, 112, 114, 118, 120, 135-137, 142, 145-146, 152, 163, 173, 179, 212, 215, 217-219, 221, 223, 226-227, 229, 231

260  museum public 13, 16, 27, 29-32, 36, 39, 49, 51, 66, 97-98, 100, 136-137, 196, 199, 216, 224-225 national museum 14, 23, 68, 72, 74, 77, 100-101, 105, 136, 219, 222, 224, 230 participation 27-28, 49, 51, 80, 90, 120, 128, 149, 153, 164, 167, 174 Pearl River Delta Region 16, 40-42, 141, 161, 183, 228 postcolonial 13, 25, 36, 65, 88-89, 174, 178, 189, 192, 194, 209, 217, 225, 227 private museum 44, 83, 144, 152, 173-174, 216, 222, 230 privatization 65, 75-76, 87; also see private museum propaganda 44, 72-73, 108, 113 public cultural sphere 141, 164, 174, 217, 222 public diplomacy 113, 136, 216, 220; also see cultural diplomacy public sphere 29-30, 97, 99, 121-122, 125-126, 135-136, 141, 148, 160, 177, 195-196, 212, 216, 218-219, 222

Museum Processes in China

regionalization 40, 161, 163, 227 regulation 16, 33-34, 36-37, 40, 43, 46, 49-51, 63, 99, 105, 120, 126, 136, 143-144, 146-147, 151, 173-174, 180, 215, 218-220, 223, 226-227, 231-232 representation 14-15, 23-25, 33-38, 40, 42, 45, 47, 49, 76, 87-88, 107, 110, 113, 118, 126-127, 142, 148-149, 158, 167, 173-174, 179, 184, 188, 190, 194-197, 209-210, 212, 215, 218, 229-230, 232 resistance 13, 39-40, 80, 110, 152, 161, 163-164, 219, 226, 228, 231-232 revolutionary 18-19, 22-23, 44, 50, 64, 66, 72-75, 78, 90, 100-101, 108-109, 127-129, 131-132, 135, 216, 231 signifying practices 13, 32, 49, 118; also see representation urbanization 41, 43, 50, 65, 81, 91, 114, 141, 145-146, 156, 158, 161, 198 visitors 16-17, 21-23, 27, 31-32, 35, 38-40, 45, 47-51, 66, 70, 97, 100, 104, 126-130, 132-137, 141-143, 147, 156-157, 159, 164-165, 167-168, 170172, 177, 179, 183-185, 187-189, 191, 196-200, 203-204, 206-207, 211-212, 215-219, 223-225, 227, 232; also see museum public