Culture Boom: China's Artscape Now, and the Making of a New Art Public

A visit to one of the many new art museums that have sprouted in China over the last two decades offers a window into some of the incredible changes in China's art and design scene. At a rapid pace, countless, often spectacular new private museums have been established from the wealth of Chinese and other Asian private collectors; major international art exhibitions are now regularly shown in partnership with renowned institutions around the world, such as the Tate and Centre Pompidou; and a mass art public has suddenly come into being in this short time. This scene offers a vastly different, and in many ways unprecedented, set of conditions for encountering art, museums and their publics in China that encompasses a hugely expanded art museum context in China, the generation of new local and global publics for China's contemporary urban art and design cultures, and a fundamentally changed relationship between China and the global art world.

‘Culture Boom: China's Artscape Now, and the Making of a New Art Public’, in A. Aitken, S. Maidment, E. McEoin, & M. Patty (eds.), The Centre - On Art and Urbanism in China, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2019, pp. 148-163.