Museums Hangzhou-style
Two new museums have been built recently in Hangzhou, adding to the large number built during the Chinese museum boom – even if quite a few of them may have been features imposed on the developers by the government in exchange for land. But that is not to gainsay their remarkable flowering.
More on the World Tourism Museum, one of the two new museums, below. But the opening of By Art Matters, a private contemporary art museum founded by the fashion entrepreneur Li Lin may suggest a Hangzhou inflection of the museum boom, one which marks out its difference from its neighbour, Shanghai which is full of grand museums
Li Lin has wisely not tried to compete with such behemoths – even if she commissioned Renzo Piano to design the museum. What is distinctive about this new museum is that it is integrated into a complex that includes two commercial galleries, a music venue, restaurants as well as the headquarters of her company. Integration might also be said to be the signature of the opening exhibition. The exhibition A Show About Nothing brings together Chinese with Western artists, from a concept proposed by its New York-based Italian director Francesco Bonami. It remains an open question, after only one exhibition, whether the museum will develop a distinctive identity or will lapse into becoming another space where globally trending artists show. For some, the appointment of a New York based  director does not bode well; for others he brings a necessary wealth of experience.
But at present one can say that By Art Matters does appear to be an attempt to integrate the global and local at the level of art – and to integrate the museum into the traffic of daily life. The same ambition can be found in the Hangzhou developments of Weng Ling’s IDEAS group which is building two major cultural projects, one of which will integrate art and science. As with By Art Matters, the ambition is to build museums not in proud isolation but to integrate them into complexes serving a variety of needs.
There has not been a great deal of noise on social media around the opening of the By Art Matters museum which may be a sign that its attractiveness will be restricted only to an already constituted art crowd. It’s worth remembering that it is opening at a moment when President Xi’s ambition towards Common Prosperity includes culture.

The face of realism
Elements that By Art Matters are not attempting to integrate (nor are many the other new museums) are the Chinese realist art of the twentieth century (the art equivalent of the great Chinese writer Lu Xun) or post 49 revolutionary art. This is odd since in the west Black Lives Matter has brought back realist figurative art in from the cold. Western galleries are now searching manically for committed figurative art.
It is particularly strange that new Hangzhou institutions do not acknowledge these kinds of art because the city’s famous art school, the China Academy of Art, began life in 1928 as the National Academy of Art, and was the first art institution in China officially licensed to engage with Western modernist art. There was nothing parochial about the social realist and socialist realism traditions and a small Hangzhou private museum called Xixi Yide Art Museum continues to keep this particular flame burning, with exhibitions of artists including the great German Käthe Kollwitz and the Soviet artist Andrei Mylnikov.
Sadly, with the Chinese government celebrating ink art and the new museums involved with a certain version of globalised art, these realist traditions can often seem orphans. It need not be the case. Eastern European countries are trying to come to terms with their post-war socialist and social realist art in a series of museum shows which try to reckon with the past.
It is worth remembering that almost all the Chinese artists valued by the contemporary artworld began by making social realist paintings.