Earlier this year there was a trigger in Nanjing for venting anti-Japanese feelings when it was discovered that a young former nurse had five years ago placed some memorial tablets to Japanese war criminals in a Buddhist temple in Nanjing, in the belief that this would rid her of her nightmares. This led to huge Weibo protests – not least in Nanjing. When we asked one of our interviewees whether he thought this anti-Japanese felling was triggered by memories of 1937, he demurred, saying it is mostly the young that express anti-Japanese sentiment. Another disagreed, saying the anti-Japanese feeling was much more widespread, it was simply that the young are generally more active on social media. A third said that foreign media tended to give such outpourings more visibility than was justified. And a fourth, that the outbursts were less stirred than stoked. It really is the case that the past is not past.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that a city with such a weighty history does not have a particularly thriving contemporary art scene. Or perhaps one should say scenes. There is a temptation to say that there is a dual cultural art economy – one powered by State museums; the other by private individuals and corporations. But it is rather more complicated than that. It is true that none of the State museums shows much contemporary art – with the exception of AMNUA, the important Nanjing art school which shows both contemporary Chinese and international artists (disclosure: we curated a Sean Scully retrospective there in 2016).
In the private sector there is the Sifang Art Museum which does show both Chinese and international contemporary artists – and is on the ‘global circuit’. We have been told but cannot confirm that the foundation underpinning it has had financial problems and that the city government is now supporting the museum quite substantially. Sifang is quite far from the city – and is not the kind of museum one could ‘bump’ into. Which is why one should take seriously the art institutions in Nanjing which are located in shopping malls in the city centre  and which thus touch many more people’s lives. After all the history of culture is partly the history of access to that culture.
There are two such shopping mall museums in Nanjing, the Deji Art Museum (德基美术馆) and the G Museum (金鹰美术馆), both owned by developers. One has his own established collection; and the other is forging his. It is not strictly accurate, though, to describe these as private museums since developers – if they want land – are ‘encouraged’ by the government to set up museums. It is early days to make any definitive judgement on these museums – and there clearly are issues – not least in the time of Covid. The issue is – will they receive the necessary interest and support they need from the national and international communities?
Covid lockdowns have hit the cultural world of China hard, as everywhere – and has put pressure on everyone’s mental as well as physical health. Nanjing was hit very hard in 2021 and responded well but for a time the airport was closed. With this context it may be that the most interesting art initiative in Nanjing is one that the international contemporary art world is not likely to be much aware of and that has been around since 2006.
At that time the artist and counsellor Guo Haiping worked for three months in the Nanjing Zutangshan Psychiatric Hospital where he saw the benefits art practice could have on people with mental health problems (his interest in the idea had developed many years earlier). In the same year he set up the Nanjing Outsider Art Studio (he is at pains to stress that Outsider Art is something more capacious than art made by people with mental health problems); eight years later, he set up the Nanjing Outsider Art Centre (南京天成艺术中心).
Guo Haiping’s initiatives have been supported by the Nanjing government – indispensably so. Even if the first official mention of management of mental health problems in China was in the Tang dynasty, its  more recent record has not been what it might be. Art practice as supported by Guo Haiping  in Nanjing is important in issues around mental health and more generally reaches part of the community beyond the official artworld – and the art so made has been shown in China and abroad.