One important sign of Shanghai’s openness over the last ten or fifteen years has been the emergence of contemporary private art museums that have worked internationally and with a nimbleness that the State museums have often found difficult to match. One of the key museums is the Yuz Museum, owned by the late Indonesian-Chinese collector Budi Tek, who died from pancreatic cancer on 18 March, a few days after the opening of a landmark Yoshitomo Nara show in his museum (disclosure: we were among Buditek’s many friends). Together with the collector Wang Wei’s two Long Museums, one in Puxi, the other in Pudong, the Yuz Museum shows Chinese art and brings important foreign artists into China. There have been a number of obituaries in the West and we don’t mean to rehearse his history here.

But the history and future of the Yuz Museum might be seen as a test case of China’s tilt towards State-driven cultural institutions rather than private ones. Ten or fifteen years ago Chinese private museums – and Shanghai was in the vanguard – were an important innovation. They seemed to be part of a burgeoning civil society. It was the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas who said that in eighteenth-century Europe the artworld needed to become ‘private’ to escape the shadow of the State and the Church. Perhaps Shanghai was escaping the shadow of the State. There were even those in Shanghai who told us that the government encouraged the opening of private museums showing riskier art, allowing the government the excuse of deniability if necessary.

Budi Tek, a pioneer of Shanghai’s private museum ecology, tried to find a way of making his collection ‘public’ without losing entire control, when he was given the cancer diagnosis. That went against laws in China and did not happen. Nor did a potential ground-breaking partnership with LACMA in Los Angeles.

It now looks as if Budi Tek’s collection will endure (how and where we do not know) but that the Yuz Museum itself will enter into a partnership with the West Bund Group (西岸） – an arm of the Shanghai government. In itself this may not be a matter for regret; on the other hand company owns the West Bund Museum where Paris’ Centre Pompidou has taken up residence – the deal seems to be that the Pompidou is there but invisible from the outside of the building. There is no Pompidou branding on the street.

In the same spirit, as we mentioned earlier, London’s Tate has largely been a backroom consultant to the new museum of Pudong (which may have been a good judgement by Tate. Western museums working with China have come under pressure, recently due to Xinjiang and other matters).

It’s a sign of the times that the Museum of Art Pudong is backed by Lujiazui Group (陆家嘴集团), a State-owned development company. It does seem as if there is a shift from the private to the State in museum development, even in Shanghai. It is too early to tell whether the international and risky spirit that infuses the private museums will be maintained in this new State era.