THE CIRCUIT IN CONTEMPORARY :

THE INSTITUTIONAL REGULATION, PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION OF ART IN , AND

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

by

Ho Chui Fun

Asia Institute, Faculty of Arts,

University of Melbourne

28 February, 2018

Parts of the publication [Ho, Chui-fun. 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:10.18848/1835-2014/CGP/v09i04/17-31.] were used in Chapter One and Chapter Two. The author of this thesis is the sole author of the publication.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements i

Declaration iii

Note on Romanisation iv

Abstract v

List of Figures, Tables, and Illustrations vii

CHAPTER ONE RETHINKING MUSEUMS IN CHINA 1.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………...1 1.2 Research Aims and Questions…………………………………………………….13 1.3 Structure of the Thesis…………………………………………………….…….....15

CHAPTER TWO REVIEWING THE METHODOLOGIES OF CHINESE MUSEUM RESEARCH …………………………………………………….…...... 25 2.1 Museum Research: Theoretical Perspectives ……………………….………….27 2.2 Museums and Concepts of the Public…...…………………………………….…36 2.3 Visitor Research Methods……………………………………………………….…44

CHAPTER THREE LOCATING THE MUSEUM CIRCUIT …………………………………………….50 3.1 Theoretical Framework: The Museum Circuit …………………………………52 3.2 Research Methods ………………………………………………………………….61 3.2.1 Case Studies of Art Museums ……………………………………………...... 62 3.2.2 Content Analysis of Museum Texts…………………………………….……….68 3.2.3 Interviews with Museum Professionals……………..…………………………68 3.2.4 Interviews with Visitors…………………...……………………..………………69 3.2.5 Observation……………………………………………………………………….70 3.2.6 Juxtapositional Comparison……………………………………………………71

CHAPTER FOUR THE HISTORICAL TRAJECTORIES OF ART MUSEUMS ……………….....74 4.1 The Path towards the Birth of Modern Public Art Museums in the Republic of China (1912-1949) …………………………………………..77 4.2 Mao’s Politicisation of Art Museums

in the People’s Republic of China (1949-1979) ………………………………..83 4.3 Cultural Relaxation and the Resumption of Privatisation

in the Post-Mao Period (1979-1989) …………………………………………....87 4.4 The Nascent Development of Private Art Museums in the 1990s …….…..…90 4.5 Museums in the 21st Century………………………………………………………93 4.6 The Changing Museum Contexts in Hong Kong (1962-current).…….………99 4.7 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………....103

CHAPTER FIVE ART MUSEUM IN SHENZHEN ...... ……………..….…106 5.1 The State and the Market: A National Museum Structure...... …..……..109 5.2 From Nationalism to the Production of Knowledge: The Art of He Xiangning...... …………… ...... …………...... 116 5.3 Cross-straits Cultural Diplomacy and Public Dialogue on Contemporary Art...... …………………………..……121 5.4 Interpreting Contemporary Sculpture: Possibilities and Limitations ...... ……………………………………….....127 5.5 Educated Youth, Provincial Visitors, and a Diversified National Public...... ……………………………..……...136 5.6 Conclusion...... …………………….………..……………………..………….147

CHAPTER SIX TIMES MUSEUM IN GUANGZHOU ...... ……………………………………149 6.1 Institutional Boundaries: The Private Market, the State, and Society...... 151 6.2 Developmental Perspective of Cultural Globalisation ……………..….…....159 6.2.1 Critique of Art Commodification…...……………….…….………………….159 6.2.2 Social-Political Critique of Everyday Life……………..……..…………….161 6.2.3 Critical Relationship between Art and Society……..…………..…………..164 6.2.4 Institutional Self-critique and Reformulation of the Museum…..………..167 6.3 Artistic Regionalisation: Southern Imaginary vs Northern Hegemony……170

6.4 Educated Youth and the Consumption of “Alternative Culture”……………174 6.5 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………183

CHAPTER SEVEN IN HONG KONG……....………….………186 7.1 Museum Bureaucracy and its Institutional Network.…………………….….188 7.2 The Historical Painting Collection: From the Colonial Legacy to Aesthetic Differences……………………….…190 7.3 International Blockbusters and Global Cultural Capital……………………194 7.4 National Representation and the Grandeur of Dynastic Art……………..….197 7.5 Different Notions of the Local: From East-Meets-West to a Local-National-Global Nexus……...…………..201 7.6 Public and Counter-Public: Museum Consumption in a City-State….…....206 7.7 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..……..222

CHAPTER EIGHT CONCLUSION: RETHINKING THE DISCOURSE AND PRACTICE OF (ART) MUSEUMS FROM THE MUSEUM CIRCUIT PERSPECTIVE 8.1 Summary of Findings…………………………………………………………..…225 8.2 Modes of Museum Circuits………………………………………………………232 8.2.1 Political and Economic Agents……………………………………….………234 8.2.2 Cultural Intermediaries……………………………………………….……….236 8.2.3 Museum Publics………………………………………………………..…….…239 8.3 Contributions and Limits of the Research………………………………..……241

REFERENCES ………………………………………………………………….………249

APPENDICES I. Interview Guide (for museum professionals) ……………………………………279 II. Interview Guide (for museum visitors) ……………………………………..……283

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis could not have been completed without the contribution of my generous doctoral supervisors, Edwin Jurriëns and Lewis Mayo in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne. They have thoroughly read and offered incisive comments on every chapter in this thesis. To my principal supervisor, Edwin Jurriëns, I would like to express my deepest gratitude for his supervision and constant help. He has given me valuable advice, particularly on audience reception and contemporary art practices. In addition, I thank him for having invited me to present the findings of this thesis at the panel, “Contemporary Art, Society and Representation in Asia 1” convened by him at “The Tenth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 10)”. To my associate supervisor, Lewis Mayo, I am deeply grateful for his critical questions. He helped me and challenged my thinking at different times. I have truly benefited from his profound knowledge of the cultural . In addition, I have benefited from the comments offered by the two anonymous external reviewers. I am extremely grateful to all of them, for their insight and suggestions, which contributed greatly to the work presented in this thesis.

This thesis is the product of an intensive four-year period of research. It has not only drawn on investigations into museum-related materials, but has also extended to include oral interviews. I have 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 Times Museums; and Eve Tam, Maria Mok, and an anonymous interviewee from the Hong Kong Museum of Art. I am thankful for sharing their time to give me insights into understanding their practices. I also thank the staff of the Asia Art Archive, particularly 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 appreciated their opinions, attitudes and interesting remarks. They have greatly contributed to my analysis of museum consumption in this thesis.

i

Researching and presenting this thesis required enormous financial support. I must acknowledge the University of Melbourne for its generous support to my research. I have been fortunate to receive an International Research Scholarship (2014-2017) cum International Fee Remission Scholarship (2014-2017) from the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University to support my PhD study. In addition, I received a Fieldwork Grant (2015-16), and two GRATS funds (2015 & 2017) from the Faculty of Arts and the Asia Institute to support my research field trips and my trips to two conferences, respectively the eighth International Conference of Inclusive Museums (New Delhi, India, 2015), and the ICAS 10 (Chiang Mai, Thailand, 2017). I thank the scholars and curators who have kindly shared ideas for my work during these trips.

There are other many individuals who have helped me in different ways. My friend and interlocutor, Vivian Ting (the former Assistant Professor in Museum Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University), has constantly discussed the subject matter of this thesis with me. I deeply thank for her suggestions to my thesis. In addition, I thank her and my former teacher, Richard Sandal (the Professor in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester), as well as my former museum supervisor, Michael Robinson (the former Director of the Hong Kong Museum of Education), for their impressive references which brought me the opportunity of studying at the University of Melbourne, and for their previous guidance which strengthened my knowledge of many aspects of museums.

This research would also have been impossible without the support of friends and colleagues, near and far. They are too numerous to list, but I especially thank my study buddies Tao Tao and Yu Jin, my friend Ivy Yuen and sister Helen Ho, who offered technical help to my research, and Hong Kong artists Clara Cheung and Gum Cheung who provided two photos to be included in this thesis. My final thanks are to my family: — especially my old mum and late dad. I dedicate this thesis to them, and to our beloved 18-year-old cat, which left us only a few days ago.

ii

DECLARATION

I hereby declare that this thesis is comprised of original work, which has been submitted towards the completion of a Doctorate of Philosophy. Where required, due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other materials used. Furthermore, this thesis is fewer than the maximum word limit in length, exclusive of tables, figures, and bibliographies.

Signature:

Date: 28 February 2018

iii

NOTE ON ROMANISATION

Names of mainland Chinese are given in the traditional Chinese order and in : 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.

iv

ABSTRACT

This thesis questions the dominant analytical approaches in the study of China’s museums, which tend to privilege the structure and modes of production, the state and market factors, and limit the study of museum publics and visitor reception to the public-relations management approach and practical functions. This thesis suggests a new conceptual framework for studying museums in the context of China’s current political-economic transition and its related socio-cultural processes. It proposes the “museum circuit” as a model to examine the museal processes of institutional regulation, production and consumption, as well as relevant issues of representation and identity. Using this constructive and multi-perspectival approach, the thesis specifically asks why and how political and economic agents play a role in museum regulation, what meanings and modes of production are conveyed by cultural intermediaries, and how visitors can be differentiated based on their ways of appropriating or resisting museum consumption.

The study is illuminated by case studies of three art museums, namely the He Xiangning Art Museum (Shenzhen), the Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong) and the Times Museum (Guangzhou). The museums, each with their own institutional organisation form, demonstrate different circuit modes in mediating the relation between the interlinked political-economic, cultural and social spheres. They address the “politics of signification” in three different ways. Firstly, this thesis analyses 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 analyses how different networks of cultural intermediaries have been involved in signification struggles, in their response to national, regional, local, global and post-colonial representational forces and agents, including the state, the market and the public. Thirdly, it analyses the visitors’ cultural orientations and social actions towards the museum based on their signification capabilities. It identifies 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 or the museum.

v

In this thesis, the art museums surveyed are understood as multiple cultural circuits in which different institutional modes co-exist in complex arrangements. The circuits underlie the processes of regulation, production, and consumption and involve different agents for articulating representation and identity. The case studies interrogate the institutional boundaries that are established by political and economic agendas, and contribute to a research paradigm that highlights the socio-cultural processes in which the museums are involved. They also offer a comparative complement to aid understanding the different museum discourses and practices in the Greater Region of southern China. More importantly, 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 cultural intermediaries, and processes of museum consumption as practices of appropriation or resistance.

vi

LIST OF FIGURES, TABLES, AND ILLUSTRATIONS

List of Figures

I The Number of Museums in Mainland China (1949-1982, 1985-2014) 5

II The Circuit of Culture 53

III The Museum Circuit 57

IV Mode of circuit of He Xiangning Art Museum 234

V Mode of circuit of Times Museum 233

VI Mode of circuit of Hong Kong Museum of Art 234

List of Tables

I Modes of museum identification of the visitors of He Xiangning Art 139 Museum

II Modes of museum identification of the visitors of Times Museum 176

III Modes of museum identification of the publics of Hong Kong Museum 209 of Art

List of Illustrations

I The central exhibition lobby of the He Xiangning Art Museum 117

II The main entrance of the Times Museum 152

III The artist Gum Cheung and a passer-by drawing portraits of each other 164 in a public area near the Huangbian village, 2014

IV “Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation” exhibition at HKME, 2009 221

V Artist protest in front of the museum office, 9 August, 2009 221

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1

RETHINKING MUSEUMS IN CHINA

1.1 Introduction

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 society in Europe. Although these European public museums 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 post-colonial critiques and state-building projects. Their distinctive local discourses (see for example Macleod 1998; Lepawsky 2008; Bhatti 2012; Lu 2014; Erskine-Loftus, Hightower and Al-Mulla 2016) have challenged the validity of treating museums through a universal discourse which is epistemologically and ontologically the same as western counterparts. In the 21st century, museums have become an academic issue that emphasises global dialogues, cultural specificity, and the need to focus on particular contexts.1 Museums across the world have figured prominently in recent discussions of the creative/cultural industries; they have been seen as agents of urban growth 2 and regeneration, and as constituents of tourism and leisure industry (see for example Stephan 2001; Plaza 2008; Grodach 2008; 2012; Lu 2014, 168-95). This thesis will focus on China’s historical, cultural-economic and social contexts (including those of Hong Kong, which was a British colony between the mid 19th

1 These aims were highlighted in 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 in April, 2016. See Walklate (2016). 2 This topic was discussed in the ESRC Business CASE Seminar, “Museums, social inclusion and the cultural industries”, which was held at the Sacker Centre of the Victoria and Albert Museum in the United Kingdom on 20th October, 2009. See the webpage of University of Leicester. https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/geography/redundant-content/research/old-research- folder/projects/completed/museum-sem/museums-the-cultural-industries-and-social- inclusion#museums-social-inclusion-and, accessed June 29, 2018. In 2017, NEMO Working Group Museums and Creative Industries also released a research report, entitled, Museums and Creative Industries in Progress. See the online document, available at http://www.ne- mo.org/fileadmin/Dateien/public/NEMo_documents/NEMO_2017_Museums_Creative_Industries_pr ogress_report.pdf (accessed June 29, 2018).

1 and late 20th centuries), and addresses the specificities of the localisation processes affecting its museums in the global-city region — Greater Pearl River Delta (abbreviated as GPRD) — from the 1990s to present-day. It does not only empirically study (regional) museal processes, but also creates a conceptual framework that can inform the study of museum formations in China, and promote the study of museum agency in other parts of Asia.

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 19th and early 20th 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 , safeguard cultural artefacts, and promote research. However, the museum scholar Marzia Varutti has cited that the first phase3 in the evolution of museums in China was the emergence of types of proto-museums, such as the Temple of Confucius4 dating back to the fifth century BCE (Su 1995 cited Varutti 2014, 25). Chinese museology considers these 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.

Regardless of when and where the modern Chinese museum originated, the country has experienced various localisation 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

3 The second phase started with the establishment of the first museum, the Xujiahui Museum in 1868, which was introduced by Western missionaries and scholars to support their activities in China. The spread of museums then accompanied the view of the museum being a token of modernity founded on Western ideas and Imperial Palace () into a public museum in 1925. The third phase, from 1949 to the present, involves the museums created under Communist rule. 4 Varutti (2014, 25) notes that Confucius’s 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.

2 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 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.). (As noted below, in the 20th century Chinese 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” (lit. “halls of fine arts”).)

In the late Qing, museums were primarily built by social 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 colonised territories such as Hong Kong and Taiwan.) Public museums emerged out of the world of revolutionary China that came into being with the fall of the (1644-1912). 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’ modernisation project. The heyday of this development was in the 1920s and 1930s, but it continued through the war with (1937-1945) and lasted until 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.)

The museum enterprise was radically transformed when the Communist Party took power in 1949. New institutional arrangements put meishuguan and bowuguan respectively under the State Bureau of Cultural Relics (the superseding agency of

5 The word “bowuguan” was first used as a term to describe the in by Lin Zexu (1785-1850) in his book, Sizhou zhi (1835), one of the earliest Chinese books depicting the world’s geographies, histories, and politics, covering more than 30 countries on the four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa, and America (Chen 2005).

3 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, 121). In Kirk Denton’s account (2014a, 19), the development of museums in the People’s Republic of China took place in three dynamic bursts. They are the (1958-1962), the early post-Mao period (1980s), and the post-Tiananmen period (1990s-present). To summarise Denton’s periodisaton, 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 , museums were utilised 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 “re-institutionalise” the memory of the past and to emphasise “spiritual civilisation”. 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. In addition, when Hong Kong came under the formal control of the government of the People’s Republic of China in 1997, the museums and art 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.

The figure below charts two significant increases in the number of museums since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2015). As noted above, the first increase occurred around 1958-60, 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 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 with the past, and caused a severe blow to the Chinese museum system. The second wave of museum expansion started in 2009

4 and accelerated in 2012 and 2013, with the last two years of this period recording a staggering increase of over 400 new museums. In the wake of their expansion and historical transformation during the last few decades, one of the key questions arising from the proliferation of museums is why and how are museums relevant in contemporary Chinese society?

Figure 1: The Number of Museums in Mainland China (1949-1982, 1985-2014) Source: Data adapted from National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2015

To a great extent, the recent museum boom was a result of the policies of the Communist Party of China (CPC). In 2009, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China promulgated the Revitalisation Plan for the Cultural Industries and upgraded the status of culture to the level of a strategic industry that is seen as directly contributing to regional economies and as sustaining employment in construction, tourism, and related sectors. The culture industry was targeted to deliver up to 5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (The State Ministry of Culture 2009). In 2012, in his report to the eighteenth CPC National Congress, the former president Jintao placed much emphasis on China’s “cultural soft power”. The Party had to promote “core socialist values” and “civic morality” to “enrich people’s intellectual and cultural lives” and to “enhance the overall strength and international competitiveness of Chinese culture”. The development of the cultural industry and cultural services was also highlighted for the importance of those sectors in generating social effect and economic benefits, and building a “strong

5 socialist culture”.6 However, “museum” is not formally classified in the official reports on the national economic performance of cultural industries.7

Occurring under the umbrella of the state, the museum “fever” that was observable in earlier periods in the western world and Japan in the 1980s has seized China today. Both Western and Chinese scholars have examined this museum fever closely. Studies emphasise that public museums in contemporary China remain institutions serving the interests of CPC and the state. In an early study, Edward Vickers (2007) asserts that museums have become a key element in supporting state- centered patriotism, even though the totalising official version of Chinese identity is contested in the museums of Hong Kong and Taiwan (whose museum system is outside the administrative control of the CPC). The museum’s role as a tool for state formation is further explicated in more recent studies. Tracey Lu (2014) 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. Kirk Denton (2014b) observes that museums are expected to support the Party’s patriotic education program and “national learning” (guoxue) with renewed emphasis on the imperial past and China’s ancient philosophies. He

6 See Full Text of Hu Jintao’s Report at 18th Party Congress, Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the of America, November 27, 2010. http://www.china- embassy.org/eng/zt/18th_CPC_National_Congress_Eng/t992917.htm. 7 For example, see the Annual Report on Development of China’s Cultural Industries which was published every year since 2001. In the China Cultural and Creative Industries Reports 2013, edited by Hardy Yong Xiang and Patricia Ann Walker in 2014, the industries dealt by this collection include: advertising, architecture, art and antiques, computer games, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, music, performing arts, publishing, software, TV and radio, digital media.

6 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. The glory of the imperial past has thus found expression in new museums and exhibitions in China. Mariza Varutti’s (2014) recent accounts of the representations of Chinese national identity and ethnic communities in the displays and narratives of museums reflect the political shift shaped by the Communist ideological crisis of the 1980s and 1990s and the rise of cultural nationalism as a new form of political legitimation. Heritage preservation has been used as a means for commoditising the culture of China’s regions, and cultural tradition has become a political tool for those in positions of power to tell stories about the past and the present (Blumenfield and Silverman 2013).

Other studies have shown that the official 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). In the meantime, 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 culture (Kraus 2004). The recent emphasis on creative industries has fostered the interplay between “culture” (the state hegemonic territory) and “creativity” (the force liberated from the state sanctioned culture) (Keane 2016). “Creativity” has become a lexicon for depicting a changing China. Creative industries maintain and protect historical and cultural heritage, improve cultural capital, and foster communities as well as individual creativity. In a broader sense, they improve the cultural assets of cities, establish city brands and identity, and promote the creative economy as well as the overall economic and social development ( 2011).

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, but also because public museums are now engaging in, or competing for the representation and interpretation of arts and culture, and the public engagement

7 with other emerging forums and sites. These platforms include creative clusters, private museums, and other new actors such as the creative labour force, the Internet and other virtual media.

Michael Keane (2011) claims that contemporary cultural clusters are fundamentally changing China, causing greater openness and internationalisation, leading to an embrace of creative communities, and, in time, possibly leading to unintended changes in social and political attitudes. The emergent creativity built around the creative industries has been defined by Keane (2011, 7) as “the fitting of new ideas and imagined possibilities to perceived realities, norms, values and patterns, encompassing imitation, differentiation, adaptation, learning and social diffusion”. It has, Keane asserts, penetrated the economic, cultural and technological fields, and social and individual organisational forms. Considered as a process for boosting local cultural economies, cultural clusters involve various stakeholders including the local districts (Fung and Erni 2013), and overseas culture and expertise (Fung 2016).

At societal level, creative clusters provide a meeting place for creative people and create a local milieu favorable to collective cultural production (Wang, Zhang, Wang and Chen 2010). A “creative class” (Florida 2002) or “creative labour” (Abbing 2008) have 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 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 legalise the private ownership of heritage and non-governmental collections. This paved the way for the development of private

8 museums. Under a robust market economy, private museums,8 as well as a thriving mass culture and competing forms of entertainment, have seen significant growth. 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 realise their personal ambitions and influence society from various perspectives (Hansen and Svarverud 2010). The increasing participation of non-governmental actors in the museum world, including private enterprise bodies, museum professionals, museum donors, and museum audiences, suggests that the state is loosening its control over museums and their activities (Varutti 2014, 43).

The impact of globalisation has recently been observed in the museum world in mainland China, 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 digitisation, exhibition design, and collection management (Lu 2014, 209). As Van den Bosch (2005) notes, increasing globalisation 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 re-creation 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. Particularly in China, museum-going culture is still developing. Museums concepts are subject to ongoing public discussion and re-imagination, and the localisation processes affecting museum consumption deserve closer scrutiny.

8 At the end of 2010, there were approximately 475 private museums in China. The figure was recorded by Varutti (2014, 48) in her interview with Professor Lu Jiansong at Fudan University, in Shanghai, on May 11, 2012.

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All in all, the political-economic transformation of Chinese society — steered by the dynamic relationship between state ideology and economic liberalisation — has arguably led to more hybrid forms and greater diversity and privatisation of museum development in China. Furthermore, “bowuguan” (museums) and “meishuguan” (art museums) are, as noted, managed by two different state departments and both museum streams have their own institutional and disciplinary norms and potentialities in constructing their material repositories and their symbolic foundations. More importantly, we can argue that Chinese museums can no longer be understood solely in terms of the politics and economics in the process of state formation. In light of the recent tension in China between the state and other competitors and new actors in a changing society and within the global context, there is a need to explore the complex relationships and contexts in which Chinese museums are located. New research is indispensable to establish a broad approach for examining the construction of contemporary museums, recognising the role of its actors, and rethinking the place of the public in shaping the discourse of China’s museums.

This thesis treats museums as important cultural organisations that engage in institutionalising and re-institutionalising the structures of history, 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 normalisation”. Their products are reflective of individuals’ and groups’ ongoing struggles to establish what is real, to organise 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 normalising events relayed in museum settings are.

In addition, there has also been little assessment of the differences between different cultural institutions in different regions of China. Scholars working on

10 regionalisation in China suggest different possibilities for undertaking regional analysis and highlighting regional diversity (Cartier 2002, 128). 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 institutionalisation 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 internalised by citizens in local society.

In this thesis, the region that is examined is the Greater Pearl River Delta (GPRD) region of Southern China, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. GPRD consists of 11 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 urbanisation and integration in the past three decades, the region has been developed into a global city-region (Scott 2001), or even the most poly-centric 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 globalised advanced services (Bie, de Jong and Derudder 2015).

The three cities in this research, on the other hand, have each promoted cultural projects in an effort to be seen as more cosmopolitan. Their local governments have made agreements for strengthening the arts and cultural exchange with each other. For example, the signing of the regional cooperation agreement between Hong Kong and Guangzhou in 2003 and the three-year plan (2013-2015) between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Moreover, local practices such as creating a regional artistic subjectivity, and protecting 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,

11 identity and rights can be recontextualised. This thesis is concerned with the contested nature of cultural practices. Instead of further highlighting the regional integration perspective underlying the GPRD economic experiment or Greater China unification project, this thesis unveils the regional cultural perspectives of different museums. It seeks to explore the dynamic cultural phenomena in the global city- region, and the local-global cultural connections that shape global cities in China.

Drawing from the field of cultural institutions studies, this study views culture as involving specific cultural entities (artefacts and practices) bounded 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 organisations which use human and financial resources to achieve certain aims efficiently. They are not identified exclusively with organisational 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, Tschmuck and Zembylas 2005, 153). In addition, institutions operate as gatekeepers, controlling access to organisational 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

12 of exchange but undergo various forms of valuation and evaluation while being transmitted to different contexts (ibid., 149-50). 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.9 This thesis endeavours to tease out this interface by looking from the perspective of a new cultural agency — the art museum enterprise in China (which here includes Hong Kong). 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.

1.2 Research Aims and Questions

This thesis advocates a paradigm shift in research on China’s museums — and above all its art museums — from a focus on the relationship between the museum and the state (and the political or economic forces that shape museum discourse) towards a sociocultural communicative approach that examines the interrelationship between institutions, the state, the economy, culture, and society. Firstly, it aims to propose a new conceptual framework for museum studies in China, with parallel considerations to the economic interests and political powers involved with museums, the cultural processes engendered by the social/cultural actors, and the social processes in which museum publics are produced. The theory will contribute to the analysis of the relationship between political/economic capital, institutional capital, and social and communicative capital. It will renew our understanding of museums by examining them from different perspectives and in different contexts, while speculating on the ways that they influence society in China. Secondly, it aims to review the art museal processes unfolding in GPRD in the context of China’s

9 World Heritage Encyclopedia. Cultural Institutions Studies, worldhertiage.org. http://worldheritage.org/articles/Cultural_Institutions_Studies, accessed January 26, 2018.

13 political-economic and socio-cultural transitions, including considering Hong Kong’s place in those structures since its return to China in 1997. Within the broader field of museum studies, I specifically focus on the art museum field, examining the distinctive discourses and practices in two official museums (located in Shenzhen and Hong Kong) and a private museum (in Guangzhou). The three case studies will provide insights for studying the regional perspectives of museums in China, and the museological approaches that have been undertaken for establishing different kinds of local-global connections in the museum world. 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 socio-cultural and political implications of museum phenomena.

The study intends to achieve the following goals:

1. to discover the limitations of the existing studies on Chinese museums and identify a research methodology that can offer a broad approach for explicating the museum-public interface; 2. to interrogate the political-economic factors that structure the three art museums under examination and shape the processes of their cultural production; 3. to examine the cultural practices of the three museums by finding out their particular approaches and their strategies for representing history, art and culture, the cultural politics that they involve, and the impacts they have made on the construction of publics and identities; 4. to explore the museum publics, examining who the visitors are, what their differences in cultural orientation are, and how they relate to the museum production-regulation entity (especially the public intended to be produced by the museum); 5. to compare different institutional models and assess the different embodiments of the relations between state, economy, society, and culture, and the different roles and functions of the agents found in each museum.

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My research asks what theoretical approaches and methodology should be applied to examine China’s complex museal processes. In the case of the three art museums that it studies, it analyses why and how political-economic forces play a role in museum construction, what types of meanings and ideologies are conveyed by the modes of cultural production operating in each museum and how these are changed by actors over time, and how visitors can be differentiated based on the ways that they relate to a given museum. Finally, I ask how museum structures vary under different institutional conditions and in accordance with different modes of mediating the relation between different spheres. Overall, the thesis offers a new conceptual framework for studying museums in contemporary China, and empirically, constitutes a critical examination of the symbolic relationship between state, economy, culture, and society within the specific institutional frameworks of art museums respectively located in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

I explicate the political and economic agents that shape the museum construct, and explore the socio-cultural processes in which actors struggle over signification and agency, and examine how museum publics orient themselves towards different cultural identities and values. The re-examination of museums from multiple perspectives and with reference to different contexts can help us to reassess the discursive power of museums in providing meanings and values to different social fields. The assessment will foster an understanding of the limitations and potentials of their socio-cultural agency of particular constituencies and impact on cultural representation, and explain the construction of publics and cultural identities. By illuminating different institutional models in the art museum field, the thesis seeks to reflect on the different effects that these different institutional models have in influencing the discourses and practices of art museums in GPRD.

1.3 Structure of the Thesis

The thesis is divided into eight chapters. It begins with this introductory chapter, which provides a short review of the fundamental changes affecting museums in the shifting context of China’s modern history. By arguing that museums are now surrounded by new competitors and actors, and are influenced by

15 international exchange, this chapter has highlighted the importance of understanding the complex relationships and new conditions of museums that have promoted the emergence of new agencies and diverse publics. This thesis thus proposes a research agenda for moving away from the conception of political and economic determination of the cultural field, especially in mainland China. It follows the view that “institutions” constitute a sector (or “system”, or “field”) of society, a sector which functions as the interface between differing spheres: social, cultural, economic, and political. The research aims, as stated in this chapter, are to establish a new conceptual framework for the studies of museum culture in China, and to review the art museal processes in China’s context of political-economic and socio- cultural transition (focusing on those processes that have affected GPRD since the 1990s). I examine two official art museums, one in Shenzhen and one in Hong Kong, and a private museum in Guangzhou. The study asks why and how political- economic forces play a role in museum construction, what types of meanings and ideologies are conveyed by the modes of cultural production operating in the museum, how these modes are changed by actors over time, how visitors interpret their experience and relate themselves to the museum production-regulation dynamic, and finally, how museums vary under different institutional conditions and in relation to different modes for mediating the relations between different spheres.

Chapter Two identifies the methodological deficiencies in the existing analyses of museums in China (including those of Hong Kong) based on a review of the salient literature. The review is divided into three parts: museum research approaches, the museum public (the concepts of the public that have been manifested in the museum field), and visitor research methods. The review questions 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. The role of group and individual agency, particularly the place of social and cultural actors and their signifying practices, as well as the notion of a differentiated public, has been neglected in studies of the discursive practices of contemporary museums

16 in China. The chapter highlights the need to take a multi-perspective approach when examining the construction of museums in Chinese society.

In Chapter Three, I suggest utilising the theoretical framework of the “museum circuit” to examine how museums articulate the different discursive and practice domains of production, consumption, identity, regulation, and representation. The elements were originally set out by British cultural studies scholars for developing the notion of the “circuit of culture” (hereafter, ‘the circuit’) in the late 1990s. The first part of this chapter will introduce and explain the theoretical construct of the “circuit of culture” and highlight the advantages for adopting “the circuit” for the study of museums in China. By reframing the museum model in terms of a “museum circuit”, this thesis enquires into, firstly, how the museum is institutionally regulated; secondly, how cultural intermediaries produce and articulate cultural representations; and thirdly, how visitors consume culture and position themselves vis-à-vis what they value and encounter in the museum. In addition, the circuit constitutes the interface with interlinked spheres, namely political-economic, cultural, and social fields. The ways in which the main actors involved in each sphere exercise their agency in meaning-making inform the power relations between the different actors. The reframed model allows us to address the specificity of individual museum contexts as well as the discourses of meaning-making deployed by different agents, enabling us to consider the various interlinked museal processes in relative and constructive terms, and to recognise the communicative practices of different audiences.

The second part of Chapter Three presents my data collection methodologies. I propose case studies of the art museums in GPRD, which is an underexplored field in China-focused contemporary cultural studies. I consider three different cases: the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, Times Museum in Guangzhou, and the Hong Kong Museum of Art in Hong Kong. These case studies are not invoked in order to make generalisations about China’s museum discourse; rather, they make possible an in-depth examination of the cultural and institutional differences in a regional context. They were chosen because they had larger implications for the study of museum phenomena and revealing the broader relations implicated in

17 cultural practices. They present different institutional modes and enable us to address the complex national, global, local, regional and central cultural forces, colonial legacies, and specific identities, as well as the interplay between state, economy, culture, and society that affect the region. In addition, as mentioned earlier, GPRD is a global city-region. The region deserves further attention because of the significant moves indicated by the governments’ initiatives in cultural collaboration and city branding (notably in Shenzhen and Hong Kong), and the emergence of artistic subjectivity and linguistic rights in (the province in which the region is located). It is worth taking the prominent cities, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Hong Kong as points of departure for studying the museum discourses and practices in the region. By the method of “juxtapositional comparison”, the “in/commensurability” of the three art museums will be discussed for drawing implications of the findings. For data collection, I used multiple qualitative methods including content analysis, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic observation of museum practices. My fieldwork was conducted mainly in the year 2015. The data I collected come from a range of sources including a variety of printed and online documents (curatorial statements, exhibition/project catalogues, and newspapers), data from interviews with museum professionals, participants and visitors, and notes from personal observation.

Chapter Four revisits the history of and the forces behind the institutional transformation of art museums in China. The chapter is divided into sections according to different periods of time — covering the transition from the late Qing dynasty to the Republic of China (1912-1948), the era of the People’s Republic of China (1949-) under the leadership of , and the period of economic reform from the 1980s to the present. Many observers contend that throughout Chinese history, the arts have been welded tightly to the state. Studies done over the last decade or so have asserted that recent contextual changes in the arts system and the waning state control over the arts have had effects on the production of art institutions in mainland China. However, little is known about the practices and discourses of the cultural actors who are involved in art museums or about how citizens use the museums in the social practice of cultural consumption. I observe that in the 21st century, art museums, as much as the art world, have gone through

18 drastic changes along with intensive urban development and cultural economic growth in mainland China. This chapter argues that art museums in China have undergone various localisation processes in response to the dynamic internal and external challenges throughout the history of the country. The chapter also endeavours to discuss the multiple forces that have been influencing the regulation, production and consumption of art museums in mainland China.

In addition, the final part of Chapter Four examines the specificities of the cultural context of Hong Kong after political sovereignty over the territory was regained by China in 1997. By including Hong Kong, China can be portrayed as formed from the co-existence of capitalism and socialism, using multiplicity and multi-directionality (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 museal practice proceeds (Du Cros and Lee 2007). In Hong Kong, state museums, once under British control, have not been democratised 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. This part examines how Hong Kong art 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.

Overall, Chapter Four deploys a descriptive approach to unpack the development of art museums in China, including those in Hong Kong after 1997. It provides a historical context in which the “museum” as a public concept has evolved socially and institutionally. It also provides a context for understanding the internalisation of the structures of contemporary art museums by China’s successive political regimes and by its changing society. It re-emphasises the need for an

19 empirical strategy for reassessing the involvement of and mutual relations between different agents in art museums.

Chapters Five to Seven analyse the individual case studies using the conceptual framework of the museum circuit. 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 which engage with the museum and to the museum organisation itself. The chapters then examine the production aspect of the museum, mainly by identifying the scope of cultural intermediaries who are involved in its production, examining their discursive and cultural practices in exhibition, curatorial, and collection development, highlighting their approaches in representing works 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 integrate 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.

Chapter Five sets out to demonstrate that a national art museum — in this case one located in the city of Shenzhen — is not simply something determined by the state, but instead entails a complex process constituted by the interplay between various actors, including the state’s political and economic agents, cultural intermediaries such as academics and cultural practitioners, and the educated elites in the city. The first section of the chapter explicates the institutional background of the He Xiangning Art Museum, which is governed by the Affairs Office of the State Council and managed by the Group. The

20 museum’s displays mainly focus on the classical Chinese ink paintings of He Xiangning and multi-media forms of contemporary art. Sections Two to Four consider the role of the museum’s cultural intermediaries in producing and negotiating exhibition interpretations and strategies, and examine how their cultural practices have informed the practices of a transforming state. Section Two specifically examines the museum’s construction of a national narrative through the art of the leading communist artist He Xiangning. The “Cross-Strait Four-Regions” project is taken as an example in Section Three where the cultural intermediates have tactically engaged in public diplomacy for a genuine platform for artistic and cultural exchange that can help to manage the geo-cultural politics between the regions that are spread across the Taiwan Straits. In the Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, as explicated in Section Four, cultural intermediates play a key role in defining contemporary sculpture and in interrogating the relationship between art and society.

Taken together, the three sections aim to reflect on the museum’s performance of a role in the context of China’s nationalism and economic development, the museum’s dilemmas in approaching cultural ideologies, and the variety of dynamic networks of appropriation that are involved in the process of “producing” the nation. More importantly, each section explains how cultural intermediaries contribute to the formation of a public sphere connected with the museum. The last section of the chapter explores the relationship of a diversified public to the national domain. I specifically ask how visitors make sense of their museum experience and relate it to their personal identities. A visitor study was conducted to identify the six segments that make up the museum’s audience of urban, educated middle-class visitors in Shenzhen, based on their socio-cultural identifications. The findings demonstrate a diversified national public characterised by different modes of museum consumption and hardly aligned with the state’s interest in Chineseness or political patriotism.

Chapter Six is a case study of the Times museum in Guangzhou. It is a private art museum located at the northern edge of Guangzhou city and built on the top floor of a middle-class residential building owned by the Times Property Company. The first section of the chapter examines how the real estate company and the creative

21 professionals play their roles in devising the museum plan, and how the museum is regulated by both the company and the state. It identifies a “customised” management team, and the team’s production culture, and examines the range of cultural intermediaries who have been involved in the organisational network and production. The sections that follow examine in detail the core practices of the cultural intermediaries engaged with the museum. Section Two explicates how the cultural intermediaries articulate the global forms and concepts of contemporary art through specific modes of address deployed in the core exhibitions and programs. Section Three discusses how these intermediaries endeavour to construct a regional cultural identity by using an art-historical narrative. Both sections demonstrate the role of cultural intermediaries in constructing a particular “public cultural sphere”, one which can mediate local-global and regional artistic interventions and cultural networks, and construct a public oriented to independent views and autonomous values.

However, the practices and critical propositions of the critical intermediaries remain only intentions or ideals if they are not actualised in social life. The final section of the chapter thus moves to examine the process through which the museum’s contents are consumed, by identifying a segment of educated youth who, it is argued, represent the majority of the museum’s visitors. This section analyses their cultural identification in relation to six different modes and sets out their positions in relation to the production of the museum. It discusses the extent to which the museum demonstrates its potency in shaping this educated youth constituency. Overall, the case study seeks to demonstrate how a private museum exercises its 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 museum presents a unique cultural circuit and a particular kind of cultural public sphere, independent of state-making activities, and relying on non- government organisations under the aegis of the private economy in China.

Chapter Seven is the case study of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, focusing on the “post-colonial” environment that affects the museum, which is shaped by

22 national, local and global forces, and colonial legacies. Using the concept of the museum circuit, I expound how this official museum is institutionally regulated, and how it has represented art in accordance with shifting curatorial interpretations, changing practices of collection development and art display extending from the colonial to the post-colonial period. I also examine how the museum’s publics orient themselves in the process of cultural consumption. In Section One of the Chapter, I outline the bureaucratic system and networks by which museum producers have been regulated in the post-colonial era of Hong Kong. It mainly highlights the important role of curatorial staff as the key mediators between the state and the public, but also identifies the network of organisations and actors that support the work of the curators and help maintain the museum’s aesthetic credibility and its cultural legitimacy. Over the years, the Hong Kong Museum of Art has built a comprehensive collection covering Chinese antiquities and historical pictures, Chinese fine art (including the Xubaizhai Collection of and calligraphy), and Hong Kong art. Thematic exhibitions of items from the permanent collections and visiting exhibitions of art treasures from the West and China make up the majority of the museum’s exhibitions. In Sections Two to Five, I identify the museum’s predominant art discourses and explicate how these discourses are represented in collection development, in exhibition interpretation, and curatorial and display strategies. I examine how historical painting collections, international blockbuster exhibitions, and cultural materials, and local artworks are organised, appropriated, and interpreted, as well as exploring the purposes they serve. The purpose of this section is to unveil how the government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region uses art and to examine the signification practices that are used to regulate the content and subject of cultural identity, and “feudalise” the public sphere.

As the museum’s public is never a unitary formation solely determined by the government, its visitors both appropriate strategies of museum consumption and resist them. The last section of the chapter will outline a varied demographical public and discuss their responses to the museum in the process of consuming its contents with reference to seven distinct socio-cultural orientations. In particular it examines the tension between the museum and its “counter-publics” in terms of

23 values and identities, and it addresses the contested social conditions in which the museum forms its cultural circuit.

The three case studies provide a detailed picture of the different frameworks of institutional knowledge and cultural meanings that can be found in 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 Chapter Eight, in addition to summarising the main findings of each chapter, I discuss the different modes of museum circuit they involve, the implications of the findings and the possible agendas for future research. Finally, I conclude with the key contributions and limitations of this research project.

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2

REVIEWING THE METHODOLOGIES OF CHINESE MUSEUM RESEARCH

This chapter presents a review of relevant academic literature, with the primary aim of exposing the methodological limitations of existing research on Chinese museums. As Chapter One has explained, the fundamental changes affecting the contexts in which museums in China operate, (especially the changes associated with recent tensions with other competitors and with new actors in a changing society and within the global arena) make it necessary to design a new methodology that can address the complex relationships and contexts in which Chinese museums are situated.

This chapter identifies the gaps in the academic analysis of museums in China. I draw from a range of international literature, placing particular emphasis on key scholarly works that have influenced museological theory and practice in both the West and China (including those in Hong Kong), while at the same time using Chinese-language scholarly literature to contextualise the research within a Chinese setting. My literature review concentrates on the theoretical approaches used in research on museums, the concept of the museum public, and the methodologies used in visitor research (both in mainland China and Hong Kong).

Section 2.1 specifically addresses the theoretical perspectives that have been adopted in museum research in both the West and China. It finds that the existing studies privilege political-economic forces over cultural forces, and neglect the possibility and efficacy of the autonomous politics generated within the cultural sphere — particularly the cultural politics associated with museum curators and other stakeholders who are directly involved in the processes of cultural production and circulation. In addition, the most important works in the literature on Chinese museums are limited to the examination of the structure and modes of cultural production, with limited consideration given to human agency and to the differences between the discursive practices in which the various actors engage. In addition, the existing scholarly works overlook the status of the museum as a locus for cultural

25 consumption, an important social aspect of what makes modern museums trustworthy public institutions.

Section 2.2 traces the development of the concept of the “public” in the West and China. Recognising that contemporary museums are public institutions, Chinese cultural studies scholars have advanced different propositions or statements for defining what museums stand for. However, these ideas are rarely empirically grounded. The perspectives in the existing research are generally limited to those of public relations or managerial museology. Little study has examined how the Habermasian concept of the public sphere applies to the Chinese museum field. Above all, the notion of the museum public as a homogeneous entity needs to be drastically revised.

Section 2.3 offers a review of visitor research and its place in Chinese museum contexts. With their strong practical orientation, visitor studies generally help institutions to evaluate their services and educational programs by examining visitors’ experiences with particular works of art, objects or exhibitions. Studies of Chinese museum visitors are generally oriented to questionnaire-based methodologies and quantitative data analysis used for increasing visitors’ level of satisfaction. Qualitative research that primarily focuses on visitors’ experiences of or communications about art or objects is unable to theorise the relation between museums and visitors, and evaluate the agency of visitors in the social or cultural domains. To address these gaps in the literature, further research is necessary; such research should attempt an in-depth empirical probing of the nature of visitors’ reception of what they encounter, their differences in museum experience, and the agency that they exercise in cultural consumption practices.

Based on my review of the literature, I critically evaluate the conventional research framework that obscures the plural nature of the structure and modes of cultural production, over-emphasises the state and market factors as determinates of cultural production, and limits the study of reception as well as restricting the concept of the museum public to one determined by instrumental or practical functions. The existing research fails to locate museums in a complex web of

26 cultural and social fabrication; it also assumes that the “political” operates within a stable culture that is upheld by a paternalistic state and capitalist economic system. The role of human agency, particularly the role of social and cultural actors and their signifying practices as well as the notion of a differentiated public have all been neglected in the discourses connected with contemporary museums in China. My review of the literature calls for a new method that can provide a broad approach to enable us to conceptualise 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.

2.1 Museum Research: Theoretical Perspectives

This section reviews some of the major theoretical perspectives used in museum research in both the West and China. I begin with a brief review of museum studies discourse in the West. Although western museums in their modern form appeared when royal collections were transformed into public institutions in the late eighteenth century, we can argue that a critical review of the museum’s traditional practice and its role in society only came in the late 1980s when the New museology10 was invented (Vergo 1989). Euro-American scholarship that followed on after the establishment of the new museology has deployed different perspectives to critically review the modern manifestations of the public museum as a social institution.

Drawing in part on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality and on work on civilising processes, some scholars have seen the museum as a political vehicle for disciplinary manipulation of a purportedly unsophisticated public enjoined to

10 Peter Vergo (1989) asserts that the old museology is too much about museum practices, the administration of museums, theoretical methods and techniques of conservation, or the museums’ success in terms of money or numbers of visitors. He proposes a new museology that will radically re-examine the role of museums within society, and reflect on the purposes of museums. Scholars have different interpretations of what the New Museology entails. For instance, Stam (2005) states that new museology is very much concerned with the context of museums, i.e. the relations of museums to the social, political and economic environment. Tony Bennett (1995) views the New Museology in terms of power. He emphasises the political aspects of museums and their “messages of power” which aim at exerting powers of governance over visitors.

27 aspire to higher levels of moral conduct and to more civilised behaviour (Bennett 1995). Philosophical and anthropological studies see the civic ritual structures and spaces in the art museum as manifestation of the political virtue of the state (Duncan 1995). From a historical and critical perspective, the symbolic role of the Louvre in the embodiment of a regenerated equalitarian society is viewed as a showcase of the French Republican culture, especially in the early years after the French Revolution (McClellan 1994). Studies using the perspectives of cultural anthropology and ethnography question the hegemonic strategies of cultural elites or states in the museum that conceal the public’s individual choices and negotiations and (mis)represent their cultures by using particular objects or displays (Karp, Kreamer and Lavine 1992; Karp and Lavine 1991). The sociological-empirical approach was adopted in the late 1960s and 1970s to examine who visited art museums in Europe and why, and to reveal the art museum’s public as socially distinct (Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu, Darbel and Schnapper 1991). The sociological approach provoked debate around issues of class-based culture and homogenous taste (Prior 2005). Such studies have generally focused on questioning the links between the museum and the state, or on the issue of access to culture in society. They have contributed to a discursive shift in the understanding of museum authority and the politics underlying public museums and their operations.

Issues of social inclusivity and cultural diversity have been formulated and included in the museum agenda in many different ways (Hooper-Greenhill 1997; Merriman 1993; Sandell 2002; Watson 2007). A body of significant literature has discussed the museum’s social role in supporting activist challenges to injustice and racism (Golding 2009; Golding and Modest 2013), abuses of human rights around the world (Sandell 2012), or debates over “hot” topics such as homosexuality, sexuality, terrorism, drugs and climate change (Cameron and Kelly 2010). In addition, “curatorial activism” has been added to the museum agenda, encouraging curators to take up their “ethical responsibility” (Reilly 2011) and engage in representing the history of social movements that are engaged with both national cultures and universal values (Message 2014). This “Critical Museology” has overridden New Museology to produce and sustain an ongoing critical and dialectical dialogue that can engender an attitude of constant self-reflexivity toward

28 museum practices and their wider constituencies on the part of those involved with museums and their work (Shelton 2013, 18).

These studies and their critical propositions have created a broad challenge to the Euro-American museum theory and practice in the period from the late twentieth century to the present. They have contributed to Anthony Shelton’s (2013, 7) idea of Critical Museology as an essential intellectual tool, not only for better understanding museums and their local and global conditions, but also for inventing “new exhibition genres, telling untold stories, rearticulating knowledge systems for public dissemination, reimagining organisational and management structures, and repurposing museums and galleries in line with multicultural and intercultural states and communities”.

In China, museology began to develop in the 1930s when a new generation of Chinese scholars returned from the West and brought with them knowledge of fields including natural science, sociology, archaeology, and anthropology. Because of the strong desire for social transformation in the Republican era, emphasis was placed on the role of museum studies in modernising the nation. After the Communist Party came to power in 1949, the museum system was influenced by the Soviet model with a strong emphasis on the political mission of museums for serving the proletarian masses. (In Hong Kong, which was a British colony at this time, museology followed a different trajectory, being heavily influenced by the museum studies approaches in Britain, the United States, and other non-communist industrial societies.) Since the 1980s, China’s museology has been concerned mainly with the technical issues of conservation and the preservation of cultural heritage. However, in recent years there has been a stronger focus on the cultural role of museums (Su 1993; Zhao 1993). Museums are increasingly regarded as a subject of social scientific investigation.

Recent significant literature on Chinese museums has adopted comprehensive historical, anthropological, political science, and museum studies approaches. These studies focus on the relations between the museum and the state or on the dominant powerful actors who own or have founded museums. Such studies have contributed

29 to a new understanding of museum authority in relation to the state and the economy in China. On the one hand, with strong emphasis on the impacts or effects of the state or market capital on the formation of culture, these scholarly works privilege political-economic forces over cultural forces and neglect the possibility and efficacy of politics generated from within the cultural sphere — particularly from museum curators and other stakeholders who are directly involved in cultural production and circulation processes. On the other hand, the studies in this field focus on the structures and modes of production, with a focus on the finished product or museum “text”. As Sharon Macdonald (2006, 5) has pointed out, the weakness of the museum-as-text approach is that it suggests that there is a neat fit between cultural production, text and consumption. It assumes that there is conscious manipulation by those involved in creating exhibitions, and a public that is passive and unitary. It ignores the often conflicting or contradictory agendas involved in exhibition-making, the “messiness” of the process itself, and the interpretative agency exercised by visitors. Both the political economy and museum- as-text approaches ignore the agency of subjects, even within the structures of the state or dominant power, as well as failing to acknowledge the contradictions that beset cultural governance in contemporary China. In addition, they neglect the public or social role of museums. Visitors are assumed to be passive subjects, or a unified and manipulated public. Questions of social representation or equity in cultural access have not been discussed as much as in the West. To illustrate the above issues, in the following section I review four leading books and highlight their gaps in the analysis of Chinese museums.

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, drawing on extensive archival research and anthropological fieldwork, as well as her experience of working as a museum curator in mainland China in the late 1980s. Her study is divided into four major parts. It first reveals how Chinese intellectuals, Western social elites, Chinese political parties and foreign missionaries all played a role in forming museums in China from 1840 to 1949, with each constituency pursuing its own economic, religious, political, and ideological purposes. This section is followed by an

30 examination of the museums under the communist regime between 1949 and 1979, including the legislative and structural management changes affecting Chinese museums in the Mao era. Thirdly, Lu’s book traces the developments occurring after China’s adoption of the Open Door Policy in 1978, focusing 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. It 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 globalisation, the policy of “free museum admission”, and visitor studies.

Overall, Lu’s central concern is to present how throughout China’s modern history museums have played key roles in helping the powerful to govern the powerless, and how Chinese museums reflect broader social and cultural changes that differ from those affecting museum discourse in the West. 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. “First, many visitors are members of factories, schools, public and private companies, etc., and their visits to museums are organised by the organisation 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.” (Lu 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 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

31 about why they visit museums. When Lu discusses the relation between the museum and the general public, her analysis is based on her evaluation of 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 away 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. Moreover, her anthropological studies are focused on museums in rural regions. We are still far from developing a detailed and critical picture of how museums and their publics have evolved in cities.

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 through observation of museum exhibitions, discourse analysis of displays, and interviews with museum academics and professionals. By investigating how objects are contextualised, displayed, and interpreted in museums, Varutti uncovers the narrative shift from political indoctrination to cultural nationalism that tends to extol Chinese culture, industry, technology and science, and emphasise 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. Varutti also discusses the historical development of Chinese museums from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, particularly focusing on Chinese approaches to cultural heritage connected with the cultural importance of inscriptions and emphasising the historical linkages between imperial collections and political authority. She provides 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. The section on museum audiences contains a brief commentary on audience

32 development in Shanghai and , and a small-scale survey of museum audiences and their profiles, preferences, and expectations, which was conducted in three museums in Shanghai in 2006.

Overall, by drawing theoretical references from museum studies and social anthropology, Varutti’s study is primarily concerned with the cultural and historical contextualisation of the museums in China, and focuses on national museums and museums relating to ethnic minorities. In her analysis, museum displays and practices determine the values and meanings of objects and affect viewers’ perceptions and interpretations. However, there is no detailed consideration of how the objects and the museum as a whole are perceived by visitors. How the state constructs the concept of the museum remains the central concern of her study.

A nuanced analysis of exhibition culture in China is provided by Kirk Denton (2014a). In his book, Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China, Denton attempts to capture the multifaceted nature of museums in postsocialist China over the past three decades. His focus remains on two major political aspects of Chinese museums: (1) the role of the party/state in promoting museums and shaping their construction of the past and (2) the historical narratives in museum exhibits and the way that their political and ideological meanings are intertwined with China’s changing social and economic situation. 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, with each type of museum presenting a unique representation of its subject matter. In addition, he discusses “red tourism”, which is a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a form of patriotic education designed to revitalise revolutionary history. He also discusses the advent of urban planning exhibition halls, which project both utopian visions of China’s future and new conceptions of the past.

Overall, Denton presents the ways state museums are responding to the social, technological, and cultural transformation of China in recent decades, in particular how they have led to a much more heterogeneous culture and polity following the

33 implementation of the post-Mao modernisation program in the late 1970s and 1980s, a trend that was further deepened by the advent of globalisation and market reforms in the 1990s. Instead of re-emphasising the idea of China as a hegemonic and monolithic state, or that state’s absolute control over cultural industries and historical memory, he explains the interplay between different ideological forces, focusing on the evolving legacy 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. Moreover, he attempts to re-examine the role of the state in the state/people equation by suggesting a more fluid interaction between the two sides. He introduces the multiple 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. Nevertheless, Denton’s concern is primarily with the ideological representations that state museums are attempting to convey to their visitors. This recent scholarship has put the state’s representational actions in a new light, but its scope is still limited to the transmission of ideologies upheld by the current state.

In her book, Between State and Market: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Post- Mao Era, Jane Debevoise (2014, 270) 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 from 1978 to 1993. 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 organising of art exhibitions or sales overseas, have decentralised 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 reflects how the state art museum discourse has been responsive to the dramatic economic changes that China has experienced throughout the period from the late 1970s to the 1990s.

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In Hong Kong, the research on local museums privileges the examination of cultural production and overlooks the element of consumption. It also lacks an incisive study of the local museum practices. Studies are primarily concerned with national narratives and issue of cultural identity in official museums. Edward Vickers (2007) has noted a significant narrative shift from socialism to patriotism in the history museums and memorials in Beijing, Shanghai and , and juxtaposed the cases 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 (HKMH), he argues that the totalising official version of Chinese identity is contested in Hong Kong. Stokes- Rees (2011, 340) conducts a more thorough analysis of the permanent exhibitions in HKMH, and demonstrates its efforts in constructing a national narrative for postcolonial Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong Museum of Art is regarded as a site where Hong Kong’s cultural hybridity can be observed. As Man Kit-wah (2010, 90) argues, its 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 post-colonial spaces and constitute “ever changing internal competitions of cultural identities”. However, as art historian Joan Kee (2003, 91 & 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, we should indeed closely examine the actual practices of the museum, specifically how and why it inscribes particular cultural meanings and identities.

To conclude, this section has reviewed the key theoretical arguments in museum research both in the West and China. It finds that the major research works on Chinese museums are chiefly concerned with political and economic imperatives and their impacts on officially-sponsored cultural representation. These works generally contribute to the state/government or market approach to museology, and

35 neglect the power and impact of the politics generated in the cultural sphere itself. The main scholarly studies are limited to an examination of the structure and modes of cultural production, with limited consideration given to human agency and to the different discursive practices of the various actors involved. The existing academic works underestimate the actual work of curators and present visitors as passive or powerless subjects. Thus the agency of individuals in contemporary museums is overlooked. Only a limited quantity of research is undertaken that seeks to explore how this agency may be able to shape the state and the market as well as to create local social and cultural changes.

2.2 Museums and Concepts of the Public

This section traces the historical trajectories of the formation of the museum public as an entity in both the West and China, and reviews how concepts of the “public” have evolved. In mainland China, museums are no longer presented as serving the “proletarian masses” — the politicised, homogeneous public imagined in the rhetoric of the Maoist period. However, existing research on the museum public in China is still limited to a public relations perspective or to the epistemological position taken by operational museology with its strong focus on practical, organisational and managerial issues. The emerging view of the public museum having the characteristic of “ ren wei ben” (people-oriented), or as being a potential public space/sphere deserves further conceptualisation and empirical research. There is still room for scholars to examine whether or not Chinese museums are able to address the democratic politics of a bourgeois public sphere, or if a new kind of socio-cultural politics is taking shape in China.

In the late 1980s, the museum public became an important subject for museological enquiry in the Euro-American context. Weil (2002) gives an historical overview of the evolving relationship between the museum and the public from the nineteenth century to the beginning of the early twentieth-first century, studying the shift in the museum’s position from one of superiority to one of engagement with the community. In addition to offering a sophisticated review of the public and how it is invoked in the Western museum context, the work of Barrett (2010) traces out

36 how the museum public has been historically constituted in the transition from housing royal collections to being a cultural institution. Because of different engagements with the state, museums developed competing notions of the public. Many other studies contribute to a re-examination of what the museum means as a public institution, mainly through the analysis of the political, social and cultural significance of museums, with some scholars calling upon museums “to reflect inclusivity and diversity, in contrast to the historical singularity of ‘the public”’ (Barrett 2010, 3).

Barrett 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” (Barrett 2010, 81). Habermas’s 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). This concept has had broad influence in discourse about the social role of museums. Many of the studies on social inclusivity and cultural diversity in the museum mentioned in the previous section are undertaken in the context of democracies, democratic culture, or state policies on multiculturalism or cultural diversity developed in response to decolonisation and the migration of people across national and cultural boundaries. 11 The policy of cultural diversity in the United Kingdom and the policy of multiculturalism in Australia both appeared in the late twentieth century. In other words, the studies perceive the potential of the museum for supporting social or political activism, and are oriented to a democratic socio-political or policy-oriented context, which they seek to foster. The scholarly literature on multiculturalism in museums offers a way to conceptualise contemporary museums as institutional forms with a place in public culture based on new forms of sociality. However, it might be difficult to directly

11 Radhakrisnan (2003) examines the ethico-political underpinnings of the mainstream advocacy of the principle of multiculturalism. He points out that multiculturalism is increasingly perceived as a crisis appearing in the aftermath of decolonisation. The mainstream culture is being forced to experience this crisis by adopting an opportune and instrumental strategy to contain multiculturalism from the point of view of the dominant regime. He posits that if colonialism in its heyday instituted a hegemonic Us-Them divide, in the postcolonial condition “they” are “here” with “us” in the very heart of metropolitan contemporaneity. Because of the lack of a radical decentering or a critical transcendence of the binary politics of Us-Them and Self-Other, the mainstream discourse on multiculturalism remains captive to the agendas of the dominant regime.

37 address this discourse in a different cultural context (such as China) where the notion of the museum “public” is inevitably different (Barrett 2010, 172). (Hong Kong, currently a semi-democratic system, is a complex case, as its museum discourses are partly influenced by those from outside the Chinese socialist museum system, so Hong Kong discourses about the museum public differ from those produced in other parts of China.)

Nonetheless, Barrett’s (2010) urge for the museum to engage more deeply with the concept of the public is important. As she points out, the term “public” is often used quite loosely in a museum context. It can be used to describe a generalised group of people, or to refer to an audience, a community or certain visitor or non- visitor interest groups. In the western museum context, the concept of the public has mingled with the notions of the visitor, the audience, the community, and the consumer. The ideas behind these terms can be briefly explained as follows:

The term visitor first appeared in the 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, 155-58). A visitor now literally means a person visiting someone or some place, especially socially or as a tourist.12 We can observe that the contemporary appropriation of the term is associated with a sense of place, institution and people.

12 See online Oxford Dictionaries, http:// en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/visitor, accessed July 2, 2014.

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Nowadays, the term visitor is generally used to refer to those who visit museums or other sites, while the term audience refers to the assembled spectators or listeners at a public event such as a play, film or concert. In constructive theories that seek to move towards pluralist perspectives on the museum, “visitor” has been understood to connote active meaning-makers who are divided into different segments (Hooper-Greenhill, 1994 & 1997). The meaning of “audience” has developed in media and communication studies, from a term denoting an undifferentiated mass being passively manipulated by the media to an idea of an active maker of the meaning of cultural texts in the active audience theory of Hall ([1973]1980), including the notion of a virtual audience that might not be necessarily unified in a single place (Sloane 2001). Communication theories have been adopted to create new communication models for the museum, and have legitimised the use of the term audience in museum literature (Hooper-Greenhill 1995). Moreover, influenced by New Museology, Barrett (2010, 4) points out that “the public is identified as ‘audience’ or ‘visitors’ considered as active subjects involved in the making of the museum’s purpose”. However, despite these differences, the terms visitors and audience have both been widely used and are considered interchangeable in the English-language museum literature.

The term, “communities”, when it is used to designate an issue of museological concern, is used neither to refer to a target audience nor to the general public. With the term community, individuals either conceptualise identity (Kavanagh 1990) or pursue a renegotiation of the politics of cultural representation (Golding 2009; Golding and Modest 2013; Karp, Kreamer and Lavine 1992; Peers and Brown 2003; Simpson 1996; Guntarik 2010). Communities become a subject to be examined in terms of their knowledge and their power relationships with the museum (Watson 2007). They certainly offer various useful ways to conceptualise the relationship between visitors and museums. Following the theory of “interpretive communities” advanced by Stanley Fish (1980), we can argue that meaning does not reside in the artefacts, but emerges in an interpretive community in which people take part and where they share similar ways for reading and interpreting objects (Lindlof, 1988). Hooper-Greenhill (1999) further extends the concept to demonstrate how collective public meanings depend on interpretative communities, which have common

39 frameworks of intelligibility, shared interpretative repertoires, knowledge and intellectual skills through which they formulate their interpretative strategies before their interpretative acts. Another concept of communities — that of “imagined communities” coined by Benedict Anderson (1991) — can be used to explain how museums enable us to imagine the nation and its collectivity. This concept underlies the idea of a “Chinese imagined community” as this is shown in the analysis of museums of ethnic minorities in China (Varutti 2014).

Lastly, the term “consumers” was initially derived from consumption theories in economics, but the notion of cultural consumption has had great influence on museum practice. The idea of cultural consumption refers in part to the processes of cultural institutions assigning meanings to artworks and events, and to the processes of consumers making sense of cultural products to their own ends. Cultural theorists (e.g. Douglas and Isherwood 1996; Lizardo and Skiles 2008; Storey 1999) also argue that the reciprocal relationship between cultural institutions and consumers contributes to the production of culture by creating a dynamic repository of meanings. In other words, museum consumers are not simply the users or recipients of products or services, but are also meaning producers actively involved in the making of culture.

In modern Chinese, the idea of the public is commonly denoted by the noun “gōng zhòng” or the adjective “gōng gòng”. The character, “gōng” covers a range of meanings including public, state-owned or collective, common, general, equitable, impartial, fair, public affairs, official business, “father-in-law” and making something public; “zhòng” means many, numerous, crowd and multitude; “gòng” means sharing, joint, together, common and communists.13 As noted, it was not until the turn of the twenty-first century that the category of the public emerged as a topic of museological enquiry in mainland China. (Hong Kong had followed a separate path from that of Chinese mainland since 1842. However, there is limited research on the museum public.) Some research that examines the public nature of either history or art museums can be found (e.g. Cheng 2007; Chen

13 See Han-Ying cidian (A Chinese-English dictionary). 1988. Beijing: Shangwu yinshu guan, 234 & 910.

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2006),14 but these works rarely provide any theoretical suggestions or empirical data on the construction of the public in Chinese museums. Instead, China-produced articles15 exhibit a tendency towards discussing the public museum in terms of the idea of “yi ren wei ben” (people-oriented), and as a charitable cultural institution intended for the public good. 16 In particular, museums have been considered important public spaces, reflecting public consciousness about cultural democracy and contributing to the development of a civil society (Yang 1999). We can argue however that such statements or propositions about Chinese museums are not empirically grounded. Overall, we can observe that in the existing research on the idea of the museum public, the twin perspectives of managerial-oriented public relations and the Habermasian public space are both significant, with each of them addressing the normative roles of museums in their own way; these concepts have been applied very unevenly in the existing research on museums in mainland China.

The adoption of a public relations perspective in the study of the museum public in mainland China (An 1997; Peng 1999) has reflected a local Chinese understanding of public relations in museums. A notable example is 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 public, external and secondary to the museum management group, and classified according to his/her relationship, importance, or attitude to the museum.

14 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. 15 My conclusions are based on my search in the main museum journals (online version) from China. Based on the China Academic Literature Database, fewer than twenty articles concerning gonggong xing (the public nature of museums) are available. Each of the two main Chinese museum journals, Chinese Museum and Museum Research, contains fewer than twenty articles dedicated to the issue of the public or audience. In the National Art Museum of China Journal around sixty related articles are available. 16 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 museum streams. See Cao (2008), or Liu and Wu (2012).

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These classifications have yielded a dichotomised 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.

A 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 (meaning “audience” — literally, “the assembly of viewers”), 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. It has been argued that the public relations approach is oriented to the “empirical-administrative tradition” (Dozier and Lauzen 2000, 8). I contend that this organisational approach is not particularly suitable for addressing the social and cultural effect of an institution. Studies of private museums are also generally concerned with museum management, organisation mechanisms, professional development, state policies and legal systems (e.g. Guo 2003; Ran 2003; Zhu 2003). Research of this type focuses on management modes and exhibition and curatorial systems (e.g. Bai 2016; Gao 2014; Gong 2013; Li 2013; Ma 2010; Zhao 2010). These studies are restricted to an instrumental understanding of museums with a lack of critical analysis of the museum and its institutional context.

Wang Huangsheng’s recent book, Zuowei zhishi shengchan de meishuguan (New Experience on Art Museum [I] Art Museum as Knowledge Production) (2012) is one of the few works that presents Chinese critical thinking about museum practice. Wang considers art museums as sites for the “production of knowledge”,

42 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. 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 H. 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 conceptualise contemporary art museums as institutional forms that can potentially support the political democratisation 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. His study attempts to reconsider the link between the museum and the state and to question the issue of access to culture in society. 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. The transformation of art museums should not be overlooked, especially considering the renegotiation of the public discourse of the Guangzhou Museum of Art and the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing.

Overall, this section has illuminated how scholars in the West and China have approached and reflected on the concept of the museum public. China has started to propose a relationship between museums and society, but existing research is confined to the concept of the museum public and to serving an instrumental or managerial function. The Habermasian type of public sphere which stresses rational

43 communication by a bourgeois class with the aim of advancing the cause of democracy has been frequently restressed in western museum scholarship. Chinese scholars have generally used the concept to confirm the role of the museum as a producer of knowledge through the exchange of ideas. However, how this concept manifests itself in China’s museum context is still generally underexplored. Even so, the idea of a differentiated museum public has emerged in both China and the West and has changed the notion of visitors, as will be explicated in the following section.

2.3 Visitor Research Methods

Visitors have been a subject of investigation17 in western museology since the late 1980s, when museums in Europe and the United States were facing various challenges. For instance, reduced government funding has increased pressure on museums to justify their public value as well as forcing them to try to attract diverse audiences (Goulding 2000; Pitman 1999). In addition, “there have been increased demands from outside stakeholders, including private and public funders, who require logic models, evaluation plans and measures of audience impact before providing support” (Falk and Dierking 2013, 8), accompanied by competition from a range of arts organisations (Kotler, Kotler and Kotler 2008). Other challenges may be presented by social changes in demographics, lifestyle and leisure activities, and communications and technology (Casey and Wehner 2002; MacDonald and Fyfe 1996), or be influenced by democratic philosophies, greater public scrutiny and calls for accountability, heightened marketing awareness, and new developments for broader access, effective educational opportunities and communicative competence (Hooper-Greenhill 1997). Facing a decrease in the number of visitors, museums have been urged to “stay relevant, attract and retain visitors, and secure their position as important cultural institutions” (Everett and Barrett 2009, 2-3).

In response to these challenges, attempts have been made to invent new approaches and methods in museum practice,18 and to put forward new management

17 The earliest studies of visitors in western countries can be dated back to 1884 when Higgins classified the visitors of the Liverpool Museum. In 1916, Benjamin Gilman studied the behavior of visitors in Boston Museum. 18 For example, studies on the interpretations of exhibitions (Hooper-Greenhill 2000), objects (Pearce

44 models to address the issue of museum sustainability.19 These studies focus on the institutional critique of management and production, particularly the interpretation, presentation and communication of museum materials. Studies with a strong focus on visitors emerged in the context of these challenges. These works seek an in-depth understanding of visitors by calling for a more complete view of museum visitors’ experiences (Dierking, Falk and Ellenbogen 2005; Goulding, 2000; Silverman and O’Neill 2004).

A plethora of visitor studies has been developed by anthropologists, sociologists, museum scholars, educators, psychologists and marketing consultants. However, several factors contribute to the gaps in our understanding of visitors’ museum experience. First, much of the existing research employs quantitative survey techniques to collect data on demographic profiles and audience levels of satisfaction and interest (Black 2005; Komatsuka 2007; Liu 2011; Simon 2010), and to trace the frequency of returning visits (McManus 2001; Verdaasdonk et al. 1996). However, the diversity of the audience is lost when a broad, cross-population picture of museum visiting is drawn up (Hooper-Greenhill 1997). Second, museums are used to conducting front-end, formative, and summative evaluation studies and to measure the effectiveness of specific exhibitions and programs (Goulding 2000; Roberts 1997) 20 . Visitors’ responses are thus limited to a specific gallery or exhibition. Together with the outcomes of the quantitative surveys, in terms of its methodology much of the evaluation that is related to museums conforms to the pattern of “reducing complexity” and seeking causality (Allen et al. 2007). Similarly, in cases of exploring the specific visitor experiences of works of art (e.g. Hooper- Greenhill and Moussouri 2001; Housen 2007; Leinhardt, Crowley and Knutson 2002; Linko 2003) these studies are reduced to an aesthetic object-centred experience, emphasising a physical correspondence structure between the subject

1994), and architecture and displays (MacLeod 2005; Macleod, Hourston Hanks and Hale 2012). 19 For instance, studies using the private business model (Falk and Sheppard 2006) and public value approach in management, and planning, programming and relationship building (Scott 2013). 20 According to Falk (2013, 306), several professional associations have been created to support the skills and capabilities of museum evaluators. These professional bodies include the Visitor Studies Association (U.S.), Committee on Research and Evaluation (U.S.), American Association of Museums, and Special Interest groups of Museums Association (UK), Museums Australia, European Science Centre Association, American Evaluation Association and Asian Science Centre Association. They are membership-based national or international organisations of museums or museum professionals.

45 and the object. Third, some studies focus on the specific needs of a particular target group, such as families and older adults (Elottol and Bahauddin 2011; McManus 1994; Müller 2001; Watson, Dodd and Jones 2007). Fourth, much research focuses primarily on cognitive engagement and learning outcomes and on learning strategies in relation to museum interpretation (Hein 1998; Hein and Alexander 1998; Hooper-Greenhill 2004; Kelly 2007; Kesner 2006). Most of these studies are limited in scope and tend to address a particular purpose or function of the museum.

In Chinese, “visitor”, like “public”, is denoted by the term “guanzhong”, meaning spectator, viewer or audience.21 Studies of visitors in the English literature on Chinese museums are limited. However, in various Chinese studies, the visitor has recently become a subject of investigation, including some studies targeted at museum tourism or “lüyouzhe” (literally meaning casual travellers or tourists) (e.g. Hei 2013; Mo 2012). “Guanzhong” is a modern word. Its first character, “guan”, according to the earliest modern encyclopedic Chinese dictionary (Ciyuan),22 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. 23 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. I am aware of the possible influence of differences in linguistic and cultural traditions between the West and China in the interpretation of museum visitors. However, regardless of the terminological nuances, in this thesis, 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, while “audience” specifically refers to those who interact with objects or artworks.

21 See Han-Ying cidian (A Chinese-English dictionary). 1988. Beijing: Shangwu yinshu guan, 249. 22 See Ci yuan. zhengxu bian heding ben (Chinese phrase dictionary: full revised edition). 1947. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshu guan (Commercial Press). 23 The Yijing, also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes, is one of the oldest Chinese classic texts. The text has been interpreted as a system of cosmology and philosophy centering on “the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change.” See Ludden (2012, 234).

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We have noted that in several studies 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”, which, as outlined above, can be translated as spectators, viewers, or audience. A quantitative study of teenagers’ understanding of a natural science exhibition in a , 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 specialising in museums from the History Department of Nankai University.) In recent times, the demand for visitor surveys has increased. Since its implementation in 2008, the free admission policy triggered a steady increase in the number of visitors to museums across the country.24 The vast number of questionnaire surveys that were produced in response had a strong focus on finding out “the demographic composition of visitors, their ability to understand the exhibitions, and their feedback and comments” (Lu 2014, 210). Much of this literature involves quantitative surveys of visitor demographics, motivations and levels of satisfaction for individual museums (e.g., Hei 2013; Chen and Ryan 2012; Mo 2012; Wang T. 2012). 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 (e.g. Liu 2009); other work seeks to synthesise the analyses of visitor data from several museums across the country (e.g. Wang 2005). 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, large-scale cultural surveys are common, commencing with the Hong Kong Arts Development Strategy Report (Hong Kong Policy Research Institute 1992) which was followed by the Hong Kong Arts and Cultural Indicators

24 Generally, the number of “spectators” has increased more than double from 283 million in 2008 to 850 million in 2016. Data adapted from National Bureau of Statistics of China, http://data.stats.gov.cn/english/easyquery.htm?cn=C01, accessed January 15, 2016.

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Research Report (International Intelligence On Culture 2005), and the Hong Kong Annual Arts Survey which has been bi-annually conducted since 2008 by the Arts Development Council, a statutory arts body set up by the Government. The studies are limited to providing statistics on areas like arts creation, arts spending, attendance, box office records and the presenters of programmes, exhibitions and screening events, and these have mainly helped to formulate government policies and measures. In addition to these, every two years the public museums jointly commission marketing consultants to conduct quantitative surveys of visitors’ level of satisfaction towards various aspects of museum services and facilities. 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).

Overall, with their strong practical orientation, the Western and Chinese study findings both help institutions reconsider what they should offer their visitors, and ultimately to develop new services and educational programmes to facilitate the experience of works of art, an exhibition, or the museum by general audiences or special groups. However, the Western and Chinese contexts for developing visitor studies are different. In China, because of support from the government, funding is not a pressing factor obliging museum personnel to do research to justify the value of museums. The increasing number of visitors indicates that there is a growing public demand for museums. In addition, studies of Chinese museum visitors that emerged since the 1980s have been largely oriented to the use of questionnaire techniques and quantitative data analysis for updating knowledge of the visitors’ level of satisfaction. Qualitative research that largely focuses on visitors’ experience or interaction with art or other objects fails to theorise the relation between museum and visitors, and it does not evaluate the possible agency of visitors. An in-depth probing of the nature of the visitors’ reception of what they experience, their

48 differences from each other, and their agency in acts of cultural consumption is still lacking.

Based on the above review of the literature, 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 re-examine the notion of “visitors”. The study of visitors should give greater account of the visitors’ interpretative agency, not only in terms of their interaction with an object or exhibition, but also in terms of how they evaluate their own experiences and negotiate their cultural orientations. Instead of viewing the museum as a tool or an indicator for explicating the changing state and market relationship, future studies should consider the role of new actors and publics in producing differences and tension in signification, and for creating different kinds of cultural politics. A new theoretical framework will be proposed in the next chapter to examine the museum as a process. It examines the place of the museum not only in China’s context of political-economic transitions, but also in relation to socio-cultural processes in which different actors and diversified publics can exercise agency in the discursive construction of China’s museums.

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3

LOCATING THE MUSEUM CIRCUIT

This chapter presents a multi-dimensional framework to study the socio-cultural forces and actions that construct the museum. I use a refined version of the concept of the “museum circuit” as a constructivist model for examining the complex processes and relationships in which museums are situated. The model primarily suggests that, in assessing the impact of the museum on society and culture, we need to unpack its discursive elements by examining how the museum and its contents are regulated, represented, produced, consumed and identified. The model will be used to examine three art museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. The three museums are “strategic research sites” (Merton 1987) that can be used for challenging the symbolic boundaries of museums that are predetermined by nationalist and economic policy agendas, and for addressing the different cultural institutional dynamics that are at play in the region. Dawning on “juxtapositional comparison”, the study of these three museums enables us to obtain interesting and comparable results on the modes of their museum circuits, and the agencies of different actors. Taken together, these three examples permit us to interrogate the institutional limits on the state’s nationalist and economic policy agendas, to tease out the tensions and differences in the signifying practices used in the museums, and to examine how different actors, including cultural intermediaries and visitors, negotiate their place in and contribute to the discourses and practices of contemporary museums.

This chapter is divided into two sections. The first section begins by introducing the theoretical construct of the “circuit of culture”, emphasising the advantages of adopting this “circuit of culture” model for studying museums in China. Secondly, it introduces the concept of the “museum circuit”, which is a refinement of the “cultural circuit” model. The circuit concept moves us away from the construction of political and ideological meanings as linear phenomena, avoids the over- determination of museum production and representation, and challenges conceptions of “audience” as a passive and undifferentiated entity. The circuit concept can be

50 used to address the specificity of a particular museum context, examining the multiple, interlinking processes by which agents articulate claims to meaning and those through which audiences exercise their communicative powers. The circuit model allows for a deeper understanding of how the museum is institutionally regulated, how it produces and articulates cultural representation, and how the modes of cultural consumption of which its visitors partake are affected by their experience of the museum.

The second section of this chapter applies the “museum circuit” paradigm to the largely underexplored yet significant field of art museums in China. Case studies focus on three different kinds of art museums that reflect broader cultural institutional dynamics with regards to regulation, production, and consumption that affect Chinese museums. The He Xiangning Art in Shenzhen represents new cultural processes unfolding in China in national-level institutions. It stimulates us to examine the national context that arose in the 1990s, with the emergence of a contingent state, academic cultural sphere, and middle-class museum public. The Times Museum in Guangzhou is a product of the local private economy and functions as a source of cultural capital accumulated from both local and global forces. It illuminates the roles of a private company and creative and critical intermediaries, and highlights the issue of social representation and the engagement of different publics. The Hong Kong Museum of Art is run by the local government and is unique in representing the intersection between post-colonial history and national, local, and global cultural and economic capital. The museum offers a perspective for exploring the relations between local and national, and the cultural condition of a global city within hierarchical world system. Taken together, these three museums demonstrate the complex interaction between national, local, and global forces, the legacy of history, and the interplay of politics, economy, culture, and society. Though each has its distinctive own context, they are read together by the method of “juxtapositional comparison”. Data for the research was collected by content analysis of exhibition and media texts and through ethnographic research, including field observation and interviews with curators of and visitors to the museums.

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3.1 Theoretical Framework: The Museum Circuit

This section proposes a theoretical framework for contextualising China’s museums in terms of a cultural circuit. By questioning conventional museum research frameworks, which only emphasise the structure and modes of production and neglect the role of human agency in the discursive construction of contemporary Chinese 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. To fill this research gap and to articulate the core trajectories of the museums within their socio-cultural environment, I have developed in this chapter a “museum circuit” (circuit) model, based on the theoretical model of the “circuit of culture” developed by British cultural theorists in the late 1990s, and supplemented by the concept of “cultural intermediaries” and by the examination of visitors’ interpretations of what they experience.

The “circuit of culture” concept 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” 25 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 emphasises 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. As shown in the Figure II diagram, there are five major processes, namely production, consumption, identity,

25 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).

52 regulation, and representation, and they relate to and co-construct each other in the circuit.

Figure II: The Circuit of Culture (source: Hall 1997, 1)

“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 organisation as well as to the ways in which practices or production are 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 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 post-modern 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).

Consumption can be considered from three perspectives: the production of consumption, where production and consumption are linked; consumption as socio- cultural differentiation, which involves distinguishing between the diverse meanings attached to a cultural text or artefact; and consumption as appropriation and

53 resistance, which relates to how objects and texts are made meaningful in the process of consumption, as consumers/users accept or reject the meanings given to texts and objects by those who produce and distribute them (du Gay 1997, 86-109). Meanings derived from the production and consumption processes give us a sense of our own identity. “Identity” refers to our sense of who we are, with whom we belong, and from whom we differ. Identities are never fixed, individual essences but are multiple, evolving, and developing entities that derive from culturally constructed meanings. In social terms, they exist in all social networks, from the state or national level to the levels of the organisation and the public; identities are shaped by subjective and socially developed constructs such as class, gender, and ethnicity. The last element in the “circuit of culture” is “regulation”, which refers to the processes by which meanings regulate social conduct and practices, as meanings set out rules and conventions by which our social lives are governed. “Regulation” encompasses the formal and informal cultural control mechanisms or conditions, encompassing social norms, technology, and institutional as well as economic, religious, and political systems. In sum, “the question of meaning arises in relation to the different moments or practices in our ‘cultural circuit’ — in the construction of identity and the marking of difference, in production and consumption, as well as in the regulation of social conduct” (Hall 1997, 4). They 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.

The paradigm of the circuit of culture has been used to examine the intersection between meaning construction and culture, mainly in the study of media and in scholarship on public relations at both local and international levels (e.g. Taylor et al. 2002; Terry 2005; Curtin and Gaither 2007; Goggin 2006; Scherer 2007; Han and Zhang 2009; Sarabia-Panol and Sison 2014), but also in international education studies (e.g. Leve 2012). In the museum field, the 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-the- scenes 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

54 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 (Kichberg 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 not only emphasises 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 regulates conduct, how it constructs identities and subjectivities and defines the way certain things are represented and practised. The circuit of culture paradigm also offers greater historical specificity than other approaches — it emphasises the way in which representational practices operate in concrete historical situations in actual practice (Hall 1997, 6). 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. Thus, this museum circuit model 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 museum circuit model seeks to synthesise 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. 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). Both processes — production and consumption — constitute the moment of circulation, which articulates production in relation to consumption and draws consumption back into the process of production (Nixon 1997, 181). Overall, contemporary museum studies cannot neglect the ever-changing interrelations between power and politics, economics and

55 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.

Third, the circuit model reconsiders the consumption or reception practices of visitors, a constituency which has generally been overlooked in previous research on Chinese museums. The model challenges the notion of museum “texts” as undifferentiated “bearers of meaning” and confronts conceptions of the “audience” being passive and homogenous. The circuit model goes beyond traditional forms of content analysis by focusing not only on the linguistic and ideological structuration of museum exhibitions but also on the communicative practices of audiences. In terms of public communication, the model transcends the limitations of the functionalist, transmission-based paradigm by positioning the museum as a meaning-making, nonlinear, and dynamic communication structure — a structure that can also be seen as a process — operating within “the politics of signification” (Hall [1973] 1980, 137-38). The model is useful for questioning the ideological role of museums in China and in particular their role in producing and transforming ideologies in audiences.

Lastly, the circuit paradigm is oriented to the project and concept of “radical contextualisation”26, which holds that knowledge depends upon context. Even where there may be differences from British experiences 27 (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

26 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, 107-20). 27 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 decolonisation 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 2010, 101).

56 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.

Figure III: The Museum Circuit

To facilitate a productive analysis of museums, I have distilled the components of the model into the above diagram (Figure III). 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. “Actors” refer to the key participants in the circuit; “agents” are active actors, who exercise their agency to produce a specific effect. Actors can act on behalf of organisations or on their own behalf. In the circuit, the state/market, cultural intermediaries (which includes curators, museum administrators and researchers), and the museum public are the major actors in the political/economic, cultural and social spheres, respectively. They articulate the interlinking and interlinked processes that surround and inform the practices and discourses affiliated with the

57 museum and affect issues of representation and identity in the museum. These processes are described in more detail below.

Regulation involves 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 organisation. Production involves the production and circulation of the museum’s symbolic and discursive practices. In particular, production concerns the matter of the agency of cultural intermediaries 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.

The concept of the “cultural intermediary” has been adopted from the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 359) and refers to a section of middle- class professionals 28 whose work involved the “presentation and representation…[of], and in, all institutions providing symbolic goods and services”. The term was subsequently explored by academics in relation to the role of practitioners in a range of cultural industries (Maguire and Matthews 2014). Cultural intermediaries are broadly viewed as tastemakers or producers of meaning, which is understood as a value added to specific goods and practices. They are increasingly central to the generation of cultural and economic capital and becoming the members of a “creative class” (Florida 2002). With the increasing power of the economic imaginary, they are redefined as “new cultural intermediaries” who “shape and regulate”, “organise and govern” the creative economy. They are experts in expanding the symbolic economy, and in building a “reflexive selves” or “forms of life” (O’Connor 2015).

28 The middle-class professionals mainly come from marketing, public relations, fashion, design, and public media. 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.

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Museum practitioners 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). In contexts influenced by government policies of social inclusion or cultural diversity, such as in the UK, cultural intermediaries have the function of gatekeepers, entrusted with the task of attracting “socially excluded” individuals or, in Bauman’s words (2005), “flawed consumers”29 into arts institutions (Durrer and Miles 2009). In China, there is limited reflection on the role and function of cultural intermediaries in the museum context. Because of stable financial support from the government, funding is not a pressing factor obliging the museum to justify its value in the cultural economy. Museum practitioners, who largely work in a government- controlled environment, are assumed passive subjects, devoid of any chance of expressing individual identities and personal creativities. Nevertheless, there are cultural practitioners working in the expanding field of private museums and public museums with a more flexible production network. These museums act as a site where creative labour can combine cultural work and individualisation (McGuigan 2010). In other words, cultural intermediaries (including museum practitioners) can have more room to push forward their preferred agendas and create new meanings to products or issues.

In this thesis, I use the term “cultural intermediaries” to refer to a broader range of actors in the field who take part in museum production processes. Depending on the museum’s mission and practices, the actors who we call cultural intermediaries can include internal or external curators, artists, collaborators, or other individuals in the museum’s organisational 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

29 According to Bauman (2005), “flawed consumers” are subjected to the forces of a world that defines citizenship through consumption, but they do not have sufficient cultural or financial capital to “belong” or have their own specific place in society.

59 process. It is essential to identify within a particular museum circuit the main cultural intermediaries involved and their particular roles and tasks.

An examination of consumption focuses on the perspectives of museum visitors in experiencing the museum. When examining how individuals make sense of their visits or react to the museum, we can see how consumption functions as appropriation and resistance on the one hand, and challenges the image of a homogenous public shaped by the dominant forces/agents on the other. 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. These three categories of positions are derived from Stuart Hall’s theory of hegemonic-dominant encodings and negotiated or oppositional social- individual decodings.

According to Hall ([1973] 1980, 137-38), when the subject identifies with the dominant-hegemonic position, he/she operates inside the dominant code that the encoder expects him/her to recognise and decode. In the negotiated position, the subject holds a mixture of adaptive and oppositional decoding elements. He/she “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. Overall, the circuit of culture paradigm’s analysis of the consumption process aims to explicate the communication modes and positions of a diversified public. Such analysis not only pragmatically facilitates the

60 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.

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 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 organisation 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 cultural intermediaries and their relations and networks. Their actions are reflected in the museum’s various material arrangements and its non-material 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.

3.2 Research Methods

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Using the theoretical framework of the museum circuit, this research combines content analysis and ethnographical case studies of three art museums, and uses the juxtapositional comparison method to discuss their in/commensurable modes of circuits and agencies. The three representative cases are the He Xiangning Art Museum (Shenzhen), the Times Museum (Guangzhou), and the Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong). These museums represent different institutional modes for addressing national, global, local, and historical influences, as well as exhibiting a diverse interplay between state, economy, culture, and society. They are used as “strategic research sites”, for questioning the symbolic boundaries of museums that have been predominated by nationalist and economic policy agendas, and for drawing broader patterns with regards to regulation, production, and consumption of museum discourses and practices in the region and in China more broadly.

3.2.1 Case Studies of Art Museums

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). The case study method is used here to optimise our understanding of the art museum society and its relationship to the wider social context. Three cases were selected based on the most-different cases method and followed the pathway method for engaging the investigation of causal mechanisms (Gerring 2008).

In mainland China, case-studies of museums tend to use “exemplary” museums to identify the common features of a larger museum world, or to address a specific issue such as identity. They concentrate on the key municipalities which are directly controlled by the central government, including Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing (Varutti 2014; Denton 2014; Debevoise 2014; Le Mentec 2015; Kiowski 2017), or on peripheral locales such as Huizhou, Dunhuang, Guizhou and Tibet (Lu 2014; Keränen et. al. 2015) where ethnic minorities are located. A regional study on Jiangnan (which literally means “South of the river”, referring to its location in the

62 southern part of the Yangtze Delta) has examined the significance of China’s early museum development in the period between the Opium War and the Japanese invasion (Leung 2000).

This study examines how museums are regulated, produced and consumed, with a focus on the agency of actors that affect the public nature of the museum. It follows the pathway case approach (Gerring 2008) for developing a mechanisms- based account of museum development in China. 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 H. 2012) and platforms for expressing regional artistic perspectives. In Hong Kong, art and its institutions have evolved with increasing relevance to people’s lives and the global art market. The selected art museums elucidate the causal mechanisms underlying the museum circuit, and explain the contingent status of the art museums in GPRD. Key factors include the contingent variables of state, market, cultural intermediaries and publics.

This study also uses the “most-different case” method (Gerring 2008), to explore the variation of museal processes including the differences between museum texts, and between museum publics, and the conflicts or tensions that exist in the processes. The He Xiangning Art Museum (Shenzhen), the Times Museum (Guangzhou), and the Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong) were selected for the following three main reasons.

First, all three museums are located in the global-city region – GPRD. The region deserves greater attention because of the significant moves indicated by the governments’ initiatives in cultural collaboration and city branding, and the emergence of artistic subjectivity and linguistic rights in Guangdong. Although they have had their own trajectories of development, 30 the cities of Hong Kong,

30 In particular, Hong Kong, having been shaped by over a century of British colonial rule and having been outside the direct control of the prior to 1997, stands out as an

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Shenzhen, and Guangzhou are geographically linked and have similar cultural characteristics, creating potential for inter-referencing. They share a common origin in terms of regional culture, namely the Lingnan culture,31 (although many of those living in Shenzhen are migrants from outside the Lingnan cultural zone) and all three cities are important global cities in the region (although Hong Kong is under a special administration). 32 With the recent 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)”,33 the economic linkages between the three cities have been further strengthened. 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.34

example of a city-state with complex multiple experiences of colonialism, modernisation, global capitalism, and “internationalist localism”. The idea of an international localism, which moves beyond the unconditional identification of the nation with the state, has been formulated by the cultural historian Chen Kuan-hsing. According to Chen (2010), 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 modernisation experiences accumulated during encounters between local history and colonial history. 31 Geographically, the Lingnan cultural region covers the Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Hong Kong, and areas, with its centre in the Zhujiang (Pearl) River Basin (Xie 2000). Lingnan culture has been extensively studied, with commentators highlighting features of openness and compatibility reflected in the exchange and integration with other regional and foreign cultures (e.g. Xie 2000; Li 2012). 32 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 political-administrative “re- centralisation 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 (1988). 33 The Plan was promulgated by the National Development and Reform Commission (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. 34 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.

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At the societal level, regional artistic subjectivity and claims of linguistic rights emerged in Guangdong. In the art sphere, contemporary artists and curators have advocated for the regional identity of “Canton” (used here to refer to the wider Pearl River Delta Region, which centres historically on the city of Guangzhou, known in English and many other languages as Canton). Notable attempts include the establishment of “Cantonbon”35 by artists, and the international display of Canton Express as part of the exhibition Zone of Urgency, curated by Hou Hanru for the 2003 Biennale. The Cantobon exhibition 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 globalisation and urbanisation 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 marginalising the city’s mother tongue (Chu 2017, 204-5). Such debates show the identity of the region as a contested cultural site for recontextualising 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 more broadly.

Second, the three museums differ in their institutional orientations. 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. 36 The museum was built in 1997 in a historical

35 The Chinese artist Chen Tong (originally from Hunan) used the word “Cantonbon” (a hybridised 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 in 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). 36 He Xiangning and her husband were amongst the revolutionaries who sought to

65 memorial site connected with the Chinese Communist Party. Established in a distinctive location and at the time of Hong Kong’s administrative incorporation into the 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 national museums, private art museums have become increasingly visible players in China’s cultural politics. They re-emerged in the late 1990s and were mostly established by enterprises (Zhu 2003). The 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 public museums by “reaching beyond canonical programming to nurture creative processes and cutting-edge practices in the areas of art, design and architecture”. 37 The museum’s non- governmental organisational background and its open curatorial attitude provide an alternative institutional model in the parts of GPRD that have been under continuous Communist Party control since 1949. 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.38

Third, the three museums use different representation systems and create different bonds with their publics. I examine the discourses and practices of art museums from an interdisciplinary perspective. The analysis of the cultural materials and non-material practices covered by the three museums is not limited to art history, but also relates to history and other disciplines. The He Xiangning Art

overthrow the Qing Dynasty. Liao Zhongkai was the protégé of the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, and was expected to become the (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). 37See “Guangdong Times Museum”. Ran Dian, http://www.randian-online.com/np_space/guangdong- times-museum/, accessed January 15, 2018. 38See this webpage of Hong Kong Museum of Art, http://hk.art.museum/en_US/web/ma/about-the- museum.html, accessed January 15, 2018.

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Museum is mainly engaged in collecting, displaying, and studying He Xiangning’s works but also showcases contemporary art. The museum emphasises the influential role that it plays in art, academic circles, and society at large.39 Located in Shenzhen, a transprovincial city accommodating a massive migrant population from across China, the museum has an advantage of drawing a wider implication on Chinese visitors’ experience. The Times Museum, located in a residential building and embedded in a local middle-class 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. 40 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 or individuals to organise exhibitions that seek to cultivate a global appreciation of art. Ethnographic research on these three museums which have works of art drawn from different cultural contexts and with different institutional positioning 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”, 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 organisational and managerial approaches and strategies of knowledge production co-exist and respond differently to state/government regulations, regional contexts and broader social and economic conditions.

39 See the webpage of He Xiangning Art Museum at http://www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?ModuleNo=00&SubModuleNo=12, accessed June 20, 2017. 40 See the webpage of Hong Kong Museum of Art at http://hk.art.museum/en_US/web/ma/18.html, accessed January 15, 2018.

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3.2.2 Content Analysis of Museum Texts

A museum is a system of representations with particular ways of organising, clustering, and classifying concepts and objects, and for establishing relations between objects, and between objects and people. In this thesis, the concept of “politics of signification” is used to denote the ways meanings are contested and how a particular regime of representation can be challenged, contested, and transformed (Hall 1997). Content analysis is used to critically review the museums’ representation of content, namely what messages the museums encode and how they circulate the messages. The analysis of the museums’ texts is based on their meaning-making mechanisms; texts and other symbolic systems analysed include those relating to the policy statement, the museum’s mission, collection, exhibition, 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. At the same time, it examines the interaction between museum representation and cultural identity by examining how the museum imposes cultural identities and creates a particular kind of public.

3.2.3 Interviews with Museum Professionals

The museum professionals under study are full-time employees, and they receive a stable monthly income. This thesis is not intended to conduct a sociological class study, or a normative evaluation of their working condition or lifestyle. It is more concerned about the nature of their actual work and their discursive/creative effects in the museum context. It accounts for their agency, their finished text/work in the practices of representation and the formation of museum public.

To provide a more comprehensive and reliable understanding of the cultural production of the museum, I interviewed the museums’ directors or/and curators and asked about their experiences in cultural intermediation (see Appendix I for the

68 interview guide). The interviews helped triangulate the data drawn from content analysis, and to fully encapsulate the construction of meaning from the production side of the museum. In addition, they helped elicit the data about the institutional condition of production.

3.2.4 Interviews with Visitors

Consumption is concerned with the use and reception of the museum by visitors. It is also a process associated with consumer activism (Kozinet 2004; Hilton 2007) by which social activists seek to influence how museum exhibitions and activities are produced or circulated in society. In this thesis, “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 homogenous 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.

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 semi-structured interviews with museum visitors. The purpose of conducting in-depth interviews was to encourage and motivate visitors to offer interpretations of their museum experiences and share with the interviewer the meaning they construct from experiences with the museum. In addition, the in-depth interviews produced richer, more complex data than could be obtained from quantitative approaches such as collecting data via a questionnaire. The interview guide (see Appendix II) covered questions relating to visitors’ demographic background, their expectations and interpretation of museum experiences, and their overall experience of the arts and culture. I mainly asked how they receive and interpret museum messages (which can

69 be derived from the exhibitions they viewed, or the museum space/activity they experienced) and how they make sense of their museum visits (which can be affected by their immediate visiting experience or/and their prior museum/cultural experiences).

Some fifty interviews41 were conducted at each museum site. Using a random sampling method, I intercepted visitors in the museums and invited them to participate in the survey. All interviews were audio-recorded with participants’ informed consent, and then transcribed to facilitate analysis. The interview data included the purposes of their visits, expectations, communication with art/objects/practices, personal interests, beliefs, and prior cultural experiences. The data was used for visitor segmentation analysis, and was analysed by thematic coding to identify the key features of visiting experiences. Segmentation studies break visitors into subgroups for purposes of analysis and intervention. The method has long been adopted by museum professionals and art researchers to investigate the patterns of art participation and museum experiences (e.g. Doering 1999; Falk 2009). The method was used here to show how different groups of visitors in each museum interpret their experiences and how they relate themselves to the museum. The data was categorised by thematic coding to identify the important concepts or features of visitors’ experiences within their visiting context. 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 summarise the key features of a large data set in a structured way (King 2004). In this study, the thematic and categorised data was presented in terms of different modes of museum consumption and of different “positionings” (whether adaptive/integrative, negotiated, or oppositional to each museum entity). In addition, the narrative approach of “thick description” (Geertz 2003) was used to capture the visitors’ experiences and to interpret their meaning and contexts.

3.2.5 Observation

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“Participant observation” as a fieldwork method adopted from anthropology was essential for this research. The advantage of observational research is to provide the researcher with a natural, unstructured opportunity to see and understand how people behave and what they do. This method was used in this research to capture how visitors use the museum facilities and services and also 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.

3.2.6 Juxtapositional Comparison

The three museums do not operate according to a linear modality, as different variables or actors inevitably came into play in various museal processes. The method of “juxtapositional comparison” was 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 geo-historical context. The method emphasises comparative acts of cognition for the production of theory, based on the dynamism of comparison unfolding in the tension between commensurability and incommensurability. As she 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”. (Friedman 2013, 40)

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

71 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, cultural 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 new insights for reading the museum world as an interconnected entity. More importantly, instead of 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.

In sum, this chapter has proposed the museum circuit model as a way to conceptualise how actors articulate meanings in the processes of regulation, production, and consumption and in their relations with each other in their struggles over signification. While the model does not ignore the role of the political and economic agents, it emphasises the agency of cultural intermediates who actively take part in the cultural sphere. It also includes the perspectives of museum visitors who constitute a diversified public and engage in consumption as a social practice of appropriation or resistance. In addition, the model approaches the museum as an interface that undergoes multidimensional transformations driven by the action of different cultural, social, political and economic forces. Above all, the model contributes to the main argument of the thesis that China’s museums are not simply a political and economic agent for the construction of the state. They should be understood as entities constituted by multiple cultural circuits in which different institutional modes co-exist in complex arrangements. These arrangements underpin the processes of regulation, production, and consumption, and shape the involvement of different agents in articulating representation and identity. As noted to support the overall argument, three case studies on art museums are used. The case studies will be examined in detail in Chapters Five to Seven. They demonstrate the tensions and differences in the signification of culture and identify the major agents or factors that are influencing the museum discourses in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. However, art museums are different from other types of museums which are each bounded by their own disciplinary or field perspectives.

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Furthermore, as noted previously, meishuguan and buowuguan are managed by two different administrative bodies in mainland China. Thus, before examining the practices that contemporary art museums engage in, the next 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.

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4

THE HISTORICAL TRAJECTORIES OF ART MUSEUMS

As stated in the introductory chapter, although the museum is conceived as a modern, Western invention, museums in China have undergone various localisation processes through the course of modern Chinese history. This chapter will focus on the 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, 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 socio-cultural 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 disjunctures 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 recontextualising 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.

The first three 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 One 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. As noted in the first chapter, 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

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Republic of China. Both bowuguan (museums) and meishuguan (fine art museums) became institutions for developing social education as part of the Nationalists’ wider modernisation project, with the fine art museums focusing on aesthetic education. However, the institutionalisation of museums, like the fate of the Republican regime itself, was short-lived.

Section Two examines how the museum enterprise was radically transformed by the Communist Party after its political takeover in 1949. Under the Maoist regime, the arts and their institutions became highly instrumentalised 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 monopolised by the state and intensively politicalised, especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Art, museums and politics remained tightly connected throughout the Maoist period.

It was not until the 1980s that the political-economic transformation of Chinese society — involving the transition from a Marxist-Leninist ideological state to one dominated by economic liberalisation — led to more hybrid forms of development in China’s museums. The re-institutionalisation of museums after the death of Mao involved greater diversity and privatisation in museum forms. Multiple forces, including the resumption of private ownership, a growing art market, state cultural policies, urbanisation, and the development of creative cities, along with a growing middle-class and the globalisation 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 emphasised the importance of the relationship between art museums and society. Furthermore, marketisation and internationalisation have nurtured new actors in the art field. Art museums have become a site of ongoing negotiation and collaboration between museum stakeholders (artists, curators and other cultural intermediaries and the public) and the government. Section Three to Five are 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.

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China resumed political sovereignty over Hong Kong and Macau in the late 1990s. These special autonomous administrative and post-colonial cities have not only served as agencies for mobilising 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 recentralised and are now managed by a department of the new government, which is increasingly responsive to the forces of globalism and nationalism. The recent outbreak of the Umbrella Movement, calling for democratisation in Hong Kong, reflected significant social contestation over the nature of the Hong Kong political system and also mobilised the cultural sphere in initiating discussions about the role of civil society in museological activism. Taking this cultural contestation as is 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 over the primary assumption that China is 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 agents (i.e. actors not associated with government authorities) and the ability of those agents to express their values and identities in the public domain, this chapter concludes by reemphasising 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 normalised public institutional platform of the art museum.

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4.1 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 modern museum establishment 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, the new museums in China were mostly founded by foreigners or missionaries. 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.42 The key change came as a response to the foreign threat experienced following China’s serious defeats in the First (1839-42) and Second (1856-60) 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

42 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 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).

77 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 , 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 1889. 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 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 founding museums.43

It was against this turbulent political and social backdrop that China experienced the first climax in museum expansion. Founded and managed by local social elites, the foreign institution of the museum went through a localisation 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.44 Many scholars argue that the most representative museum was the Nantong Bowuguan, founded by the late Qing Chinese scholar-official and industrialist Zhang Jian in 1905. It is generally recognised as being the “first museum of China” (Zhao 2002 cited Lu 2014, 79) in that it was founded by the Chinese and was rooted in the patriotic cause of “fulfil[ling] the political and nationalistic need of a group of Chinese social elites” (Lu 2014, 84). The museum was a mixture of elements including a zoo, Chinese

43 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 Modernisation movement, the author, Liang Qichao, called for the display of an array of technical equipment and for the formation of museums for facilitating technological experiments (Cao 2008, 51). 44 For a detailed analysis of the effect exerted on early museums by social elites, see Lu (2014, 62- 88).

78 gardens and exhibition galleries; it displayed historical artefacts, natural specimens and art objects. 45 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 organised on the metropolitan and provincial levels within China (Fernsebner 2006, 100). The name “meishuguan” 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 categorised idea of art in the modern sense was visible in one of the ten galleries, namely the Meishu (Fine Arts) Gallery. 46 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 hereafter) (1913-1948) and the (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

45 Zhang Jian had proposed to the authorities the idea of building a national museum. He emphasised that the national museum should be an institution built in the capital of the nation to glorify and publicise Chinese civilisation, 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 (2014, 78-88) case study of the Nantong Museum. 46 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).

79 system and the established power of the Republican state through an act of museum founding (Lu 2014, 107-08).

With a vision for building a modern nation, intellectuals started to advocate the idea of establishing museums specialising 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 quest for transforming literati paintings and developing modern Chinese paintings, referred to in Chinese as guohua (literally national painting)47, was much influenced by Western and Japanese art.48 The leading intellectuals and artists Lu Xun, , and had become influential in the development of art museums through their proposals for aesthetic education. Cai Yuanpei (1868- 1940), a well-known Chinese educator and president of , served in the provisional Republic’s Ministry of Education in 1912. He made a cogent proposal for national education policy, characterised 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 enhanced students’ innermost desires and feelings of humanity, while religious doctrines militated 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 organisations, as well as

47 John Clark (2010a, 19) writes that modern Chinese painting developed in the historical context of a national and patriotic struggle to end foreign rule and the semi-colonial relationship with the outside world. 48 Since the nineteenth century, after China had been in contact with Western and Japanese art, the pre-modern traditional painting system was replaced by neo-traditional painting and oil painting. Subsequently, avant-gardists emerged with the rise of the “Shanghai School” in the late 1920s and 1930s, followed by the Cantonese “Lingnan” school. In addition, China’s early contact with Western art came through art works, overseas training, the institution of modern education and the introduction of drawing. See Clark (2010a, 262-64).

80 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 ), stressed the cultural significance of art museums in his article “Meishuguan zhi gongneng” (The Functions of Art Museums), published in 1932.

In 1929, the first large-scale “national exhibition of art” (quanguo meishu zhanlanhui), proposed by Cai Yuanpei and organised 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. 49 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’ modernisation project. In 1930, the first fine arts city museum, the Tianjin Museum of Art, was established

49 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 emphasised “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).

81 under the direction of the education affairs section of the Peking National Art Academy.50 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).

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). Museum 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 (Lu 2014, 89). Fifty-three museums were registered under four main categories: general education; history; fine arts; and sciences, industry, and technology (Cao 2008). 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 ’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 (1946-49) 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

50 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 organised 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 Art Museum 1934).

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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.

4.2 Mao’s Politicisation of Art Museums in the People’s Republic of China (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 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 materialised through a centralised arts system that included art museums.

When the People’s Liberation Army entered Beijing on 31st 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 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 modernisation plan. In the same year, the Ministry of Culture (MOC) was established to oversee museum management for the new nation. The State Bureau of Cultural Relics (the predecessor of the present State Administration of Cultural Heritage) 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 (wenhuagun), and performance troupes. This institutional rearrangement led to the gradual

83 separation of activities between meishuguan (art museums) and bowuguan (museums) (Lu 2008, 66-67). The museums were managed by various levels of government, ranging from national and provincial to city and county levels. Military museums were managed by the military. 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 (Holm 1991; Andrews 1994; Galikowski 1998) 51 . Popular art became the main form of art for the 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 organisations, 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 Chinese Artists Association (CAA) (originating from the China National Art Workers’ Association), under the management of the Propaganda Department of the CPC, primarily supervised the ideological content of art and the display of legitimate artworks. Fine

51Holm (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 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.

84 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 nationalise 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 (Lu 2014, 121). 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 (ibid., 112).

In 1952, the CPC specified the mission of museums as being to carry out revolutionary education for socialist patriotism (ibid., 128). Following this, a series of museums showcasing the revolutionary history of CPC were built, including the National Museum of Revolution and the National Museum of History.52 In PRC art museums, narratives that supported and promoted revolutionary art (geming yishu) became the exclusive and sole component that characterised communist-era art history. The National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) was one of the “ten grand national projects” established in 1962. According to 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 for 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

52 Both museums were governed by MOC from the 1950s to the 1980s and were integrated into the current National Museum of China in 2003.

85 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 emphasise 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.53 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.54 The Anti- Rightist campaign of 1957, which purged a large number 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 1965.55 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

53 For details, see Galikowski (1998, 55-125). 54 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 China Art gallery, 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 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). 55 Galikowski (1998, 87) states that a national exhibition of worker, peasant, and soldier art was organised 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 organised 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.

86 number of museums, rising from 72 in 1957 to 360 in 1958 (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2015). The subsequent outbreak of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was the climax of the radical and extreme homogenisation of art.56 It led to the massive destruction of cultural infrastructure and the closure of museums57; yet, exhibitions and museums were still being created to serve the goals of the revolutionary political movement.58

4.3 Cultural Relaxation and the Resumption of Privatisation in the Post-Mao Period (1979-1989)

Following the death of Mao Zedong and the purge of the Gang of Four in 1976, (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 modernisation drive, the museum enterprise was reinstitutionalised, with greater diversity and resumed privatisation. NAMOC was characterised 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 reorganisation 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

56 See Kraus (2004, 53-54) and Andrews (1994, 3). 57 See Cao (2008, 53-54). 58 Nevertheless, during the Cultural Revolution, an exhibition was organised by the Shanghai Museum in 1976, which displayed ceramics from the South China Sea. The exhibition further reinforced Marxist historical materialism by emphasising 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 Crafts Museum, founded in 1970 and 1971 respectively (Lu 2008, 69).

87 some experiments, yet it faced numerous challenges, including the reorganisation 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 modernisation program59.

Under Deng’s economic reforms, the system of institutionalised 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). 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 organising exhibitions with works of art for sale, contributed to the

59 Köppel-Yang (2003, 22-24) emphasises 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 organised 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.

88 decentralisation 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 depoliticised subject matter, which accompanied the academisation 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 modernisations” promoted by the regime of Deng Xiaoping. Museum development was included in the Sixth Five Year Plan (1981-5) in 1982, which stipulated that each city should have one or more museums. Museums were redeveloped to permit greater diversity and allowed to privatise. 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 revitalised in 1982 and it started to publish a journal titled Chinese Museums in 1984. Most importantly, the “Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics” 60 which was issued in 1982 to regulate the acquisition and sale of artefacts, legalised the private ownership of heritage and permitted the establishment of non-governmental 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”,61 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.

60 The legislation was issued in 1982 and has undergone several revisions since then, with the final version dated to 2007. See Lu (2014, 196-97). 61 The regulations were revised again in 2002.

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In all, the cultural milieu in the 1980s was relatively relaxed, but was characterised by alternating periods of openness and restriction, notably the Campaigns in 1983 against “spiritual pollution” and in 1986 against “bourgeois liberalisation”.62 New cultural concepts and the official ideology of modernisation coexisted right until the “China/Avant-Garde Exhibition” at the NAMOC in 1989. This exhibition was curated by the critic Gao Minglu and 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 with the June Fourth Incident, which occurred soon after the exhibition opened. The exhibition represented “the conclusion of an era and also the end of the ideals”63 of the 80s 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).

4.4 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 toward the market after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 inspection of South China. The 1990s witnessed the development of a nascent market for Chinese art, 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 thesis would refer to as cultural intermediaries. These individuals sought new modes of expression in international exhibitions, veering away from formalist exploration

62 For details, see Kraus (2004, 18-19). 63 This was a quote from the Chinese art critic Li Xiantang, cited by DeBevoise (2014, 195). DeBevoise (2014) defined the 1989 “Modern Art Exhibition” as a watershed, marking “the final 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 development 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.

90 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, 220-28), 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. 64 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.65 Driven by both the marketisation and internationalisation 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”. 66 In addition, he notes that the young artists who were born after the mid-1970s had no direct experience of history before 1978 and were exposed to global influences. As Clarke (2010b, 100-05) notes, their production became more oriented to personal artistic sensitivity and to plurality in artistic issues

64 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, 258-67). To Barmé (1999, 218), the exhibition made the commonwealth of cultural exchanges with Hong Kong and Taiwan possible. 65 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). 66 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 a domestic market awareness and organised art fairs to help Chinese cultural products “compete” in the international art market.

91 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 specialisation of artists, a more niche-market orientation of art publications, and diversity in the circulation of art information (ibid., 188-92). 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 geo-politics 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, 76-79). 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.67 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 first private art museum and Beijing’s first large modern art gallery, 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

67 The official censorship over the production of Chinese contemporary art occurred in three ways: stylistic, moral, and political (Si 2012).

92 private museums, such as the Chengdu 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.

4.5 Museums in the 21st Century

Entering the twentieth-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 urbanisation and cultural industrialisation, 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 co-existed 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 multi-layering 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, 160-61). 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 globalisation on China’s art world and

93 indicated the official legitimation of international platforms for art exchange. 68 The Biennale was also held to coincide with the controversial “Fuck Off” exhibition and the so-called “satellite” exhibitions organised by independent curators and non- government 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 first edition in 2002. The first three editions discussed cultural topics and contributed to the construction of an academic-art historical narrative in China.69 By 2000, spaces that exhibited contemporary art had been diversified. They included national and municipal galleries, academy-affiliated galleries, exhibition halls, art galleries and commercial spaces, and other temporary sites such as private homes, embassies and foreign institutions, open public areas, mass media, and virtual spaces. Official exhibition spaces were transformed through the efforts of independent curators, incorporating experimental art through delicate negotiation and frequent compromises (Wu 2001, 163-67). A high tide of international display of Chinese art ensued, especially when the first official China pavilion was established at the 51st 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 U.S. 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.70

68 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). 69 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 modernisation” 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. 70According to the report “The Art Market In 2014” (102-04), “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 revitalisation 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

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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 in Beijing, the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, and the Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing. In 2007, the first foreign-funded private contemporary art museum, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, was founded in Beijing’s 798 Art Zone. It was followed by the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art (2008) and the (2010). In 2014, the bank-led Minsheng Art Museum, the Yuz Museum, and the largest private museum, the 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 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). Local commentaries on private museums are in general concerned with museum management, organisation mechanisms, professional development, state policies and legal systems (e.g. Ran 2003; Zhu 2003; Guo 2003). Similarly, Chinese-language research has investigated private museums, with a focus on micro-management as well as exhibition and curatorial systems (e.g. Bai 2016, Li 2013, Gao 2014, Gong 2013, Zhao 2010, Ma 2010). 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 , 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

Yi, whose interest was driven by intellectual curiosity about contemporary art. See Zhang (2009, 42- 51).

95 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 institutionalise museums. 71 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, 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 associate 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 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

71 This included regulations on museum management (in 2005), guidelines for organising overseas exhibitions (in 2003), the museum grading system, and the policy of free museum admission (both implemented in 2008) (Lu 2014, 197 & 206).

96 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 . 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 toward a more Westernised 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. We can argue that members of the Chinese middle class are caught in a dilemma between choosing capitalism and consumerism on the one hand, and celebrating Chinese exceptionalism and national pride on the other. Unger and Barmé hold that 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.72 Wang Jing

72 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, Province, Shanghai, Province, 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 & 29).

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(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 opening it up de facto 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 73 , 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 effort to write the history of art museums. Li Wanwan’s 2016 book, Meishuguan de lishi (History of Art Museums in China) is a remarkable example. Li examines the longue durée of the Chinese art museums as part of 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 formed a path different from that of the West. The volume took more than ten years to complete. It covers art collection history, overseas exhibitions, western and Japanese museology, intellectuals’ museum concepts, art production and education, national/municipal museum organisations and management, early reception of art museums and the function of city-building. Though akin to grand narrative, it adopts an approach far broader and more systematic than any previous literature on the history of Chinese art museums. 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

73 Johnson (2013) has observed that these Chinese art museums were criticised 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.

98 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.

4.6 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 thesis, 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 clock, 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 a Museums Select Committee as a decision-making body in which unofficially appointed and elected members worked hand in hand to develop museum services for Hong Kong (Tang 2007, 43). Prior to 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. 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 (urban councils and regional councils) became more democratised with an increasing number of members elected by universal suffrage.

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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 centralise 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 privatisation, 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’ 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 post-colonial 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-

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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 former 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 2019. 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). The renovation of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, which is also due to be completed in 2019, has displayed an effort to cope with the challenges of the times. At the same time, the WKCD project is underway, and its practice has been under continuous scrutiny. Public attention has focused on M+’s recent bulk acquisition of Chinese contemporary art from a famous Swiss collector, Sigg, associated with the intensive involvement of foreign expatriates. The nature of the relationship between a global museum and local people remains an issue of significant debate. This is 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). 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 criticised, 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 discredited.

In addition to government-led projects, the high profile international gallery openings taking place alongside the annual art fair have brought a hype and frenzy

101 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 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 programs 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”74, 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 “mainlandisation”.

Nevertheless, in this post-colonial city, local citizens, from their ad hoc reaction to heritage preservation issues to their conscious and deliberate initiation of social activism,75 have engaged in many types of political action, action that reached its height in the Umbrella Movement of 2014. The civil society-led movement broke out principally in response to the decision of the Standing Committee of the

74 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 colonisers and the Chinese who chose to work with them. 75 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 programs.

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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 in late 2014 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 art and museological practices in social activism and expanded their claims of citizenship in the cultural sphere (e.g. Wong 2017; Ho and Ting [forthcoming]). 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 with national and global capital). Hong Kong museums deserve further interrogation with regard to their relations to local citizens’ realities and their social struggles.

4.7 Conclusion

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 modernising 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 modernisation, followed by communist Marxist-Leninism, and then by the transition to socialist modernity based on ideologies of cultural nationalism, social modernisation, 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 (1927-49), the role of museums was extended to cover the history and art of the country and was designed to serve the project of modernising the nation and society. The art museum emerged as part of a social effort to build a modern nation, reflecting the ideas on aesthetics education of the leading intellectuals and social elites. During the Maoist regime (1949-1979), all

103 museums were entirely state-owned and highly instrumentalised, 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 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 conceptualisation and contextualisation of art museums in China (and in Hong Kong). It has offered a broader perspective on the country’s process of art musealisation, while suggesting that empirical studies of art museums are a way to analyse diverse museal processes and their relation to society. The

104 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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5

HE XIANGNING ART MUSEUM IN SHENZHEN

This chapter applies the paradigm of the museum circuit to the He Xiangning Art Museum. By elucidating how a national art museum has evolved amidst processes of regulation, production, and consumption, and addressing issues of representation and identity, this case study demonstrates that the formation of the museum is not simply determined by the state, but by a complex process involving the interplay between various actors, including the state’s political and economic agents, cultural intermediaries such as academic and cultural practitioners, and the educated elites in the city of Shenzhen.

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 state- corporate and 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, in Shenzhen, an experimental economy-focused city bordering Hong Kong, which accommodates a massive migrant population from across China. The museum’s displays focus on the classical art of He Xiangning and multi-media forms of contemporary art. Its collection of the art of He Xiangning has been built up by purchase or donation from He Xiangning’s successors, friends and collectors. In addition, around 40076 contemporary art works have been collected through donation and designated donation after exhibition. Founded in a distinctive location (Shenzhen) and at a time of political transition (the period of the Hong Kong Handover), the museum constitutes a unique case that reflects the state’s new national agenda of co-opting cultural-academic elites and

76 The figure was given during my interview with the Art Director of the museum, Feng Boyi on 27 January 2016, in Shenzhen.

106 nurturing a middle-class museum public in a Chinese society that is rapidly changing.

This chapter comprises five sections. Section One looks 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 organisational 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. Being managed by a state-owned enterprise, the museum is used to conjure up an image of quality urban life, and to realise the state’s plans for marketing the cultural industry and city-branding in Shenzhen, as well as for entertaining and civilising 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 cultural intermediaries in mediating the production of meaning by the state in China.

The subsequent three sections explore the scope of the agency of the cultural intermediaries within the institutional frameworks that affect their acts of cultural production. Section Two to Four 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 of the chapter are devoted to depicting an emerging cultural-led public sphere, and the increasing power of cultural intermediaries in producing art knowledge that challenges the meaning of state rule. In their cultural production actions, undertaken facing the state’s nationalistic aesthetics and claims for cultural diplomacy and “city development”, the museum’s curators and academic stakeholders work together to

107 rationalise the national art narrative, adopting 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 project of the state is contested by both structural changes and cultural agency.

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, Section Five 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 leaners” 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 middle-class public. The study acknowledges and analyses the role of cultural intermediaries in mediating the meaning production by the state, and reveals how the claims made by the state have been contested through structural social changes and the cultural agency of other actors. In addition, it reflects on the rise of a middle- class museum public in mainland China, and emphasises the issues of cultural inclusivity and exclusivity in a socially stratified city.

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5.1 The State and the Market: A National Museum Structure

As noted above, the He Xiangning Art Museum is officially governed by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO) of the State Council and is managed by the Overseas Chinese Town Group (OCT). The OCAO is an office directly 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 organisational history. In the early twentieth century, He Xiangning (1878-1972) 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, , 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, 77 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 twenty-first century China (Bo 2007, 165-66). Liao’s family has thus been in charge of the work of overseas Chinese affairs since 1949.

77 Liao Hui had been a member of the Central Committee since 1985 and was elected Vice- Chairperson of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in 2008.

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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. On 18 April 1997, the museum was opened by then-Vice Premier of the State Council Qian Qichen. As a visible political endorsement, the name of the museum was personally inscribed on the museum façade by the then-President of the People’s Republic of China, Jiang Zemin. 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 legitimise China’s revolutionary past and the continuing hegemony of its political elites. However, we can ask if its institutional structure under the management of a state- owned enterprise has evinced an altered meaning of state rule, given the ostensibly diminishing control by the CPC over cultural affairs 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 Commission of the State Council. Headquartered in Shenzhen with a business focus on tourism and associated cultural industries and properites, 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”, “” 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 post-modern manner (Liauw 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.

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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 Center 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 first 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 78 . 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”79. OCT’s role thus reflects 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 civilising citizens. In China, media conglomerations have a profound impact on the circulation of signs and their interpretation. In Shenzhen, the mainstream media monopolised by the state has two tiers. The function of the first

78 See “Guonei zuida meishuguan liansuo pinpai zheng shi xingcheng.” (Formation of the largest chain-brand art museums in China) Guiyang Daily, May 14, 2012. http://epaper.gywb.cn/gyrb/html/2012-05/14/content_292300.htm. 79 See the logo of OCT on this webpage of the company, http://www.chinaoct.com/hqc/index/index.html, accessed April 18, 2017.

111 tier is to “publicise the Party’s policies, legitimise 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 civilising 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.80 These rules are clearly stated in the museum’s official website81 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 civilising 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 the behaviour and conduct of a population and shaping the ideal form of urban citizenship in China’s societies today.

In terms of organisational regulation, the He Xiangning Art Museum is unlike the NAMOC, where the Party Committee Office is stationed to undertake direct ideological supervision. The He Xiangning Art Museum is led by a small management team comprising the company’s chief manager, who serves as the

80 For example, see “He Xiangning Meishuguan”. Southern Metropolis Daily, October 15, 2008, AT22. 81 See this webpage of He Xiangning Art Museum, http://www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?ModuleNo=00&SubModuleNo=12, accessed June 20, 2017.

112 museum’s president, two senior corporation managers and the museum’s executive director, who all serve as vice-presidents. The museum currently has about twenty- two staff members divided between three departments: administration, curatorial affairs, and public relations. The curatorial department, headed by an art director, forms the core production team; it undertakes multiple functions in managing collections, public education, exhibitions and in organising museum programming. Curatorial opportunities are available to all team members, although program ideas mainly come from the art director before being run through a process of team discussion.82 In addition, 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.83 Under the current organisational structure, the museum has enjoyed greater autonomy in staff recruitment than other state museums, whose staff is recruited and assessed directly by the government. 84 For example, the art director, Feng Boyi, is an eminent independent art curator and critic in China. In 2006, he was headhunted by the museum for the position of art director. Feng commented that the system does not provide the same clear professional identity as state museums. At the same time, however, it is relatively successful in securing capital input from the OCT enterprise, and it is subject to fewer ideological controls than is the other national museum (which runs directly under the guidance of the Ministry of Culture).85

The museum relies entirely on the curatorial team to carry out exhibitions and public programs. The He Xiangning Art Museum primarily aims to support the collecting, exhibiting and researching of the art of He Xiangning, and also of artworks by outstanding Chinese contemporary artists, overseas Chinese artists, women artists and emerging young artists. The museum has sought to promote the

82 Interviews with curatorial staff, Wang Dong and Philip Ngan, respectively on 12 May, 2015 and 31 July, 2015, in Shenzhen. 83 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, , Wang Guangyi, Fei Dawei, Huang Zhuan and Karen Smith. See Ren Kelei (2007, 245). 84 Interview with Wang, May 12, 2015. 85 Interview with art director Feng Boyi, January 27, 2016, Shenzhen.

113 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 gradually also come to influence the international world of art museums. 86 From 1998 to 2005, the museum organised 15 to 32 exhibitions each year. During this period, it collaborated with a wide range of organisations including companies, public and private museums, galleries, academics, embassies, local art associations, art centres, tourist organisations and official cultural exchange bodies. A variety of temporary shows were organised, ranging from those which supported OCT’s branding project and the municipal government’s plan of creating the “City of Design”87, to curatorial efforts to classify great works88 and to map the local art ecology.89 In 2005, the museum’s subdivision OCT Contemporary Art Terminal90 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 has shown a clearly-defined direction for exhibition programming, by streamlining its program to focus on 6 to 13 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.

86 See this webpage of He Xiangning Art Museum, http://www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?ModuleNo=00&SubModuleNo=02, accessed June 20, 2017. 87 For examples, 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 organisations 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. 88 The museum has curated contemporary art exhibitions for individual Chinese established artists, for examples, Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun, Xu Bing, Zhang Xiaogang, and Fang Lijun. 89 For examples, 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. 90 In April 2012, OCAT was separated from He Xiangning Art Museum and registered as an independent non-profit organisation. 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.

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The museum’s public programs are mainly lectures, seminars and regular talks held in the museum.91 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.92 Speakers are mainly art historians, art critics, curators, and humanities, arts and social science scholars from across mainland China. Because of their high levels of cultural capital, 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, 93 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 cultural 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.

91 The museum reported that it organised 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 shown on its website, the museum has held a number of open workshops led by artists. 92 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 , art criticism, feminist art, the relations between modernity and aesthetics, contemporary art and the humanities, and modernism and post- modernism. “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. 93 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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5.2 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 . 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 organised 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’ official 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

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He Xiangning by Mao Zedong, as an expression of his gratitude for her gifts. The poems that other religious and cultural figures94 wrote to He Xiangning were also displayed, but they were overshadowed by the overwhelming reproduction of Mao’s calligraphy.

Illustration I: The central exhibition lobby of the He Xiangning Art Museum (Photo by the author)

This exhibition’s narrative of He Xiangning’s life and works emphasised her nationalistic spirit, the role of aesthetics in the service of politics, as well 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, and cities in mainland China. Approximately half of the twenty-four special exhibitions for He Xiangning were structured to emphasise 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 scrutinising her art’s aesthetic, historical and social values. Cultural intermediaries, consisting of both in-house and external curators and researchers, have taken He

94 These included (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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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 milieux of the places that had shaped the artist and 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 socio-cultural 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 conceptualise 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).

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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, periodising 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 art scholar Lu Mingju and in-house curators Fang Lihua and Fang Hua) 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 pre-modern Chinese artists and of her contemporaries. In this narrative the early works created during her studies in Japan are seen as having been subject to the influence of the Japanese art genre Ukiyo-e95, 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.96

The 2016 exhibition “Appropriation and Transformation: The Exploration of Painting by Chinese Artists Trained Abroad in the Early Twentieth Century” (curated by art scholar Hua Tianxue and Feng Boyi) 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

95 The term ukiyo-e translates as “picture(s) of the floating world”. This genre flourished in Japan from the 17th through to the 19th 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. 96 See this webpage of the exhibition, “Movable Mindscape: The Style, Concepts and Changing Times: He Xiangning’s Landscape painting”. http://www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?ModuleNo=04&SubModuleNo=0403&id=1004&ordertype=0&pa ge=1&year=2014, accessed June 20, 2017.

119 eleven other leading artists 97 who studied abroad between 1905 and 1937. It explored how Chinese artists were influenced by Japanese artists who synthesised 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.98 These curatorial efforts to pose an artistic question were intended to avoid grand narratives and subjective judgments, and to follow the logic of He Xiangning’s historical context instead (Hua 2016).

By moving away from essentialist nationalism and using art-historical or socio- cultural perspectives, cultural intermediaries were able to generate moderately critical narratives. Based on varied analytical methods, including formal, semiotic, inter-textual or cross-cultural analyses, they tended to contextualise works or individuals historically rather than touting a nationalistic persona to be glorified and memorised. Instead of affirming the legitimacy of the regime and its progressivist and developmentalist ideology, cultural 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

97 These artists are Gao Jianfu, Gao Qifeng, Chen Shuren, Guan Liang, Zhu Qizhan, Chen Zhifo, Yanyong, Feng Zikai, Fang Rending, Li Xiongcai and Fu Baoshi. 98 Gongbi is a traditional technique and style for Chinese ink paintings. It uses highly detailed brushstrokes to depict narratives or subjects in realistic way. The style can be dated back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). It flourished in the Tang and Song Dynasties (7th to 13th centuries) when these refined paintings were collected by the royal families and used to feature narratives or high authority figures.

120 authoritative museum that operates in support of the project of constructing a rational nation-state.

5.3 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 Regions 99 Artistic Exchange Project”. 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) 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 field. According to Jan Melissen (2005, 11 & 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 programs 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, cultural intermediaries concentrate on a strategy of public diplomacy that aims at multi-directional and “long haul” dialogue between the participating regions. This arguably undermined the state’s unified image of a monolithic Chinese community and provided a

99 “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.

121 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 multi-region 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 organised in the form of exhibitions and seminars held in collaboration with different anchor art organisations 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), “Crossroads — Another Dimension” (2013) and “Conformity to Vicinity” (2014), respectively, all carried metaphors and shifted between meanings 100 . In addition, the project constituted a relatively broad organisational 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 non-governmental art

100 “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 symbolising 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.

122 institutes. They formed the core cultural 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 globalisation and localisation, the impact of urbanisation 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 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 obtain in the relationships between different cultures. The project marked a shift in the concept of cultural

123 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 globalisation. “Conforming to Vicinity” further explored the relationship between globalisation and localisation. 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 traveling 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 cultural 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 globalisation on peoples’ lives and creativity; Hong Kong artists explore how to preserve and highlight the local culture under the threat of globalisation; 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.).

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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.101 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 work102: “I prefer to mobilise different resources to realise my idea that works for a society. I am still content with the collaboration (with the state), 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 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. For instance, 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

101 See Hong Kong Art Centre. 2001. “1+1: A Cross-Strait-Four-Region Artistic Exchange Project (Artists Interview).” Uploaded on July 4, 2011. YouTube video, 13:45 min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=PnKPUlUz41w. 102 Interview with Feng, January 27, 2016.

125 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 “Conforming to Vicinity”, directly criticised the practice of linking the four places with the idea of a “Greater China”, the inclusion of two non-Chinese/non-Han artists and the selection of four artists to “represent” the multi-regional and multi-ethnic mainland. 103 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, 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 criticising the alleged political censorship and questioning the professional ethics of the museum.104

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 cultural intermediaries were formally able to express their ideas by posing their agendas, questions, and criticisms, crossing China’s state-drawn policy 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 homogenisation and reification of Chinese cultural forms and identity, the artists produced multiple identities in individual, local and global forms.

103 Vigneron (2014) points out that the two non-Chinese artists were Russian Macau resident Constantin Besmertny and the Taiwanese aborigine Labay Eyong (Lin Jiewen) of the Seediq nation (a group in Taiwan that has been an important tool for legitimising the idea of a nativist culture in Taiwan). 104 For details, see the press release from the University of Hong Kong, “HKU responds to media enquiries about exhibition ‘Conforming to Vicinity’”, February 10, 2015, at http://www.hku.hk/press/press- releases/detail/12348.html. See also Li (2015), “Gangde meishuguan shengming yu shishi bufu (Incompatible between UMAG’s statement and reality)” in Standnews, February 13, 2015, available at https://thestandnews.com/.

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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.

5.4 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 organised the event from 1998 until 2007, with a total of six editions. By examining this exhibition series, this section highlights the different signifying practices used by the state and the cultural 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 re-conceptualising China’s contemporary sculpture, also interrogating 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 problematised 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 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

127 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- organised 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 program 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 .

The state’s developmental ideology was well expressed through the project’s structural and symbolic arrangement. For instance, the 1st Exhibition was co- organised 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.105 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.106 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 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

105 See this webpage of the exhibition, “The 1st Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition.” http://www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?ModuleNo=0404&SubModuleNo=040401&id=451&ordertype=0 &page=1&year=2016, accessed December 29, 2017. 106 See this webpage of the exhibition, “The 2nd Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition”, available at: http://www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?ModuleNo=0404&SubModuleNo=040401&id=453&ordertype=0 &page=1&year=2016 (accessed December 29, 2017).

128 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 cultural 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,107 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 organisation, 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, 103-04).

The exhibition was considered by those involved with it to be a new mechanism for institutionalising contemporary sculpture in China. It used a critical and reflexive approach for exploring the social function of contemporary art. The participants interrogated issues relating to the institutionalisation process of contemporary art in China, the relationship between art and the public, the rights and obligations of

107 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, , Germany, and Indonesia, in addition to emerging and well-established Chinese contemporary artists.

129 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 emphasised 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 modernisation. 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 20th century, sculpture was highly ideologised and instrumentalised. 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 marginalised 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 centered 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, 105-13). 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.

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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 reconceptualising sculpture/art in various 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 installment, 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”,108considering 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 modernisation 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 modernisation”.109

108 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 modernised 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. 109 See the webpage of the exhibition, “The 3rd Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition”. Available at: http://www.hxnart.com/main.aspx?ModuleNo=0404&SubModuleNo=040401&id=454&ordertype=0 &page=1&year=2016 (accessed December 29, 2017).

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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 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 post-modernist 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 modernisation 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 civilisation, 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 reintepreation (Ren 2007, 14- 17).

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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 conceptualising 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 transcend the four systems. In their view, art was meant to observe and criticise 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-historicisation. 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 modernisation, and the conflict between inner-self and external ecology. Briefly, the influence of China’s modernisation process on people’s lives has not only resulted in a higher quality of life and modernised consumerist practices, but has also created a series of problems,

133 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 conceptualised 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 utilising 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 idealised 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 cultural 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 of the American EP-3 spy plane that had collided with a Chinese flight 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.110 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 alleged organisation, the French foreign ministry and the signatures of the participating mainland artists.111

110 See Huang yongli, Jiang zhi, Qiu zhijie, Shu Ke-wen, Wu Huang and Wu meichun (2002), “Di si jie Shenzhen dangdai diaosu yishu zhan shang Huang Yongli de caifang (Interview with Huang Yongli about the 4th Shenzhen Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition on December 11, 2002).” In: artlinkart.com, available at: http://www.artlinkart.com/cn/article/overview/c08csCop (accessed January 24, 2018). 111 For the original letter drafted by Daniel Buren and signed by the participating mainland artists on

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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 cultural 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 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 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

December 10, 2001. See artlinkart, available at: http://www.artlinkart.com/cn/article/overview/474csCpr (accessed January 24, 2018). For the final release of the letter of protest of December 12, 2001, see artlinkart.com, available at: http://www.artlinkart.com/cn/article/overview/609csCpi (accessed January 24, 2018).

135 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 in China. In spite of their cultural differences, the cultural intermediates have displayed serious cultural intentions and aspirations for their various undertakings, forming an academic-led public sphere connected with the idea of Habermasian communicative rationality. Because of their growing authority in the interpretation of cultural materials, cultural intermediates have been able to act as reflexive producers who channel their cultural capital into the museum. They have also added a strategic communication component to the museum in its interaction with the public domain. They thus serve as legitimators of art knowledge and form a professional niche in the structure of museum regulation. In addition, they have taken an important role in negotiating the state’s regulatory mediation of the relationship between art and society.

Nevertheless, the museum has limited its mechanism for public feedback to simple exit questionaries 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 citizen for supporting a stable, progressivist consumer society. However, museum visitors are not cultural blank spaces. Assuming that visitors are not passive receivers but are instead socio- culturally differentiated individuals, the next case study identifies differences in visiting experiences, and the politics of signification these differences involve.

5.5. Educated Youth, Provincial Visitors, and a Diversified National Public

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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. 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 characterised 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”112, 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 emphasised. 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 were also displays of works of overseas female Chinese artists possessing relatively

112 This is the original English title of the exhibition.

137 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 17 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 education113, and 73% were aged 20 to 30114. 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 characterised 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

113 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. 114 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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adopt a negotiated position in which opinions varied according to their prior knowledge or their prior cultural experience.

Integrative/Adaptive Negotiated Culturalists Aesthetic cosmopolitans Utilitarian art learners Social learners

Type ofType identities Leisure consumers Revolutionary history

Types of identity of Types enthusiasts

Table I: Modes of museum identification of the visitors of He Xiangning Art Museum

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 realised 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 emphasises 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

139 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 is a Chinese artistic expression for seeking infinite meanings beyond appearance and image] …I remember 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 university girl)

Another visitor, a retired university teacher, who had a longstanding interest in literature and calligraphy, emphasised 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 biology university 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 demonstrates a shared quest for cultivation through engagement with Chinese traditional culture. These visitors consider 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 mobilised in Maoist Communist era. According to David Holmes (1997, 39), personalisation 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

140 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 specialised arts production system.

This visitor segment uses the museum as a learning platform and confirms 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 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 gave him new ideas for his creative work.

Leisure consumers are 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.

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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 student in Design 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 both 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 mould her temperament.

Revolutionary history enthusiasts are those whose attitudes resonated with the state’s ethos of nationalism by cultivating nostalgia for the revolutionary past.

There were one or two elderly visitors expressing a strong sense of having had a revolutionary spirit in their 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 instruction 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.

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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 undertake either intellectual or phenomenological engagement 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 negotiate 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 museum visit was concerned with people’s understanding of their own existence and the people around them, and how their experiences can be communicated and participating in. Likewise, a university graduate in engineering considered contemporary art to offer him an alternative perspective about today’s society, and about the way that artists express themselves in a fast-changing society.

The exhibition also enticed visitors who applied a gender perspective to the works. A masters 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 the unique perspective taken by them. 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

143 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 a 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 globalisation, or those who immerse 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 at 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 multi-media 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

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exhibition is more about political relationships, and 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 Da Fa 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 official cultural exchange program of the state, and is seldom publicised. 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 been increased. Cultural

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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)

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 leaners” 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. The visitors have different cultural orientations, ranging from personal identification with Chinese traditions, political culture, foreign culture, to 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 homogenous national public propagated by the state.

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5.6 Conclusion

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 cultural 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 since the 1980s. 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 organisational change is also important for explaining the increasingly influential role of cultural intermediaries who work surrounded by a state discourse wrought by nationalistic, diplomatic and developmentalist ideologies.

Although inseparable from the institutional structures affecting them, cultural 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 publicise their approaches to revisiting history based on their disciplinary knowledge, manage geo-political- 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 a rational negotiation of the attributes of the state. However, there are hurdles to be confronted throughout the realm of public discourse. They include regional difference and its

147 politics, art censorship, and ideological divergence between the intermediaries and the state, and amongst the intermediaries themselves.

Within the cultural production system, audiences act as message receivers or conventional 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 in contemporary China. In the first place, this study has sought to interrogate the institutional boundaries set up by nationalist and economic policy agendas and to recognise the agency of cultural 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 (and perhaps against) the cultural practices of the government and illuminate the changing production of signification and the contestation of the nation in the twenty- first century. Secondly, the visitor study has attested to Bourdieu’s (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 visit 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 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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6

TIMES MUSEUM IN GUANGZHOU

This chapter examines how the Times Museum in Guangzhou combines private market and local-global cultural capital to articulate its particular mode of cultural production, and how this action is received by its public. The museum originated from an architectural and artistic idea for responding to the urbanisation process and stimulating artistic production in the Greater 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 non-governmental organisation offers a distinctive cultural circuit that can help to form a particular kind of cultural public sphere that is relatively independent of the state and relies on non-government organisations 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 structural factors, the cultural intermediaries and their practices, and the various types of museum public. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section examines how the museum is 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 organisational network and production. In this case, the relatively democratic, autonomous organisation structure is the key feature that not only allows the cultural 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 cultural intermediaries involved with this museum produce their ideas and activities, the subsequent two sections examine

149 in detail their core practices. Section Two explicates how they have articulated the global 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 Three discusses the museum’s effort to construct a regional narrative of art history in order to confront 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 mobilising the “glocalisation” 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 identification and demonstrate their positions in relation to museum production. Based on semi-structured 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 in accepting what they experienced 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 mobilising 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, and on the other hand, it is subject to the influence of both state and popular culture propagated by the entertainment media.

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The conclusion of the chapter summarises the various intersecting types of capital that the museum uses to produce a unique form of public culture. In short, this private museum has demonstrated cultural agency in reconciling market interests and state regulations, in mediating local and global dynamics, promoting regional artistic interventions and cultural networks, and in constructing a public oriented to independent views and autonomous values.

6.1. 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 financially regulated by a real estate company. From conceptualising and designing to the final materialisation 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 how creative professionals have been involved in generating new ideas and knowledge, on the other hand. At the same time, as a state- registered civil organisation, 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 organisational structure in which cultural producers have secured a relatively high degree of autonomy in cultural production activities. The cultural intermediaries include in-house curators and managers, both local and global artists and curators, 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 organisations 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

151 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” (CWED) (Chung et. al. 2001, 28). Where a traditional city strives for a condition of balance, harmony and a certain degree of homogeneity, the 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, Koolhas 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 (Times Museum 2017a). 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 building 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 materialise 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.

Illustration II: The main entrance of the Times Museum (Photo by the author)

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Located in a newly built 19-storey fashionable, residential apartment building in the Baryun District at the northern edge of Guangzhou, where the urbanisation process has been accelerating since the 1990s, the museum mainly serves the rising middle-class. The museum has an exhibition hall, a flower café shop, a reading room, an archive on the top floor, a museum office on the 14th floor, and on the ground floor a lobby, an art bookshop, a creative gift shop, and a café, which can be turned into an event space.115 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.116 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 commodity-focused capitalist culture. In the fast-developing urbanisation process occurring in the Pearl River Delta Region, the company has played a role in shaping 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 (Times Museum 2017). This museum model reflects ideas of corporate social responsibility, and leads us to re-imagine the role of developers, who are commonly criticised 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

115 During my visit at the end of 2017, the flower café shop had been replaced by a temporary book corner; and the art bookshop on the ground floor had become a café. 116 Interview with museum director Zhao Ju, June 10, 2015, Guangzhou.

153 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 cultural 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.

While no law or regulation has been officially set to protect and promote the development of private museums, the Times Museum is registered with the Guangdong Administration Bureau of Civil Organisations as a non-governmental organisation (NGO, or minjian zuzhi) placed in the category of non-profit institutions. As Yu Keping (2011) notes, China has a broad range of classifications of civil organisations. It is important to clearly identify here the prominent characteristics of the museum. First, it is an independent organisation that does not represent the state and its government. Second, it is a non-profit 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 for special exhibitions. 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 10 million RMB.117 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 not volunteers but are professionally paid. The full-time staff are 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.

117 ibid.

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The Times Museum is a non-governmental organisation, but like other civil organisations in China, the museum is under micro-institutional regulation and subject to supervision by the government. 118 In an effort to maintain greater autonomy, the museum has seldom collaborated with government organisations or state museums. Its exhibition or programme partners range from artists’ collectives and independent art spaces to art academies, foreign consulates or cultural organisations. However, the museum model does not reflect Western notion of civil society as something separate 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 recognised as a 4A social organisation (the highest rating amongst all art institutions at the provincial level) by the government of Guangdong in 2017.119 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 scholars and a trustee board comprised of less than 20 sponsors 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 institutionalising minjian art museums in Chinese society, which is understood in Chinese as “meishuguan shehuihua” (literally meaning “socialisation of art museums”) (Qu 2017).

Although founded and funded by the Times Property, the museum’s internal organisation is an autonomous entity with decentralised leadership and relatively democratised decision-making. Currently, there are 15 full-time staff members working in four main units, namely, administration, exhibitions, public programmes,

118 According to Yu Keping (2011, 79-83), in China, the macro institutional environment is generally favorable to the growth of civil society, but in terms of micro institutions, particularly government laws and regulations, civil organisations in China are all subject to the hierarchical registration and multiple supervisions by the government at different levels. 119 “Guangdong shidai meishuguan bei ping wei 4A ji shehui zuzhi” (The Guangdong Times Museum was rated as 4A social organisation) in Read01.com, Dec 28 2017. Available at: https://read01.com/zh-hk/0eegz83.html#.Wo4JhahuaUm.

155 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 art 120 and it occasionally sought advice from local artists and critics121. 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.122 Since the introduction of the new managerial system in 2017, the six 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.123 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 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.

120 Currently, they are Wang Huangsheng (artist, scholar and the Director of CAFA Art Museum) and Hou Hanru (an international Chinese curator based in France). 121 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. 122 Interview with Zhao Ju, 2015. 123 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 non-governmental art museums) in Read01.com, April 27, 2017. Available at https://read01.com/2LoGLo.html#.WnQAoqiWaUl.

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Based on its exhibition and program 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 handicraftspeople, and folk opera artists all joined together to explore methodologies for reconstructing 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 organising debut shows for some well-known international contemporary artists, 124 the “Open Studio”, a short-term residency, was set up for artists to 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 utilising 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-organised 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-organised institutions in China. In spite of the differences in their organisational 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 organisations, foreign consulates, cultural

124 For examples, Tino Sehgal and Nobuyoshi Araki.

157 organisations, and media companies. Its media support mainly comes from private or independent art platforms and social media such as Weibo and WeChat.125 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 organisations and spaces. It is affiliated with a local research-led, non-profit art-making institution, Huangbian Station. In 2016, the museum formed a coalition called “Wu Xing Hui”126 with other local art spaces127, with the aim of fostering the contemporary art ecology in Guangzhou. The coalition has co-organised a fund-raising activity to auction artwork donated by artists, and to seek the support from collectors and private companies.

To summarise, 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, 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 revitalisation of space and communities. The museum is a social organisation under the micro-regulation of the government. At the same time, it has an autonomous organisational 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 cultural intermediaries in absorbing the influence of globalisation and empowering themselves as active agents in local and regional cultural constructions. It has demonstrated a new space for independent cultural organisations, which exist with the support of both the private economy and the cultural sphere.

125 Like WhatsApp and Line, WeChat is a social media platform for conservations in small groups of friends. It is different from Weibo which is a more open public platform for information, news, stories, and for speaking publicly. 126 “Wu Xing” refers to the Five Elements (wuxing) defined by Chinese Astrology. 127 The organisations are Libreria Borges, Video Bureau, Haibai Station, and Observatory.

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6.2. Developmental Perspective of Cultural Globalisation

From the outset, the Times Museum has positioned itself at the intersection of the “global” and the “local”. It is “a gateway to the world of art through research and presentation of contemporary art and related cultural ideas, and the promotion of local, public and interdisciplinary artistic practices and cultural production.”128 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 conceptualises cultural globalisation as a process of ‘glocalisation’ — as a dialectical process between the global and the local forces in cultural change and formation”. As she notes, “the notion of ‘glocalisation’ was first presented by (Roland) Robertson (1995) in the attempt to overcome the weaknesses in the notion of ‘globalisation’ which emphasises the development of cultural convergence, suggesting a rigid, one-way process from the West to the rest of the world and slighting the heterogenised force of local cultures in the change process” (ibid).

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 interiorised 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 mobilised in the museum’s cultural production undertakings that operate at the global-local nexus.

6.2.1 Critique of Art Commodification

128 See the webpage of Guangdong Times Museum. Available at: http://en.timesmuseum.org/about/ (accessed 30 April, 2014).

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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, multi-media projects, archival materials, performances, workshops and forums, the types of art or art practices exhibited in the museum are largely conceptual, non-material, 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 commoditising 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 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 immaterialised and de-commodified artistic production to promote discussion amongst local artists. In the show “Pulse Reaction — An

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Exchange Project on Artistic Practice” (2012), Chinese contemporary artists intensively discussed their artistic production, particularly their moments of creation and the material and non-material 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.

6.2.2 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 prioritised 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 destabilised the Chinese audience’s conventional perception of art. It has also mobilised 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

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Gunilla Klingberg, 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 could 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. 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.129

129 Interview with project coordinator (education) Jacqueline Lam, June 9, 2015, Guangzhou.

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Furthermore, at the 2nd community festival, “Wrong Place, Right Time” in 2014, Hong Kong artists Gum Cheung 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 portraits in the mobile museum. The project intended to question the role of an art museum in society, and to problematise 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. When they were moved on 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 corporatised 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-Sheer-Form 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 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, . The exhibition encouraged local people to reflect on their identification process in different social spaces. 130 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.

130 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 a 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?” See the webpage of the exhibition, available at http://en.timesmuseum.org/exhibitions/detail/id-329/ (accessed January 27, 2018).

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Illustration III: The artist Gum Cheung and a passer-by drawing portraits of each other in a public area near the Huangbian village, 2014. (Photo courtesy: Clara Cheung and Gum Cheung)

6.2.3 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”. 131 With an emphasis on visitors’ positioning being based on their experience and imagination, the museum has recognised the place of visitors and their potential for exerting agency and inter-agency in cultural production. In addition, based on their curatorial exhibitions/projects, 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 urbanisation, 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 mind-sets, 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

131 See the webpage of the exhibition, “You Can Only Think about Something if You Think of Something Else”. Available at http://en.timesmuseum.org/exhibitions/detail/id-330/ (accessed June 14, 2017).

164 art, art spaces, art pieces, artists, and 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 conceptualised 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, 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&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 mobilising 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 advisor Hou Hanru. In the exhibition, autonomous regions were conceptualised as two possibilities of geopolitical organisation, 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. 132 By showcasing 16 artists (groups) from around the world, the exhibition aimed to reflect

132 See the webpage of the exhibition, available at: http://en.timesmuseum.org/exhibitions/detail/id- 321/ (accessed January 27, 2018).

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“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 emphasised the connection between art and 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 urbanisation in southern China. In an artist-residency and exhibition programme in 2017, the international artist initiative My villages was invited to develop a global neighborhood project, called the “International Village Produce”. They showcased village practices from Germany, Russia, and The Netherlands around themes such as neighborhood and social life, natural resources and materials, and the history of production and culture. They also organised social activities to gather different kinds of residents from the

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Huangbian neighborhood 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 emphasised the representation of a shared community, collective awareness of the traditions and histories that have been discarded by urbanisation, and the inter-referencing of global community projects for seeking a trans-national 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, which has transformed art visitors from “spectators” into active participants and public actors, arguably helping them to create a more “independent and autonomous” public.

6.2.4 Institutional Self-critique and 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 institutionalisation 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 cultural intermediaries 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 institutionalisation, 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,

167 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 A Museum That is Not exhibition 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 characterised 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 Yingqian (2011, 13- 14) put it, the exhibition was rather like an instance of the practice of micro-politics 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, 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 institutionalising of art, namely “self-historicisation” and “proactive parasitism”. The former concept was coined by 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-

168 institutionalisation 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-institutionalising 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 internationalisation 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. 133 In addition to the exhibition, a two-day seminar titled “Active Withdrawal — Weak Institutionalism and the Institutionalisation 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.

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 criticising 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.

133 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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6.3 Artistic Regionalisation: Southern Imaginary vs Northern Hegemony

The Times Museum emphasises its geographical position to reflect the unique social, economic and cultural conditions in the urbanisation processes in the Pearl River Delta, and to stimulate artistic practices and cultural production in the region through research, exchange and support of artistic creation.134 This section considers another major initiative connected with regionalisation 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 program, “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 recognised as “an alternative model of modernisation, 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/conservative,” amidst the social situation complicated by “the notions of ‘freedom and openness’, globalisation, the commodity economy and consumerism”.135

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

134 See the webpage of Times Museum. Available at: http://en.timesmuseum.org/about/ (accessed June 14, 2017). 135 See the webpage of the exhibition, “Big Tail Elephants: One Hour, No Room, Five Shows”, available at http://en.timesmuseum.org/exhibitions/detail/id-716/ (accessed June 14, 2017).

170 works and performances in non-art spaces such as cultural palaces, bars, the basements of commercial buildings and outdoor venues.136 Overall, the exhibition was meant to recognise 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 Pearl River Delta Region based on the following principles: firstly, engaging with the regional perspectives of the Pearl River Delta and the writing of local art history that intersects with globalisation; 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”.137

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 co-existence 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

136 ibid. 137 See the webpage of the project, “All the Way South Research Fund” http://en.timesmuseum.org/exhibitions/detail/id-851/ (accessed June 14, 2017).

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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 put forward by Pearl River Delta artists is regionally unified, while at the same time exhibiting specific differences between (artistic) methodologies.”138

On the other hand, the museum reimagines PRD according to the history and context of the region. Through tracing the original history of Cantonese laborers during their southbound migration, the museum constructs a “southern theory” as a way to eliminate the inequality between the (colonialised/neo-colonised) Global South and the (imperial/neo-imperialising) 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 center 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 socio-cultural 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-organised activities that negotiate between global capitalism and local forms of interpretation and resistance.”139

The previous two sections highlighted the two major methodologies — glocalisation and regionalisation — of the museum’s cultural production, and explicated the agencies that have been mobilised by cultural intermediaries in the processes. Firstly, the cultural intermediaries use the developmental approach to orient cultural globalisation and mediate the process by drawing critical imperatives in cultural production and driving socio-cultural changes in China. By favoring immaterialised and de-commodified artistic production and various kinds of artistic

138 See the webpage of “Big Tail Elephants”. 139 ibid.

172 intervention and curatorial proposals, cultural intermediaries have questioned the unprecedented force of art marketisation; 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 emphasises 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 ways. Secondly, they have helped to construct a southbound “alternate” art history of the Pearl Delta 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, they suggest 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 2005, 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.140 The members 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 art works. They are presented as active participants. The differences in their visiting experiences will be explored in depth in the following section.

140 Interview with Jacqueline Lam, June 9, 2015.

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6.4 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 relate 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 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 mobilising 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 semi-structured 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 15 and 30 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, the exhibition “Roman Ondák: Storyboard” was taking place. Ondák is a Slovakian contemporary artist with a high international profile. He

174 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 re-displayed 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, emphasising the relevance of space and its migrations — physical and temporary — in the artistic practices of Roman Ondák”.141 With much emphasis on the relationship between art, space and audience, the exhibition served as a platform for challenging visitors’ spectatorial relationship to art and re- emphasising 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.142 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 categorised the visitors into six distinct identities: “the imaginative audience”, “participants”, “social learners”, “meaningful leisure seekers”, “committed visitors”, and “classic

141 See the webpage of the exhibition, “Roman Ondák: Storyboard”. Available at http://en.timesmuseum.org/exhibitions/detail/id-517 (accessed 14 June 2017). 142 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.

175 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 degrees of adaptability to the museum.

Table II: Modes of museum identification of the visitors of Times Museum

Integrative/Adaptive Negotiated

Committed visitors Classic museum visitors

Social learners

Participants

Imaginative audience

Types of identity of Types

Meaningful leisure seekers

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 conceptualised 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 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

176 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 (2000, 3) 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 realisation 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.”

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 their conversation with a volunteer was meaningful. They said that they used to be passive viewers, but

177 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 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). She came to the museum because of its reputation in the field of exhibition-making. She thought the artist expressed the

178 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 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 organising programs. 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

179 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.

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 and 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 , 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

180 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 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 organising a weekend body movement workshop for kids inside the museum. As a frontline cultural practitioner, he 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.

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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 spectaorship; 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 Pearl River Delta 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 characterised 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 experience and personal reflection, rather than pure enjoyment and entertainment, as a way to enhance their life quality. The museum has challenged the audience’s preconceived ideas of what art is and what art should look like.

6.5 Conclusion

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 organisation 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.

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Due to the autonomous and democratic organisational structure of the museum, key cultural intermediaries are able to exercise their agencies. As reflected in its dynamic production process, the museum has formed a civil-led public cultural sphere dependent on the market economy, but distant from the state’s cultural production activities. Local cultural intermediaries have consciously and strategically responded to the forces of globalisation 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 publicised 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. 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 meaning-makers. 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 essentialised 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

184 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.

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7

HONG KONG MUSEUM OF ART IN HONG KONG

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 authority of the Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Government. The museum now positions itself as arguably 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 preserve the cultural heritage of China and promote art with a local perspective, to conduct cultural heritage research, and to make collections accessible by providing a significant platform for artistic talents both locally and globally.143

Based on the analytical framework of the museum circuit, this chapter examines how this official 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 post-colonial periods, and how the museum’s publics orient themselves in the process of cultural consumption. This chapter is divided into five sections. Examining the changes in cultural governance practices since Hong Kong entered its post-colonial era by returning to the political control of the Chinese state, Section One outlines the bureaucratic system and networks through which museum producers are regulated. The core museum staff 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 organisations, individual art stakeholders, collectors, and members of art societies.

For more than half a century, the Hong Kong art museum has built a comprehensive collection that covers Chinese antiquities and historical pictures, Chinese fine art including the Xubaizhai Collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy, and Hong Kong art. Thematic exhibitions of items from the permanent

143 See the webpage of Hong Kong Museum of Art. Available at: http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/Arts/en_US/web/ma/18.html (accessed June 26, 2017).

186 collections and temporary exhibitions of art treasures from the West and China make up the majority of the museum’s exhibitions. In sections two to five, 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 exhibit: exhibitions that involve the historical painting collection, international blockbusters, exhibitions of Chinese art and cultural materials, and local artworks. I explore for what purposes these representations were made and how they were organised, 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 feudalised public” in which critical-rational thoughts and debates are discouraged. The museum has demonstrated its strength in articulating art representations that encompass the local, national, global, and colonial components for different uses such as diplomacy, cultural nationalism, leisure consumption, global gratification, and the interpretation of Hong Kong local culture.

The last section 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 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 state/museum’s ideologies.

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In conclusion, the bureaucratic-led local museum unveils its distinctive positions in relation to the colonial legacy and when articulating the discourses relating to globalisation, nationalism, and local culture. The museum also articulates the tension with its counter-publics in terms of values and identities that have, in general, contested the formation and operation of its distinctive cultural circuit.

7.1 Museum Bureaucracy and its Institutional Network

The Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMA) 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 centralised system of management and is directly governed and financially supported by the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (HKSAR) government. Emphasising 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. HKMA now has around 30 curatorial staff out of a total of around 80 staff members. These staff members are mainly permanent civil servants with 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 Program Planning Committee, which is composed of the chief 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

188 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 organisation, mainly formed by art enthusiasts from upper- and middle- class backgrounds, has supported the museum’s public programs primarily in the form of sponsorship. In addition, the museum has become associated with a host of art stakeholders that help with organising exhibitions and programs. 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 programs. 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 nineties, 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-organisers and museum sponsors have included foreign consulates, national and international museums, and private corporations. There has been limited collaboration of the museum with non-governmental art organisations, independent art spaces, and academia, usually in the form of fringe or educational activities.144 In addition, art

144 For example, in 2001, the museum expanded the scope of the local biennial through partnership with various art organisations and institutions to create a series of fringe programmes involving varied activities celebrating the artistic achievements of the city. The recent collaboration with Asia Art Archive on a short-term research project relating to local art history is another notable example.

189 critics and independent curators are engaged with its activities only in limited ways.145

In short, the Hong Kong Art Museum 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 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; independent art critics, independent curators and independent art spaces are excluded.

7.2 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.146 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

145 The “Hong Kong Art: Open Dialogue” (2008 – 2013) was the only project that involved independent curators. 146 Examples of these are the exhibitions entitled “Pictures from the Charter Collection” (1966) and “Historical Pictures and Prints from the Law & Sayer Collection” (1967).

190 involved portrayals of the daily activities and customs of the people and the topography of a particular locality, such as Hong Kong, Macau, Canton, or the larger Pearl River Delta Region.147 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 objects148, and by the role of western art historians in sanctioning artistic styles that generally privileged the contribution of western artists.149

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”

147 Examples of these are the exhibitions Hong Kong the Changing Scene” (1979) and “Pearl River in the 19th 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. 148 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 emphasised the artistic characteristics and achievement of a special group of the 19th 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. 149 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 popularising 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.

191 design, surrounded by a red (symbolic colour of China) wall to represent a sense of national glory.

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 colonisers and settlers, the gaze of colonisers, 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 exhibition 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 prioritised 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.

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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 revitalise a popular engagement with the collection. 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. The exhibitions were successful in engaging visitors to undertake an imaginary journey to the 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 , 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.

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 traveling at a time when China was in regular conflict with Western powers. The journey navigated through the shopping meccas and places for site-seeing, 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.

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7.3 International Blockbusters and Global Cultural Capital

In the colonial era, the Hong Kong art museum was a stage for presenting modern aesthetics, emphasising the status, artistic progression, and innovation associated with art objects. It played a significant role in naturalising 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 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,150 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 organised 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-organised 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.

150 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 20th century Chinese Masters” (2014).

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These shows of world-class art have demonstrated the government’s capacity for mobilising global cultural capital and pursuing political, economic, and cultural ties with its global capitalist allies (including global players in 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 organisers. They controlled the exhibitions’ production, limiting the creation of new or 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 emphasised 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 , 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 revolutionising 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. Instead, the museum 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, it installed 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 civilisation is another common subject of blockbuster exhibitions. “Egyptian Treasures from the British Museum”

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(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. 151 “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 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 emphasised the primacy of the “great civilisations” 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 18th 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 both the exclusivity of high art and the consumerist populism of heterogeneous culture that can maximise attendance” (West 1995, 75).

The international blockbuster exhibitions circulating amongst the capitals and metropolitan cities around the world have become an important aspect of globalisation 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 to 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 an ideological 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

151 The figure was found on the webpage of HKMA. Available at: http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/Arts/en_US/web/ma/article02.html (accessed January 16, 2018).

196 through these exhibitions. Despite having record-breaking visitor numbers, the blockbuster exhibitions were not successful in enticing Hong Kong audiences. This claim is supported by a qualitative study of the “Andy Warhol” exhibition in which curious explorers and leisure wanderers formed the majority of those in the museum audience cohorts (Ting and Ho 2014). 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 shows152. In short, the blockbusters were characterised 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 their direct consumption of Western knowledge.

7.4 National Representation and the Grandeur of Dynastic Art

Chinese fine art and dynastic antiques have been central in the collections and displays of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, but their representations in exhibitions have changed in the post-colonial 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, , , 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 of the museum’s history 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 and 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,153 to

152 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 HKMA in email communication on January 14, 2015. 153 Exemplary exhibitions include “From the Realm of the Luminous: Art Relics of the ” (1986), “The Grandeur of the Chinese Empire Art of the Han & Tang Dynasties” (1986)

197 encourage visitors to contemplate the beauty and perfection of objects, and to recognise 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 his efforts to create an understanding of 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 emphasise 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 lie of things154, 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-first century, through strategic purchases and generous 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. 155 The museum’s collection of Chinese painting and modern calligraphy has been further strengthened by the donation of Lau Siu-lui’s Taiyilou and “Gems of Antiques Collections in Hong Kong” (2002). 154 This perspective highlights culturally-oriented 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 (Appadurai 1986, 5). 155 See the webpage of HKMA, “Museum Collections Xubaizhai Collection of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy”. Available at: http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/Arts/en_US/web/ma/collection06.html (accessed January 26, 2018).

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Collection, and Fan ’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 Guangzhong 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 pieces156 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 20th century are common, organised in terms of a cultural model structured by the categories of Chinese tradition and innovation or of “East meeting West”.157 Temporary exhibitions by guest curators have sought to initiate cultural reflection on Chinese contemporary art. They have attempted to strategically propagate China’s position in the global cultural arena (including emphasising the ongoing influence of its traditional philosophy) by putting together the works of artists in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan along with overseas Chinese artists.158 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.

156 They include “The Book from the Sky” presented by Xu Bing, and “The ” by Wenda, and works by Wu Shanzhuan, Lin Tainmiao, Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Tainde. 157 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 Guangzhong Art Retrospective Exhibition” (2010), “A Passion for Tradition: The Art of Li Yanshan” (2011) and “Revitalising the Glorious Tradition - The Retrospective Exhibition of ’s Art” (2011). 158 For example, “Inside Out: New Chinese Art” (2000) curated by Gao Minglu and “The Origins of Dao: New Dimensions in Chinese Contemporary Art” (2013) curated by Professor Pi Daojian.

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Furthermore, since China adopted the Open Door Policy in 1978, the HKMA’s collaboration with museums in mainland China has grown. Starting from 1997, blockbuster exhibitions featuring Chinese national cultural heritage organised in collaboration with China’s State Bureau of Cultural Relics and with national and provincial museums have increased significantly. 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 civilisation, 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 civilisations 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.159 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-book 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 (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 civilised culture, inviting Hong Kong people to see themselves as part of this nation.

159 For instance, “Warring States Treasures-Cultural Relics from the State of Zhongshan, Hebei Province” (1999), “Relics from Yuanming Yuan” (2000), “Origins of Chinese Civilisation - 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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7.5 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. In the post-colonial period, 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 interfusion 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 subsequent series of the artists’ solo exhibitions in the lead-up to 1997. The

201 works of these artists were understood as reflections of the modernisation of tradition and a progression towards important artistic innovations.

Since the Handover in 1997, the Hong Kong Museum of Art has organised exhibitions to pay tribute to senior or deceased local modern artists. Survey shows for celebrating creativity and for branding a city image that is characterised by the idea of vitality have become common.160 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”,161 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 organising thematic shows exhibiting local contemporary art, the museum has tended to reconstruct narratives of Hong Kong cultural identity. In the “Chinglish — Hong Kong Art Exhibition” in 2007, in-house curator Eva Tam stated that a notable shift in the narrative of Hong Kong culture away from “East-meets- West” to the idea of embracing different cultures in the era of globalisation 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.

160 For example, “Hong Kong Visual Arts: Vibrant City” (1999) and “Hong Kong Visual Arts: City Rhythm Impressions of Diversity” (1999). 161 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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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 emphasised 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. 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 scrutinising further how local culture has been officially interpreted, while the museum has picked other, less contested ways to tell the story of Hong Kong.

As reflected in its main collection and exhibitions, the art museum has organised itself around the subject of cultural identity. 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-meets-West discourse were naturalized – the post-colonial period has seen the museum make a dramatic shift of cultural representation towards China imagined as a national structure. 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 prioritised the educational-entertainment needs of the audience. The museum’s collection of Chinese fine art and antiquities has been expanding 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

203 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 organised to extoll 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 civilisation. Finally, Hong Kong art, which once was understood in terms of a connection between modernised 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 cultural identity. They serve to create a feudalised public sphere where “representation and appearances outweigh rational debate” (Holub 1991, 6). The notion of a feudalised “public” was developed by Jürgen Habermas.162 In his book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ([1962]1989), he described the decline of the “bourgeois/literary public sphere”. Rational-critical debate has waned, as newspapers and magazines change their functions from distributing political ideas to distributing advertising messages linked with profits ([1962]1989, 165). Debate

162 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.

204 has regressed back into a mode of representative publicity that Habermas terms as “the refeudalisation 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, “feudalise(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. In addition, there has been increasing use of advertisement and marketing techniques to promote a “good” image of the museum, treating visitors as mass consumers for the goal of increasing attendance. 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 refeudalisation 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 depoliticised 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 consultant 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

205 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. There is an urgent need for examining the differences amongst museum visitors and researching their agency in museum consumption.

7.6 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 Hong Kong Museum of Art has drawn a broad spectrum of adult visitors. The majority of them are between 18 and 30 years old. Based on the visitors’ narratives of their museum experience, I categorise 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 state/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 contextualise 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 emphasised the form and texture of his sculptures, which reflect his passion for nature and life, and spring from the artist’s inner capacities,

206 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 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 urbanisation. 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

207 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 familiarising 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 (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 specialisations and covering a wide range of occupations. They included doctors, journalists, financial analysts, restaurant waitresses, dental assistants, and clerks. 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 specialised 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.

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Based on their own interpretation of the museum and their art engagement, the purpose of their visit, and cultural interests and expectations, I categorised 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 significant 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 state/museum. Together with the “critical audience”, they have made it more difficult for the art museum to sustain the image of being a trustworthy public institution and thus more difficult to legitimatise official representations. The seven modes of identification are explicated in the following table.

Integrative/Adaptive Negotiated Oppositional

Leisure consumers Cultural tourists Critical audience

Curious explorers Activists

Enthusiastic/Utilitarian

Types of identity learners Amateur connoisseurs

Table III: Modes of museum identification of the publics of Hong Kong Museum of Art

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 comprised elderly visitors (regular visitors as well as casual ones) from both professional and working classes. The former looked exclusively at

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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, in 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 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.

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Professionals simply selected what they liked. A Malaysian young male visitor, who was an 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 local young doctor stated that he often frequented museums and galleries for relaxation. He preferred seeing installation and multi-media works. In 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 art works. 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. In the visit, he enjoyed the works in the “Four Gentlemen” exhibit and Wu Guangzhou’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 museum. She decided to visit the museum because of her interest in

211 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.

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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, 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 organise more art workshops and demonstrations than it actually does.

A university student specialising 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

213 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. A couple, who had both previously worked in the educational field, visited the museum once in 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 into what contemporary artists express…of course, Chinese culture is my roots. I think it might be because I was educated in the 60s.”

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

214 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 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.

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Amateur connoisseurs were another category of art-related professionals. They were frequent museum-goers who utilised 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 recognised artistic taste and knowledge of art.

For example, a collector in his 40s had emigrated from Fujian in mainland China twenty years ago. He had been active in collecting 20th century Chinese art works 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 organisations or collectors’ clubs. He had already joined the Friends of the Art Museum at a university. He realised 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 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

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HKMA 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 specialised 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.”

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

217 from her cultural background, encompassed different thoughts, and also expressed no specific meaning or purpose. With a 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 who 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 centered 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 resistant to hegemonic meanings, being motivated for socio-political reasons to make oppositional or subversive readings ‘against the grain’” (Morley 1980, Fiske 1987, Radway 1984 cited Livingston and Lunt [1994] 2002, 72). As the social psychologists and media scholars Sonia Livingston and Peter Lunt ([1994]2002, 91) note, as critical judgment

218 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 middle man in the media industry, criticised 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 criticised 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 organisation…I remember the works in 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 post-colonial 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-organised 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 Jean-Michel 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. 163 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.

163 Press release by the government of Hong Kong (2008), “CS (Chief Secretary) ends fruitful visit to France”, May 14, 2008. Available at: http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/200805/14/P200805140286.htm.

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Illustration IV: “Louis Vuitton: A Illustration V: Artist protest in Passion for Creation” exhibition at front of the museum office, 9 HKME, 2009 (Photo by the author) August, 2009 (Photo courtesy:

Art Museum Concern Group)

In 2004, a group of about twenty local artists formed the “Art Museum Concern Group” in protest against the exhibition. The Group had 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 financed, 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 and curatorial practices. Secondly, they criticised the museum for privileging the self- publicity of a private foundation of a globalised 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 organising forums on various issues, including the relationship between business and art, the effect of globalisation 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

221 stakeholders.164 Besides the actions of this group, similar criticism by art critics and artists were published in the print media.165 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 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 non- government organisations 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. 166 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.167

7.7 Conclusion

164 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, June 19, 2009. Available at: http://www.inmediahk.net/node/1003619. 165 For example, see Lau Kin Wai (2009), “Bei bao de yishuguan” (The wrapped art museum), Hong Kong Economic Journal, June 29, 2009, and Ho Hing Kay (2009), “you you cheap: yishuguan de mingpai tuixiao zhan.” (Expensive and Cheap: the art museum’s brand promotion show), Hong Kong Economic Journal, July 6, 2009. 166 Siu, Phila (2014), “Protesters urge Hong Kong Museum of Art to remove ivory and rhino horn exhibits”, South China Morning Post, July 6, 2014. Available at: http://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/article/1548012/protesters-urge-hk-museum-art-remove-ivory-and-rhino-horn-exhibits. 167 Interview with chief-curator of HKMA, Eve Tam, August 27, 2015, Hong Kong.

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This chapter has offered an examination of a local Hong Kong museum, which has reflected the centralised 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 critical audience).

Firstly, the study has explored how the museum is institutionally regulated. Under the governmental structure, curatorial autonomy is institutionally confined. Curators construct their professional identity based on management and art scholarship, with the support of individual art advisors, collectors and artists who donate or loan work to the museum. The museum’s major institutional partners are national-level museums and cultural organisations, foreign consulates, and private corporations. The 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 constructed a specific type of cultural identity. In place of a political void, there has been a dramatic shift in representation towards . 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 depoliticised modality of everyday aesthetics and is embedded in a local-national-global nexus of imagination. The museum’s overall cultural production practice tends to feudalise the public sphere.

Finally, public consumption of its contents is an important aspect of 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

223 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 state/museum’s value and representation system. The latter group mainly draws from the forces of the 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.

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8

CONCLUSION: RETHINKING THE DISCOURSES AND PRACTICES OF (ART) MUSEUMS FROM THE MUSEUM CIRCUIT PERSPECTIVE

8. 1 Summary of Findings

This thesis has examined the discourses and practices of museums in contemporary China, focusing on three art museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. It began by addressing the fundamental changes to museums in the shifting context of China, and exposing the methodological limitations for examining the museums. In Chapter One, I highlighted the importance of understanding the complex relationships and new conditions of museums that have given rise to new agencies and diverse publics. Through a literature review in Chapter Two, I questioned the conventional research frameworks that privilege the structure and modes of museum production determined by state and market factors, and adopt methodologies that limit the study of museum publics and visitor reception to instrumental or pragmatic approaches. The role of human agency, particularly the role of social and cultural actors with their specific signifying practices, and the notion of a differentiated public have been neglected in the conventional analysis of contemporary museums in China.

In order to expand the conceptual framework for the analysis the museum in China, I proposed the “museum circuit”, a theoretical model based on the concept of the “cultural circuit” (Du Gay 1997; Hall 1997; Mackay 1997; Thompson 1997; Woodward 1997). As explicated in Chapter Three, the model diverges from analytical methods in which political and ideological meanings are conceived as being linear, the production and representation of the museum are overdetermined, and the museum visitors are represented as passive and undifferentiated. The circuit model addresses various discursive elements, including institutional regulation, cultural production and consumption, identity, and representation, and understands

225 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. Using the model as a guide, my study examined why and how political-economic agents play a regulatory role in museum construction; what meanings and modes of production are created and used by the cultural intermediaries (including the hurdles they have encountered in the circulation process); in what ways the visitors can be differentiated from each other; and how visitors make sense of their museum visits as forms of cultural consumption.

This thesis focused on the study of art museums. Chapter Four traced the history of art museums in China back to the Republican era. It examined the volatile institutional and contextual changes occurring in mainland China in the modern era. It also analysed how various actors have constructed and contested museum ideas and practices in Hong Kong. The study showed how museums have been locally transformed in response to the dynamic internal and external challenges facing the country in different periods of time. Art museums emerged out of the nationalist revolutionary period and were used as a place for aesthetic education. In the early period of Maoist rule, they mainly served to propagate communist socio-political ideologies. The activities of art museums were abruptly disrupted during the Cultural Revolution. In post-reform China, alongside intensive economic development and growing privatisation, art museums as well as the larger art world have undergone drastic changes. Multiple forces including the growing market, the state’s cultural policies, urbanisation, the development of creative cities, and a growing middle class, have continued to shape the processes of cultural regulation, production and consumption. Importantly, academics have started to rethink the relationship between museum and society and have defined art museums as a site for knowledge production. Moreover, private museums have adopted a managerial system different from that of the state. These museums are not only seeking commercial benefits, but are also shaping the cultural consumption of urbanites, a phenomenon which needs greater scrutiny. In Hong Kong, official museums underwent steady development under British rule from the 1960s until the late

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1990s. After 1997, under the “tutelage” of the state of China, Hong Kong museums have been increasingly drawn to constructing a national narrative as well as promoting the image of Hong Kong as a global city. In recent years, civil society-led museological and artistic activist practices have also emerged. We should not underestimate the role played by social agents and their capabilities in expressing their values and identities in the public domain, and how this may influence museum practice.

Three detailed empirical case studies of art museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region were undertaken for this thesis. These three cases reflected a dynamic museum world in which multiple organisational and managerial approaches and different strategies of production co-exist and respond differently to the state/government’s regulations and their broader social and economic conditions. Chapters Five to Seven provided a detailed picture of the three different institutional frameworks of regulation, production, and consumption operating in each museum. These chapters demonstrated the complex forces affecting cultural representation, including nationalism, globalisation, local and regional mapping, and colonial legacies. They also showed how different segments of visitors, characterised by particular socio-cultural orientations and positioning, could be observed. The main findings of the three case studies will be summarised in the following paragraphs. The art museums suggest three different museum circuit types for explaining the relationships between the political-economic, cultural, and social spheres. The circuits will be juxtaposed with each other and their in/commensurability will be examined (see section 8.2). Finally, this chapter also discusses the contributions and limitations of this research (see sections 8.3).

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 academic and cultural practitioners), and the educated elites living in the city. This national art museum represents the newly- established combination of the legitimacy of Communist-party rule and China’s economic and urban modernity. Although under the management of a state-owned enterprise, the museum enjoys relative autonomy in absorbing external skills and

227 knowledge through invited curatorship, collaboration with art scholars, and a broad institutional network that is not limited to state-level enterprises and organisations. The museum’s cultural intermediaries have built up their authority based on their scholarly knowledge about art and their contributions to the canonisation of Chinese art. Instead of directly confronting the political myth around the leading communist figure, He Xiangning, they re-interpret the figure from the perspective of national art history and disciplinary knowledge.

Contemporary art has been used by the state for various purposes, such as for the production of a national imagination, cultural diplomacy, and the cultural economy. The “Cross-Strait Four-Regions” project was taken as an example of how the cultural intermediates have tactically engaged in public diplomacy. They use a platform of artistic and cultural exchange as a way to manage the geo-cultural politics that operate between the regions. The Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, in spite of being used for crafting the city’s image, has expanded into a discursive sphere involving the cultural elites engaging in the evaluation and interpretation of public art. More than being simply “taste gatekeepers”, the museum’s cultural intermediaries arguably act as reflexive producers who actively interpret, redefine, and negotiate the methods of displaying contemporary and modern Chinese art. They have created a professional niche in museum regulation. They also contribute to forming a public sphere which has links to Habermasian “communicative rationality” and potentially engage in a rational negotiation of the cultural attributes of the state.

However, this public sphere led by the cultural elites has not yet reached out to a broader spectrum of society. My visitor study indicated that an urban educated middle class remains the core category of visitors to the He Xiangning Museum. Most of them are people who have moved from other provinces to Shenzhen for work or study, while a few visitors were local tourists. With the exception of the “revolutionary history enthusiasts” who expressed strong nationalist sentiments, visitors generally displayed limited identification with the state-planned nationalism and were oriented to other identities, including those I refer to as “culturalists”, “utilitarian art learners”, “leisure consumers”, “social learners”, and “aesthetic

228 cosmopolitans”. Although nearly all the segments of this urban elite audience tended to absorb what the museum offered them, there was still room for the museum to entice aesthetic cosmopolitans who expected broader cultural outreach from the city in which they lived. Together with “social learners”, their modes of cultural consumption reflected the outlook of a migrant population with privileged middle- class status, seeking a wider social horizon and craving to know more about the outside world. The segmentation of the visitor group reflected the diverse cultural identities of the visitors and 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. The increasing diversification and fragmentation of interests, values, and beliefs of the public that were demonstrated in this case study challenge any assumptions about cultural consensus or a unified national public in China.

The second case was the 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 urbanising 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 organisation rather than a private company, and it is also known as “minban meishuguan” (an art museum run by a non-governmental organisation). Its organisational structure is characterised by autonomy, a democratic culture, and a strong network of local and global actors, who are closely connected with independent, organic, and collective forces. All these factors have contributed to the development of a distinctive cultural sphere.

In the Times Museum, the cultural intermediaries have considerable freedom to impose their cultural agendas. On the one hand, they use the developmental approach to actively direct cultural globalisation towards a discourse of “glocalisation”. They prioritise artistic and curatorial practices that are effective in 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

229 promoting institutional self-critique and reformulation. On the other hand, these cultural intermediaries are constructing a regional narrative of art history in order to confront the cultural hegemony of the capital in the north, and establish a horizon for the southern imaginary operating from a critical subaltern perspective. Their reflexive practices have striven to transcend the local-global boundary and construct a new regional identity that makes the Times Museum an alternative institutional model in the region as well as in the country. It has served as a critical reference point for mobilising local agencies in the process of globalisation, and asserting regional agency in the cultural construction of a heterogeneous conception of China. In addition, it has 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.

The people who visit the museum are mainly educated young adults. Based on my analysis of their interpretation of their visiting experiences, they can be classified into six distinct identities: “the imaginative audience”, “participants”, “social learners”, “meaningful leisure seekers”, “committed visitors”, and “classic museum visitors”. Among them, only the last segment, “classic museum visitors”, were inclined to take a negotiated position in relation to what they experienced in the museum. All other segments were successfully encouraged by the museum to explore new meanings and engage in the production of an “alternative culture”. In short, the private museum has demonstrated cultural agency in reconciling the rival forces of market interests and state regulation, mediating local, global and regional artistic interventions and cultural networks, and constructing a public oriented towards independent views and autonomous values. It supports the argument that the rise of an urban market economy has opened up a new space for the development of cultural organisations 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, is a distinctive post-colonial museum. Since the return of Hong Kong to the control of the Chinese state in 1997, the museum has transitioned towards a “post-colonial” environment,

230 shaped by the combination of national, local and global forces and colonial legacies. Under a centralised bureaucratic system, the museum’s curators construct their professional identity based on their skills in art management and art scholarship. Their practices and the museum’s aesthetic credibility are supported by a network of state-level organisations, individual art stakeholders, and collectors. An examination of the museum’s dominant art discourses and practices — which deal with historical painting collections, international blockbuster exhibitions, Chinese antiquities and modern works of art, and Hong Kong’s local artworks — reveals that the museum is not neutral, but uses its signification practices to regulate the content of cultural identity and the subjectivities related to it. In place of a political void seen in the end of colonial era, there has been a dramatic shift in representation towards an image of China as a national entity. Materials related to the colonial legacy have been used for imagining a national past, providing aesthetic education and creating lively audience experiences. Western art treasures have become an amalgam of a spectacle for the accumulation of symbolic capital and a spectacle for the sake of economic interest and city status. Chinese cultural materials are used to propagate an image of 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 depoliticised manner, and is embedded in a nexus of imagination defined by the national-global-local triad. The museum has demonstrated some potency in articulating cultural representations for different uses, such as diplomacy, cultural nationalism, leisure consumption, global gratification, and interpretation of the local. It has tended to produce a feudalised public sphere that discourages critical thoughts and public debate particularly on the issue of cultural identity.

However, the museum’s public is not unitary. Its visitors both appropriate and resist the strategies of consumption that the museum’s structures enjoin. Visitors to the museum are not all highly educated, but are demographically diverse, especially in their occupational backgrounds. They can be divided into six distinct identities: “leisure consumers”, “curious explorers”, “enthusiastic/utilitarian learners”, “amateur connoisseurs”, “cultural tourists”, and “the critical audience”. The first four segments tended to adapt to the museum entity, while the “cultural tourists”

231 were more inclined to adopt a negotiated position, expressing varied opinions according to their previous knowledge and cultural experience. The “critical audience”, together with the “activists” emerging from the forces of the independent art community and international pressure groups, was prone to an opposition position. They represented the forces of social dissonance and social action, as they held values that were in conflict with the state/museum’s ideologies. The museum reveals the tension between the city-state and its counter-publics, which has created a cultural circuit of contested values and identities.

8.2 Modes of Museum Circuits

The case-studies demonstrated the interplay between the political-economic, cultural, and social spheres. This section juxtaposes the three case-studies with each other and discusses 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, cultural intermediaries and museum publics) in each sphere.

Firstly, the relations between the spheres varied in each of the three art museums. As shown in figure IV, He Xiangning Art Museum has a top-down orientation, 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 legitimised contemporary art. The cultural sphere is active in negotiating how art is represented. Cultural intermediaries play an important, political role in rationalising 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 shown in figure V, as a non-governmental museum, the Times Museum presents a unique circuit for thinking about a particular kind of cultural public

232 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 mobilising 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, as shown in figure VI, 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. 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 is not able to impose a homogenous identity onto the public. It faces challenges in coping with the social and cultural aspirations of the citizens in the city.

Political- Economic Cultural Social sphere sphere sphere

Figure V: Mode of the circuit of Times Museum

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Political- Political - economic economic sphere sphere

Cultural Cultural sphere sphere

Social sphere Social sphere

Figure IV: Mode of the circuit of Figure VI: Mode of the circuit of He Xiangning Art Museum Hong Kong Museum of Art

Secondly, 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 study of the three cases provides some insights into state and economic regulation, cultural production and consumption. The following sections discuss, firstly, the effects of regulation by the state and economic agents at national, local and international levels, exploring this in the context of cultural economics; secondly, the constitution of cultural 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 labour issues; thirdly, the main actors in the museum publics, the nature of their agency and its implications for cultural consumption.

8.2.1 Political and Economic Agents

The state and economic agents remain significant factors in the development of contemporary museums. They support the museum enterprise for different purposes. The state’s concerns are cultural nationalism, diplomacy, developmental/economic ideologies, global gratification, and the legitimatization of official notions of the local. The economic agents create a consumption market for the middle-class to

234 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, public diplomacy, the cultural industries, 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 non-governmental organisations, 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) 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 harmonisng the living environment. In the case of HKMA, 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 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’

235 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 organisations, 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 globalising creative economy. The two domains of the “Chinese sphere” and the “Creative state” at the global level can inform research on international cultural politics, creative industry policy, and globalisation studies.

The political and economic agents both support the cultural/creative economy. The Times Musuem configures a cultural consumption site combining art, leisure, knowledge and activity, and directly engages local and gloabl creative workers in its cultural producation process. The He Xiangning Art Museum absorbs external skills and knowledge, networks with economic partners, and engages with the OCT’s cultural industrial project. HKMA has particpated 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 commerial parties (for example, collaboration with luxuary companies and art market stakeholders in the exhibition of Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation in 2009). To varying degrees, the three art museums all involve artists, creative professionals, and non-governmental art organisations/ spaces in their operations, especially by purchase or commission of their artworks/services. 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.

8.2.2 Cultural Intermediaries

The study analysed the actors involved in struggles over signification in the art museum. In the past, museum workers in mainland China served as the primary gatekeepers controlling art display to serve the national industry and aesthetic

236 education agendas and communist socio-political ideologies. In this thesis, 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 feudalised public.

By borrowing the concept of cultural intermediaries, this study also expanded the spectrum of museum actors from those who officially work in the museum to those who are directly involved in museum functions, exhibitions, and programs, 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 specific kind of institutional culture and identity for the museum. In addition to artists, the actors include independent curators, art academicians, official and unofficial organisations (in the national museum case), local and global unofficial curators, non-governmental art and cultural organisations (in the private museum case), appointed advisors, 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 cultural intermediaries employ different museological approaches in response to their particular institutional and contextual conditions. The Times Museum, which depends on the private market, can organise 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, sustaining an

237 ongoing critical, dialectical dialogue seeking to engender a consistently self- reflexive attitude towards museum practices and their constituencies (Shelton 2013, 18). The He Xiangning Museum, although profoundly affected by influence from political and economic agents, struggles to emphasise its educational role as a producer of new knowledge. The museum can be seen as an important model of an institution re-examining its role in society. It displays a 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 emphasises 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 cultural 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 organisations, the Times Museum arguably does reflect the agency of non-state stakeholders in advancing a cultural agenda and affecting social relations that accommodate pluralism and the interests and autonomous will of citizens.

Overall, the study considered the actual work (exhibitions/programs) of the cultural 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). Although their workers are generally well-paid, the museums draw on

238 irregular sporadic employment from “talent pools” with a wide range of remuneration. Particularly in HKMA, there is a big difference in pay and benefits between permanent staff and contract workers, and work is increasingly being outsourced. Further studies of the quality of the working conditions and experiences of the cultural intermediaries (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011) will provide knowledge which can help address the normative issues of equality, justice, well- being and the democratisation of creativity in museum production.

8.2.3 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 characterises 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 thesis, 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

239 museum visitors (64% aged 18-30 in He Xiangning Art Museum; 95% aged 15-30 in the Times Museum). They tended to accept what an art museum offers or negotiate it, rather than actively contesting 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 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.

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 post-colonial 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 experience 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 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, HKMA has faced a unique counter-public. They are the critical groups and activists (Art Museum Concern Group and international pressure groups). Their

240 critical deliberations and social actions reveal the contradiction between their own values and the official ideologies. These 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 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 commination 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.

8. 3 Contributions and Limits 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

241 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 cultural intermediaries, and the process of consumption as a practice of appropriation 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 socio-cultural practices. The circuit approach gave consideration to diverse museal processes and saw the various actors as active interpretative 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 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 socio-cultural 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,

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Guangzhou, and Hong Kong respectively. As shown in this thesis, 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 culture industries, globalisation, localisation, regionalisation, and post-colonial reorientation. The cultural plurality and diversity of the museums opens possibilities for negotiation of and resistance to political/economic meaning-making and for comparisons between a variety of production and consumption practices. 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 contemporary China. In addition, 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 (2006) 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 19th and 20th centuries in China. Her concept of “region” is not limited to an administrative or geographical definition. 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” (Ching 2006, 315). 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,

243 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 for addressing a region. He Xiangning Art Museum represents a new state strategy for promoting national and local (Shenzhen) cultural-economic interests and seeking cultural alignment with the places and cities that are considered to be part of the Greater China region. The He Xiangning museum, 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 more ambitious reform and opening to the world. Shaped by its location in Shenzhen, the museum has a role in proclaiming the state’s 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 doubt over 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 cultural intermediaries involved display a self-proclaimed consciousness of the values of their own community (such as the ideas of autonomy, de- commodification and citizens’ rights), and their understanding of the world (such as their invocation of the cultural hegemony of the northern capital and its neo- colonisation of Global South). Unlike the Guangdong literati who built a close relationship between regional culture and national identity (Ching 2006), these cultural intermediaries engage themselves in both internal and global politics, creating a unique voice of regional culture that questions the nation and other

244 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 (2006) finds, the organisers (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 thesis has mapped the different and changing trajectories of three art museums in GPRD. It leads us to see museum discourse and practice 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 are obvious: findings and conclusions are bound to the particular case studies only. 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. The study of the Times Museum illustrated the role and function of a private museum at regional and country level. However, the model of this realtor

245 and cultural elite-led private art museum might not be applicable to other private museums that are owned by individuals or registered as companies. Similarly, the case of the Hong Kong Museum of Art might not be applicable to government-run museums in other special autonomous regions, such as Macau or the autonomous regions of particular ethnic groups.

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. The views of art museums offered in this thesis 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 thesis.

A final caveat: conducting research inside China’s museum organisations 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 that refused to be interviewed or that did not respond at all to the interview request were mainly thos from the He Xiangning museum and HKMA. The Times Museum was the most welcoming of my study and assisted me in scheduling all the interviews with their

246 staff. I contend that some cultural practitioners in official museums are far from ready to cope with an open museum research culture. Because of their non- involvement, my study might have missed out some valuable ideas and might have failed to fully document the rationales behind and struggles in museum practices. In addition, when I was doing 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. The HKMA was entirely closed in August 2015 for its three-year long renovation project. The renovation project also barred public access to the museum’s archive. 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 socio-political and economic situation in China.

In conclusion, this thesis 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 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. It studied the institutional regulation, production and consumption of art museums in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. 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. Overall, the study interrogated the institutional boundaries constrained by political and economic agendas. It furnished a research paradigm that highlights

247 the socio-cultural processes in which actors demonstrate their agency and negotiate different representational forces, including though the constitution of diversified publics orienting themselves towards alternative cultural identities and values.

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APPENDIX I

Interview Guide (for museum professionals)

Theme Question

Mission/aims 1. Why this museum is found? What are the missions and visions of the museum? How does the museum achieve these and develop in its context? 2. In what ways does the museum try to gather evidence of this? (Prompt: based on e.g. collection, policy, society change) 3. Have these aims changed over time? Are these likely to be reviewed? What factors are shaping these changes? 4. In what ways was/is the museum distinct from or similar to other art spaces/organisations or cultural sites? What are the recent exchanges and networks with other institutions? 5. What obstacles / difficulties were faced in bringing the museum to fruition? 6. What working plans do you have for the museum in the future? How do you see the museum developing? Museum 7. What do you think of the public role and function of Public/audiences the museum in society? What kind of relationship should be built between the museum and the public? 8. Who would you say the museum is trying to reach? (Prompt: target audiences?) 9. What kinds of response do you expect to elicit from the public/visitors? 10. Do you feel that different audiences respond to the museum in different ways? If yes, can you describe these different kinds of response? If no, why? 11. Can you tell me about how the museum was received by the public? In what ways has the museum tried to

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gather evidence of this? (Prompt: for example, has your museum conducted visitor survey, collected visitor feedback, or evaluated evaluation/event?) 12. What do you think about the issue of public representation or participation in the museum? 13. What are the strategies taken by the museum in building links with your target audience or the general public? 14. Has the museum faced any difficulties or challenges in building the links? Museum 15. What is the basic organizational structure of the management museum? (Prompt: how is it governed and regulated?) 16. Has this structure and mechanism changed? Are this likely to be reviewed or evaluated? What factors might shape the changes? 17. How would the museum facilities help promoting the museum’s image, and realizing the institution’s missions and visions? 18. How would the museum facilities (e.g. exhibition venues, café, and shops, etc.) help catering visitors’ needs and interests? 19. What are some of the difficulties and challenges in managing museum facilities in relation to the public needs or visitors’ expectations? Exhibition and 20. How does the museum develop its exhibition Interpretive strategies? As how do you produce an exhibition? strategies What are some of the considerations when you initiate an exhibition? 21. Which museum exhibition is your favorite? What attributes account for good practice in terms of exhibition and interpretation? 22. How do you develop curatorial concepts? (the

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researcher might cite an exhibition curated by the interviewee) How do you think your exhibition would associate with the audiences in terms of their cultural aspiration? 23. How do you interpret the objects/artwork for your audiences? What sort of experience/message/information would you like to provide to your audience? Why? 24. Have you tried different kinds of interpretive / display strategies? Which do you feel are most effective in eliciting the kinds of responses you try for? 25. What do you think the audience wants from you? And how would your exhibition and interpretation help accommodating their needs and interests? Education 26. What are the educational aims of the museum? 27. How would you develop ideas of education activity and

workshop for diverse audiences? Do you have any particular approach or strategy? 28. Who is your major target audience? How would you develop program in accommodating their needs, interests and identities? 29. What sort of experience/message/information would you like to provide to your audience through your activities/events? Why? 30. How would you evaluate the museum education programs or activities? Do you think the museum has fulfilled its educational aims/role? 31. Which museum education activity / workshop is your favorite? (the researcher might cite an activity organized by the interviewee) What attributes account for good practice in terms of communication and engagement? 32. Have you encountered any difficulties and challenges

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in developing your education programs? What are these? How would you encounter these difficulties and challenges? Museum Support 33. Please briefly describe your social background. 34. Could you please describe your role or involvement in the museum? How do you view of your relationship with it? Why? What is your motivation or intention? 35. In what ways your support (eg. Collection or financial donation) is relevant or important to the museum’s aspiration? What do you expect to or from the museum by this kind of support? 36. How does it have contribution/impacts to the public/museum?

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APPENDIX II

Interview Guide (for museum visitors)

Theme Question

Visitor profile 1. Can you tell me about your age, gender, educational background and occupation (if any). 2. Are you grown in this city? Where do you come from? Motivation / 3. How often do you go to museum? expectations 4. What did prompt you to come to this museum (Prompt: for examples, day out, personal interest, recommendation by friends, special exhibition/event/collection.) 5. What do you expect from today’s visit? How does your experience compare with what you expected? Visit/ experience 6. What do you feel about your visit? (Prompt: enjoyable or in association disappointing? What makes you feel like that? ) with cultural 7. What do you think about your visit? (Prompt: for consumption example, is it something like an entertainment, a social event, a cultural activity or an educational experience?)

8. Is the museum visit important to you in everyday life? Why? 9. How do you think of your participation/ representation in the museum? 10. In the past 6 months, have you been other art and cultural sites or participated in the activities? 11. Is your museum visit different from your participation in other cultural/ leisure/ social activities? How does it compare to your daily life experiences? Visitors’ 12. What does the museum/visit mean to you? How do you interpretation- perceive its role and function in this city/country? reception 13. Which particular thing/collection/exhibition you have found most impressive or interesting in the museum? Why? (Prompt: What does it mean to you? Is it related to your prior experience or identity?)

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14. Have you learnt or taken away something from the museum visit? What are they? (Prompt: are they related to your identities or having influences on you?) What helps you to achieve this in the museum? 15. What do you think of the museum performance? (Prompt: please give a general comment on its services and facilities, and highlight the most interesting part of it) Why? 16. Do you think the museum should make further improvement? What are your suggestions/future expectations?

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Ho, Chui Fun

Title: The museum circuit in contemporary China : the institutional regulation, production and consumption of art museums in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Hong Kong

Date: 2018

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/213985

File Description: Complete thesis

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