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Privately Owned Art Museums in State-Sponsored West Bund

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Privately Owned Art Museums in State-Sponsored West Bund Xing Zhao (Inter)Dependency: Privately Owned Art Museums in State-Sponsored West Bund oughly a century ago, fan shops in Shanghai started commissioning art for the nouveau riche, representing and marketing artists, as Rwell as reaching out for potential collectors, which made the shops by all means a prototype of a commercial gallery. This not only led to a flourishing art scene, but also, more importantly, introduced an alternative type of patronage, and the result was that Shanghai became a leading site for art in modern China. Today, the former treaty port that has grown into a megacity and a global financial centre always seeks to materialize the intangible values in stimulating consumption from its unique urban culture. However, up until ten years ago, there were not many exhibition spaces dedicated to the arts, especially those housing contemporary art. Urban residents and tourists barely frequented commercial galleries until several clusters of galleries became must-see attractions. Under a national five-year plan to promote culture by building more museums, the latest grand state-run project is called the West Bund Cultural Corridor. The government’s decision not only to have more art museums, but also to create spatial proximity among the new institutions, is understandable because “first, cultural industries have important economic and social impact; and, second, the social milieu is a decisive means by which economic transactions occur both in cultural industries and knowledge- intensive sectors more generally.”1 This essay analyzes the West Bund Cultural Corridor as a newly emerging destination for arts and culture, with a focus on the relationship between the state-planned nature of the area and the privately owned art museums established at the founder’s will (there are no tax exemptions or other benefits associated with running a museum or donating artworks in mainland China). I will show that the Xuhui District government of Shanghai, which is in charge of the West Bund project, has learned lessons from failed examples of other arts districts, and, so, by putting a considerable amount of thought into selecting the founders rather than interfering in their managerial and artistic conduct, the project has attracted top collectors to launch their institutions. Driven by a consumption-based, high-end lifestyle and life experience promoted in the West Bund area, the museum founders are enjoying the hybridity of arts and commerce, which will partially and potentially pay back the high cost of running a museum—a problem for museum founders worldwide. However, it is too early to give a round of applause to the long-criticized cultural personnel and private art museum founders in China. A lack of professionalism shown in the newly opened art museums will eventually prevent the institutions from evolving into a sustainable public space that benefits society. 30 Vol. 17 No. 1 Long Museum, West Bund, Shanghai. Yuz Museum, West Bund, Shanghai. Courtesy of Yuz Museum, Shanghai. West Bund Art & Design, It is commonly agreed that the 2016, West Bund Art Center, Shanghai. determinant, if not sole, force that is causing the current museum fever and the pursuit of the West Bund project is the government’s plan. As critic Barbara Pollack puts it, “Shanghai’s impulse to build so many museums is the direct result of a governmental five-year plan for the city to become an artistic centre on par with London, Paris, and New York. Not satisfied with the large number of museums already in existence, the Shanghai government has decided to develop a section of the Huangpu River as the West Bund Cultural Corridor.”2 While the government is in charge of the urban plan as well as improvement in infrastructure and transportation, the vision is largely being realized by individual collectors, entrepreneurs, and foreign investors at their own initiative and for various reasons. A few privately owned art museums have laid the foundation of the area, differentiating West Bund from a typical state-run cultural site or another cluster of commercial galleries. Long Museum West Bund, which opened in 2014, is on the former site of a wharf for coal transportation. It was founded by collector Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei as their second location for art exhibitions. It is designed by Shanghai-based architects from Atelier Deshaus and features a cantilevered structure bearing a vault- umbrella with independent walls. The building covers an area of 33,000 square metres, reserving up to 16,000 square metres for exhibition space. Opening in May 2014, the Chinese-Indonesian tycoon Budi Tek’s Yuz Museum Shanghai was the second major privately owned art museum in the West Bund area. Housed inside a former hangar of the Longhua Airport and repurposed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, the venue boasts a total area of 9,000 square metres, Initiated in 2015 by world-renowned photographer Liu Heung Shing, the Shanghai Center of Photography Vol. 17 No. 1 31 (ScôP), the first public art space Façade and interior view of Shanghai Center of in Shanghai dedicated solely to Photography, West Bund. Courtesy of Shanghai Center photography, is one of the latest of Photography. creative additions to West Bund, and is next door to the West Bund Art Center, which houses West Bund Art & Design annually. SCoP’s unique space is designed by the US-based architectural duo Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee and contains a number of elliptical-shaped exhibition spaces. Collector Qiao Zhibing runs two institutions in the West Bund area, Tank Shanghai and Qiao Space. Tank Shanghai is not in full operation at the time of this writing, although it was planned earlier than some of the other enterprises. Some sources have said that a number of international artists have received commissions and agreed to create works for the five buildings of Tank Shanghai, which is scheduled to open in 2017. Qiao Space consists of a two-story studio next to the West Bund Art Center, along with a few commercial galleries as well as artists’ and architects’ studios.Qiao Space opened in 2015 and hosted a show of paintings by the Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal in cooperation with the commercial gallery Hauser & Wirth and held simultaneously with the 2015 West Bund Art & Design. In addition, the state-owned West Bund Art Museum, designed by David Chipperfield Architects, which is famous for its designs of cultural and civic buildings, is under construction and is planned to join the artistic panorama soon. The planners of the West Bund Cultural Corridor took the advantage of moving forward later than other either state-planned or naturally formed arts districts within and outside China, and they learned lessons from it. This seemingly more sustainable plan does not anticipate a decline and has attracted collectors to jump into the adventure and risk of opening and running an art museum. The intended nature of the district promotes a lifestyle and a multidimensional urban ecosystem rather than focusing on an arts agenda derived only from idealism. This encourages collectors to believe that they can experiment with this hybridity and the merging 32 Vol. 17 No. 1 Entrance to Qiao Space, Shanghai, 2015. Courtesy of Qiao Space, Shanghai. Wilhelm Sasnel, exhibition view, Qiao Space, Shanghai, organized in cooperation with Hauser & Wirth. Courtesy of Qiao Space, Shanghai. Proposed site of TANK SHANGHAI, West Bund Cultural Corridor, Shanghai. Courtesy of TANK SHANGHAI, Shanghai. Open Architecture, rendering of TANK SHANGHAI. Courtesy of TANK SHANGHAI, Shanghai. of art and business, which will provide a brighter future for the museum’s sustainability due to possible profitability. Besides multidimensionality and lifestyle as selling points, the role played by the government is more service- Vol. 17 No. 1 33 than authority-based. All these reasons contribute to the formation of the infrastructural clustering and how it currently looks, although time is still needed to test the sustainability and the comparative advantage of the West Bund Cultural Corridor. Left: Songzhuang Artist Village, Beijing. Right: Entrance to 798 Art Zone, Beijing. Shockingly pessimistic titles given to media articles about arts districts, private museums, and once-passionate collectors in China may be exaggerated, but they are not mere click bait. In October 2015, a commentary titled “Starving Artists from Songzhuang Artist Village (Beijing) Became Homeless and The Art Village in Nanjing Is Now a Ghost Town” appeared on the website of China National Radio.3 This was roughly a decade after Hu Jiebao, secretary of the Party Committee in Songzhuang from 2004 to 2012, announced the seemingly feasible and creative plan to let “culture form a town.”4 Similar articles on the decline of Songzhuang have come out in recent years, among them, in 2014, “Unescapable Rise and Fall: Original Art Gradually Disappears in Songzhuang,”5 which accused a local government of over-involvement that quickly resulted in commercialization, an influx of official art and artists, and a loss of originality both in the artwork and in the community’s artistic milieu among Songzhuang artists. A similar question was posed about the 798 Art Zone in a 2013 article, “Can 798 Overcome the Destined Collapse of the Art Zone?”6 798 is a different case from that of Songzhuang. Songzhuang’s vitality, recognized by its more senior residents, comes from the excitement of the non-institutional and non-official—the satisfaction of seeming to be alternative. It is a subcultural community that suffers and benefits from its distance from mainstream culture and commercialization. In Songzhuang, the sense of exile, marginalization, poverty, and lack of recognition is believed to be the soul of the place, which explains its vulnerability to influence from commercialization and its opposition to government intervention into art.
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