Now, in Gilbert & George and the Communists (Cheerio Publishing, 2025), Birch has written of his time promoting the controversial British artists Gilbert & George in, first Moscow, and then, breaking more new ground, Beijing and Shanghai in 1993. That artists whose work tackled such controversial themes and used such (back then) shocking language and materials should be pioneers in China was amazing and unexpected. How did Birch get the idea and the permissions and then actually manage to stage the shows? Ultimately, Birch would achieve major groundbreaking success with the exhibitions and crucially, Gilbert & George would inspire a generation of young Chinese contemporary artists who went on to totally turn the international art scene on its head and place China back on the global art map. Paul French met up with James Birch to remember those times….

Can you briefly explain how the idea of taking Gilbert & George to China in the early 1990s came about? Nobody as controversial had ever exhibited in China before.

After the success of Gilbert & George in the Soviet Union in 1990, I said to Gilbert & George: “Where would you like to go next?” They said, “China. If you can make this happen, we’ll be your best friends for life.”

I gulped as I had no connections in China, and post-Tiananmen Square, the Sino-British relationship was at an all-time low, but fuelled by the incredible response to the Francis Bacon retrospective and Gilbert & George’s more recent exhibition in Moscow, I took courage in both hands. I asked a friend who had worked in China if he knew anybody I could go and see – he told me to go to Dublin and look up Brendan Ward who had been the Irish cultural attaché in Beijing at the time of the uprising. Brendan recommended that I see Wang Xiaoning in the cultural section of the Chinese Embassy, where this story begins.

In 1993, the long shadow of state-mandated Socialist Realism still constrained Chinese art, and local artists who used any of the more controversial motifs in their work, similar to those of Gilbert & George, still faced fines, arrest and self-criticisms. How did you persuade Beijing to let Gilbert & George in?

It was an extraordinarily quick process. Given the incredible restraints on Chinese artists of the time, I felt I had a one in ten chance of getting this exhibition agreed upon. Gilbert & George had a punk attitude and were fearless in their use of images and cultural references, which were often seen as controversial, even by a so-called ‘enlightened’ 20th-century audience. However, the optimist in me hoped that the Cultural Ministry would recognise the influence of social realism on their work and respond in the affirmative. I took with me the catalogue of the Moscow exhibition, which I hoped would reassure them that G&G had valid “communist credentials’. We’ll never really know what made the difference, but a week after visiting Mr Wang, they had rubber-stamped the exhibition. In retrospect, I feel that they saw it as an opportunity to show the West that they were open to new ideas and wanted to build relationships with us quite simply to expand their economy.

Previously, you had taken Francis Bacon and Gilbert & George to Moscow in the days of the old USSR. Both attracted huge audiences. Was it the same in Beijing and Shanghai in 1993 and do you have a sense of who came – artists, students, regular people?

You are absolutely right! It was mainly artists, students, officials, Beijingers and Shanghaiers. The exhibition was a big deal and was constantly packed in both cities. Steven Spielberg came, too! To this day, I have no idea how or why.

Many Chinese artists of a certain generation – those born in the 1960s – have written about how inspired they were by the 1993 Gilbert & George exhibitions. While taking Gilbert & George to China was obviously going to attract a lot of media attention to them and their work, did you also anticipate how important the visit was to struggling Chinese artists in the years before the great boom in Chinese contemporary art?

I didn’t realise that there were so many young artists who wanted to have exhibitions in Beijing. What was generally on show was state-funded art. While I was there, a young artist decided to cut his hair in front of the exhibition to protest that Western artists were being shown as opposed to Chinese artists. I’m afraid to say that he was arrested, and we never knew his fate.

During the days of the exhibition, I didn’t fully comprehend its impact. It wasn’t until post-Shanghai and after a visit to Hong Kong, where I met David Tang, who impressed upon me how significant he felt this moment was. David was an amazing collector of Chinese social realist paintings but also Chinese underground art. His collection was exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1997-98. Charles Saatchi bought most of it, and that is when the West began to take a serious interest in the contemporary art of China.

Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming, two major Chinese performance artists, have written about how, in 1993, they were struggling – being fined, hassled by the cops, unable to show their work. Zhang has said that Gilbert & George inspired him to double down and continue performing. Ma has said that meeting Gilbert & George in Beijing and seeing what two artists who started out as performance artists could achieve was the major turning point in his career. Did either you or Gilbert & George have any sense of the impact you were having on the local art scenes in Beijing and Shanghai back in 1993?

We visited China in the days of heavy censorship. There was no internet or social media. Unlike Moscow, which is only four hours away from the UK and shares Europe’s cultural heritage, China felt a world away. It was much harder to meet people, we were never invited to people’s houses, and a frank exchange of views was impossible. I know that Gilbert & George visited a number of artists in their studios which was a first. Even now, it’s thrilling to learn of their impact on artists such as Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming.

And finally, what do you think Gilbert & George got out of visiting China? And you yourself? What was the biggest contrast between Beijing and your previous experiences in Moscow?

My fascination with China began when I was ten years old. I wrote a letter to the Chinese Embassy, asking for a copy of the Little Red Book. Chairman Mao was something of a hero of mine. Twenty years later, the USSR was beginning to disintegrate – it had the feel of an empire falling. Beijing, in contrast, was at the start of an economic revolution, albeit with a communist edge. I was amazed to discover that McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut were already in situ – it was so different from the culture I was expecting.

I can’t really speak for Gilbert & George, but it’s clear even now that they remain constantly interested in the new and unusual and are passionately committed to taking art to the people. After all, one of their most famous slogans is ART FOR ALL.

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Two decades ago, cultural relations between China and the UK were at an all-time high. At the time, I was the editor of the cultural and entertainment magazine Time Out in Beijing, and there was a constant stream of British talent landing in China.

The pre-Olympic build-up years saw China-based music promotors bring top-flight British musicians, including Frank Turner, Faithless, Friendly Fires and Joss Stone to clubs and venues in Beijing and Shanghai on what felt like an almost weekly basis.

Concerts, art fairs and theatre festivals were springing up in stadia and parks across the country, including the Midi, Intro, Modern Sky, Yue, and Zebra festivals, to name but a few. Major government-to-government cultural exchanges were the norm – such as the 2006 visit by then Director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor, to loan 272 of the British Museum’s most valuable artefacts to China.

This positive energy was crystalised by the 2008 CHINA NOW programme held in advance of the Beijing Olympics at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the largest festival of Chinese culture in Britain. It featured contemporary photographers such as Chen Man, designers including Shao Fan, and architects such as Ma Yansong, along with filmmakers, artists, musicians and more.

In return, the British Council organised UK NOW in advance of the London Olympics in 2012, and a whole host of iconic British photographers, choreographers, artists and directors descended on China to showcase the best of British.

British media were making documentaries on China, journalists were writing about the Chinese contemporary art and music scene, and international film productions were shooting in locations all over China, from the outskirts of the capital to the far western deserts of Xinjiang.

From my front-row seat to the cultural goings-on between the two countries, it was incredible to witness these two nations working together and the impact it had on both the British and Chinese populations.

The impression of China among the British population was overwhelmingly positive, and Chinese tourists and students flooded to the UK to be in and around the British cultural scene that was promoted so well in venues in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities.

This cultural explosion led to an openness and freedom of expression that showed a confident China on the world stage. “Culture has always been the most immediate form of social commentary and political criticism. And, for the moment, the authorities appear unfazed by this new-found freedom of expression. The strong sense of ‘Chineseness’ that artists and architects raise in media interviews, the patriotic and nationalistic pride depicted on canvas and on film, is, for the most part, accepted, encouraged even,” I wrote in the V&A Magazine for the launch of China Now in 2008. “It remains to be seen if the authorities will be quite so easy-going this time next year when the Olympics are just a memory. Will they clamp down as they might have in the past?”

It turns out they did. And it was a great shame when much of that cultural light started to fade. Increased restrictions on the number of foreign films allowed to be shown in cinemas, complexities around getting permits for international music acts and geopolitical tensions saw the number of cultural exchanges reduce. When Covid-19 hit in 2019, many of the independent promotors, corporate sponsors and international audiences in China left the country leaving not just a vacuum of events but also a lack of experience and knowledge that had been built up over the previous decades.

According to a new report, the UK has fallen behind Russia in its soft power ranking among Chinese people. However, Dom Hastings, the British Council’s Director of Arts in China hopes to bring back some of the cultural opportunities for British creatives with the re-launch of the website China Now – and in turn, boost the cultural standing of the UK in China.

The British Council have revamped and relaunched the website ‘China Now’ (no direct relation to the V&A’s 2008 blockbuster) as a central point for UK artists and arts organisations interested in exploring creative ventures in China.

According to Hastings, the site is now a central hub for people to “find resources about China’s creative sector, to build connections, and to highlight opportunities in China. It also highlights the risks such as intellectual property issues, too,” he says.

Hastings is quick to point out that there are still any number of major cultural exchange programmes between the two countries. The V&A has five exhibitions currently touring China, and the Royal Philharmonic are currently in the country, he says. But it is mostly the bigger national institutions who are putting on productions, and it is very “government to government. I want to ensure that all of the UK’s arts sectors are represented in China,” he says.

In a bid to boost cultural exchanges, the British Council has taken a number of Chinese cultural leaders to various festivals in the UK, including Great Escape in Brighton and Hove and the Edinburgh Festival, and invited British festival organisers to China to see if they can bring some of their projects to the country.

The China Now site not only provides information, reports and stories on the sector but also ‘how to’ guides on funding applications for projects. Currently, the British Council has grants of up to £10,000 under their Connections Through Culture programme. The grant, which runs until 2 September, provides seed funding for research, development and partnership outreach for collaborative projects between the two countries. Further down the line there are International Collaboration Grants of up to £70,000 for organisations that are ready to put on a project.

Cultural exchanges might not always be seen as the most important or direct value stream when it comes to trade and relations between the UK and China, but companies want to invest in countries with a strong creative culture, students want to study where creativity thrives, and nothing helps public the understanding of two nations more than a shared love of culture. So whether it’s British rock bands to Beijing or Chinese photographers to London – building cultural exchange between our two great countries has never been more important than it is today. 

Visit the China Now website

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In late 2021, two Ming dynasty terracotta clay figurines returned to China after residing in a private collection in the United States for nearly a century. The figurines were presented to the Shanghai Museum for inclusion in their collection of 66 similar Ming dynasty figurines, which owner Suzanne Fratus had seen at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in 1983 when they were on loan from the Shanghai Museum.

Fratus’ grandfather, John Herbert Waite, who was an ophthalmologist and spent some time working in Asia, was gifted the figurines by a Chinese patient whom he cured. He returned to the United States with them in his possession in the early 1900s, and the figurines were passed down through the family to Fratus, who decided to return them to China via the Chinese consulate-general in San Francisco in April 2021.

The return of the figures, which was facilitated by the freight forwarding specialists at CBBC member company Heighten, is not just a story of cultural appreciation across borders; it also sheds light on the unique skills needed to ship fine art and artefacts across borders.

“The list of specific challenges when shipping cultural artefacts is very long,” says James Grayland, Heighten’s International Director. Beyond obvious requirements like making sure items are properly packaged so they don’t get damaged in transit, there can be multiple layers of bureaucratic and communication-related hoops to jump through when transferring art or artefacts to and from China.

Suzanne Fratus’ clay figurines ready to be returned to China. Source: Heighten

Museum objects, for example, are usually national property, requiring permits at the national and local levels, which, in recent years, have typically been issued very close to the time of shipment. In addition, objects over 100 years old like the clay figurines in this story are treated as antiquities under the jurisdiction of the National Cultural Heritage Administration (part of China’s Ministry of Culture & Tourism), meaning that they need to be handled differently to modern art, for example.

In addition, Grayland notes that there can often be a significant cultural gap. “The level of transparency on the ground handling process or with China customs is lacking,” he says. “Furthermore, often fine arts teams do not have regular customs interaction, meaning their depth of knowledge can be lacking, combined with possible language barriers and a lack of understanding of norms in other countries.”

As a result, communication is key. “Like many projects involving China, the key is to build relationships across all the stakeholders, and where possible and applicable, to open up communications across all those parties,” says Grayland. “What we find is that chains of communications traditionally are just that, ‘chains’.” Communications move back and forth between single points of contact, but this can be very inefficient. Instead, Heighten focuses on creating broader networks of relationships from the get-go, so that “as the pressure increases, communications are much more effective and the level of trust & understanding higher. Likewise, there are much better lines of communication across all stakeholders, who, if necessary, can develop smaller expert groups to work on specific technicalities.”

As with most interactions with China these days, one of the major challenges Heighten is having to work with is Covid-19. “The majority of the projects we worked on before required courier supervision end to end. For large exhibitions this can be a governmental and insurance-based prerequisite,” Grayland explains. Of course, China’s strict quarantine requirements under the ongoing zero Covid policy now mean that end-to-end supervision by a single individual is not possible.

“Due to this we have been helping clients by offering a bookend courier solution, where our team can step in and meet the shipment, then carry out due diligence and monitoring of the exhibits in place of their own team,” says Grayland. “This is an exciting new area for us, however it does create new dynamics and requires very clear communications and agreement on expectations between the multitude of different parties involved.”

Get immediate access to the China market with Launchpad, CBBC’s flagship market entry service. Call +44 (0)20 7802 2000 or email enquiries@cbbc.org now to find out more.

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Jenny Lin lived in Shanghai for many years and is now Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California. Her recent book “Above Sea: Contemporary Art, Urban Culture and the Fashioning of Global Shanghai” (Manchester University Press) takes a deep dive into the notion of Shanghai as China’s “capital of cool”, and its promotion of contemporary art and design.

In Above Sea you describe the explosion of galleries, museums and art districts in Shanghai in the 1990s. It certainly was a vibrant time, but how would you describe the art scene in the city now? To an outsider, it seems to be focused on formal museums now rather than perhaps more ad-hoc art districts and independent galleries?

The contemporary art scene in Shanghai continues to boom. Dozens of new museums and galleries have opened in recent years, including the gargantuan China Art Palace and Power Station of Art, which is now host to the ongoing Shanghai Biennial. The government has ramped up investments in Shanghai’s art and culture industries, most noticeably with projects along the Huangpu Riverfront, such as Shanghai Urban Space Art Season, a bi-annual public art exhibition featuring large-scale works by local and international artists.

As you note, Shanghai’s most visible recent art developments tend to be formal, such as government-backed museums and city-sponsored exhibitions. However, less overtly official art endeavours still flourish in private museums like the Rockbund Art Museum, commercial galleries and artist-run initiatives like Xu Zhen’s MadeIn Gallery, publications and websites like Art-Ba-Ba, underground clubs and festivals, and also in Shanghai’s cutting-edge art schools and institutes.

The height of art ‘retailing’ seems to have been in the earlier 2000s. What is the health, or otherwise, of the art sale market in Shanghai now?

Art collectors, many from outside mainland China, had voracious appetites for contemporary Chinese art, especially from Beijing and Shanghai, in the early 2000s. During these years, the Shanghai Art Fair became a major destination within the international art market, and arts professionals around the world began touting Shanghai as a hot cultural capital. At the same time, high-end retailers like Christian Dior sponsored exhibitions and commissioned works by Shanghai-based artists, hoping to tap into this new-found excitement for the city’s art amongst foreign shoppers, while preparing for Shanghai’s expected emergence as a centre of luxury goods consumption.

Fast-forward to today, and Shanghai has indeed become a hotbed of high-end retail and art development. These days, we see more local (i.e., Chinese and Shanghainese) investment driving the city’s continuously strong art market. The Long Museum, founded by famed Shanghai-born billionaire and art collector Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei, marks a striking example of this increasingly localised art investment. 

You discuss the government’s desire to promote Shanghai as an ‘international cultural capital’ and that, back in 2008, there was a forum entitled, “Los Angeles vs Shanghai: Who is the Art Capital of the Pacific Rim?” How far has Shanghai emerged as an ‘international cultural capital’ in the intervening years?

Shanghai has soared high as an international cultural capital. No longer reliant on comparisons to Western cities like Los Angeles, nor evoking its early twentieth century monikers such as “Paris of the East” and “New York of the West,” Shanghai has emerged as a major world city on its own terms. Countless people around the world, even if they have never travelled to mainland China, will be able to conjure images of Shanghai in their minds. The city’s iconic Lujiazui skyline in Pudong, which has appeared widely in mainstream media everywhere from fashionable advertisements to the James Bond movie Skyfall, now signifies a premier global metropolis.

China Art Palace, a museum of modern Chinese art located in Pudong, Shanghai

You are quite critical of biennales, of generic ‘biennialisation’ with more emphasis on tourism, domestic politics and ‘worlding’ Shanghai than genuine artistic creativity. We’re just coming to the end of the 13th Shanghai Biennale in July. For the first time, the Biennale has operated over eight months through three phases between November 2020 and July 2021, challenging the usual art biennale format. Despite obstacles, has this in any way rejuvenated or significantly changed the Biennale and ‘biennialisation’ in Shanghai? And, if not, can anything?

While I remain sceptical of large-scale, government-sponsored art biennials, this past year during the pandemic has made me acutely aware of their potential benefits and what we stand to lose without them: cross-cultural exchanges and the forging of international relationships, both friendly and professional, among participating artists, curators, and visitors. The longer, diversified format we saw in this last iteration of the Shanghai Biennial, along with other experimental approaches such as the international city pavilions introduced in the 2012 Shanghai Biennial and increased presence of Latin American artists in the 2018 Shanghai Biennial, showcase the sincere efforts of a new generation of curators and organisers to foster sustained, transnational artistic exchanges. As extreme nationalism and nativist movements rise around the globe, and as I witness increased instances of anti-Asian hate and violence from where I write in the United States, cross-cultural exchanges and the sharing of personal perspectives through art assume a new urgency.

China has sought to position Shanghai as an international city, a financial centre, a focal point for art and design and, as you discuss in your book, even to hark back to a form of its previous semi-colonial cosmopolitanism. Yet art in the service of becoming a world financial centre may not necessarily be great art! How has the government gone about reconciling the two objectives of finance and art in one place?

The Chinese government, keen to promote Shanghai’s soft power nationally and internationally, has invested in local artists by providing studio space in officially designated creative zones, commissioning public artworks, and sponsoring exhibitions in state-run museums. Sometimes such investments result in art that appears blatantly propagandistic, basically churning out artworks as civic advertisements. Yet, when artists are granted space, time, financial support, and at least a modicum of freedom, they often yield beautifully interesting, arresting, critical, and contemplative results. In Shanghai, as elsewhere in the world, finance and art frequently converge quite literally in one place. Seen, for instance, in the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, established by China Minsheng Bank, and Shanghai’s K11 Art Mall.

While I remain sceptical of large-scale, government-sponsored art biennials, this past year during the pandemic has made me acutely aware of their potential benefits and what we stand to lose without them

As I argue in Above Sea, private spaces, such as the art gallery in the Bottega Veneta shop in Shanghai, unencumbered from governmental restrictions, have been able to feature some of the city’s most experimental and edgy art. At the same time, private and governmental support often go hand in hand in China, and we also witness interesting artists benefitting from both state and corporate support. For example, the artist Liu Jianhua, who I discuss at length in my book, has produced easily digestible commissions for private corporations, as well as government-sponsored public art, which, in turn, help support his more probing projects that ruminate on the promises and pitfalls of globalisation.

Author Jenny Lin

You juxtapose that while government officials promote Shanghai’s contemporary art scene, they are also increasingly seeking to dictate that art through control of the display mechanism (i.e. what goes into galleries and museums) and encouraging artist self-censorship. Can a genuine local art scene emerge in Shanghai given this scenario, or is it all just ultimately a façade?

I believe a genuine local art scene can emerge under almost any conditions, including this push and pull with governmental forces and self-censorship, which is inescapable in China today. I found the documentary Sky Ladder, about the art of Cai Guo Qiang, quite revelatory in this regard. As I discuss in my book, Chinese-born and currently US-based artist Cai has produced large-scale public art commissions for the Chinese government, including the spectacular fireworks display over the Huangpu River for the 2001 APEC conference in Shanghai. Simultaneously, the artist creates critical projects that call audiences’ attention to pressing, intentionally hidden social issues, such as the undervalued importance of migrant labour in fuelling Shanghai’s urban development.

Watching Cai Guo Qiang’s difficult negotiations with the Chinese government in completing public art commissions, and how these commissions ultimately helped support his very personal, localised dream of exploding a ladder into the sky in his home village, made me extra sympathetic to the pressures Chinese artists endure. While governments, as well as purely commercial enterprises, frequently exploit art in order to erect shiny façades, we can still find, beneath these veneers if we look hard enough, critical, experimental, quixotic, funny, surreal, and dreamy projects – the stuff that constitutes a genuine local art scene.

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British design firm Paul Cocksedge Studio has joined with Swire Properties to tour a major public artwork called Please Be Seated.

The large-scale installation first showed at the Temple Plaza in the Sino-Ocean Taikoo Li Chengdu and will travel across the country to Taikoo Hui in Guangzhou, Taikoo Li Qiantan in Shanghai, and finally, Taikoo Li Sanlitun in Beijing, where it will become a permanent installation in the capital city.

The launch of Please Be Seated by Paul Cocksedge Studio in Chengdu

Please Be Seated on display in Temple Plaza of Sino-Ocean Taikoo Li Chengdu

“We’re delighted to partner with Paul Cocksedge Studio to bring this ambitious art piece to four of our retail centres in the Chinese mainland,” said Tim Blackburn who is Swire Properties’ Chinese mainland CEO. “This installation, which merges innovation, sustainability and art, is a wonderful showcase of our commitment to creative placemaking in our communities. With this piece, we invite the public to explore and engage with the artwork on their own terms, interacting with it so that they become an integral part of the piece themselves. We feel this sends a powerful message of the personal relationships we form with art, and speaks to our vision of curating exceptional art and cultural experiences within our developments.

Discover how British companies find Chinese partners

“Please Be Seated was an instinctive response to public space and the rhythm of people moving through it. We are excited to work with Swire Properties again to create a piece of work that engages with the public, and puts them at the centre of design,” said Cocksedge of the installation.

Paul Cocksedge Studio has a longstanding creative partnership with Swire Properties and has created ambitious pieces of work including Gust of Wind at HKRI Taikoo Hui in Shanghai, and Spectrum for the Swire Properties VIP lounge at Art Basel Hong Kong 2019.

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In Shanghai, only ten years ago nobody would have wanted to go for a cultural stroll along the Xuhui Waterfront. No travel guide book or city directory mentioned its West Bund Cultural Corridor, simply because it did not exist. Instead, art lovers would rather have headed to M50, a hip, cosy complex of former factories filled with independent art galleries on Moganshan Road.

That has now changed. A stone throw’s away from a pleasant riverside runway park that stretches miles along the river, the Bund Cultural Corridor now comprises dozens of Museums. The latest addition is a newly opened outpost of Paris’s Pompidou Centre, which French President Emmanuel Macron inaugurated last November.

The corridor represents the archetypal genesis of art partnerships between Chinese and foreign art institutions. “Chinese museums are strong on the hardware: they spend a lot on the architecture, but they do not invest in the software, that is on staff and curation,” says Lisa Movius, a China-based journalist specialising in visual arts.

This has resulted in Chinese museums seeking to import foreign know-how, which led to the realisation of one-time shows as well as long-term collaborations. Seizing the opportunity to fill up beautiful architecture in the Bund Cultural Corridor, partnerships with foreign art institutions have brought exhibitions of the likes of Giacometti and Warhol to the Yuz Museum, the West Bund Museum and the Long Museum. Inevitably this has culminated with the launch of one of the most prestigious art franchises in the world, the Centre Pompidou x West Bund Art Museum.

It all began in 2008. The desire to show its cultural lustre for the 2010 Shanghai Expo made the Shanghai municipality realise that the city – unlike other megalopolises in the west – lacked an art centre and that building one could yield great opportunities, both cultural and commercial. Thus, in 2008 Shanghai initiated a “comprehensive development plan along both sides of the Huangpu River” that called for the development of the Xuhui waterfront.

This stretch of land in the Xuhui District of Shanghai was only the beginning. The numerous Memorandums of Understanding signed between Chinese museums and international collections are a clear sign that the art craze has spread beyond the borders of Shanghai. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London was amongst the first to initiate a partnership in China with the Design Society in Shenzhen, for their 2017 opening. Whilst last year, the Tate signed an MoU with the Shanghai Pudong Museum of Art, which is due to open in 2021.

The latest additions to the list are a 15,000 sqm branch of Paris’s Musée Rodin, due to open in 2023 in Shenzhen, and a five-year collaboration to open Paris’s Fondation Giacometti and Musée National Picasso-Paris in Beijing’s 798 art district, both launching in June.

International museums are eager to seize the endless prospects that this art fever is bringing. And they are not the only ones. A great deal of enthusiasm comes from local property development companies and governments. The former see art spaces as a good chance to invest, but their effort is limited to building classy museums, often with the help of some ‘starchitect’.

Should the property market slow down, international museums will always be the winners in this race, as their expertise in providing trained staff and know-how will be more and more in demand for such partnerships. For them, entering China is a profitable business, that allows them to build upon their brand by getting unprecedented exposure abroad.

Regardless of the mutual benefits, these partnerships may bring by, a few factors may hinder their blooming. International museums often enter China expecting that they are going to face an identical situation to that in their country, both professionally and organisationally. “Coming from a very structured museum and history in the west to China where foreign exhibitions are a relatively new thing can be challenging for the international museums,” says Lisa.

Blaming management problems on cultural differences is sometimes the easiest way out. On the contrary, international museums should rely on the knowledge of the several local, yet foreign-trained, qualified art experts, who could help them navigate their new venture. Moreover, developing a deeper understanding of the novel reality – and rules – in which they are operating is key to setting a successful example for the art partnerships to come, and for these cultural exchanges to keep on flourishing in the future.

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One of Britain’s most popular and celebrated artists David Hockney will be exhibiting a first survey exhibition in China in partnership with the Tate Museum, at M Woods gallery in downtown Beijing until January 2020. David Hockney: Works from the Tate Collection will be the launch exhibit at M Woods – Hutong, the second branch of the popular gallery in Beijing.

Drawing on many different sources, including popular imagery and the works of old and modern masters, Hockney’s subject matter concerns the traditional themes of art – still life, portraiture and landscape – and his principle obsession with representation and perspective. With nearly 100 works, the exhibition spans his career from the mid-1950s to the present and demonstrates the range of possibilities in his work, not only within the traditional areas of painting, printmaking and drawing but also in his more recent use of photography and digital technologies. Works are drawn primarily from the Tate’s collection in the UK and include some of Hockney’s most iconic paintings including A Bigger Splash (1967), Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970-71), and My Parents (1977).

Born in Bradford, UK in 1937, Hockney attended Bradford School of Art and the Royal College of Art, London, before going on to make some of the best-known images of the last 60 years. Since his first retrospective exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1970 when he was only 33, Hockney has continued to attract widespread critical and public attention. He has been consistently innovative and adventurous in questioning how we see and respond to the world.

Hockney first visited China in 1981 with Stephen Spender, a British poet, and the two collaborated on the book China Diary (1982) that chronicled their journey. Hockney went on to explore his fascination with traditional Chinese scroll painting in the 1987 film A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China or: Surface Is Illusion But So Is Depth. In the film, Hockney examines the Qing dynasty court painting The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour. Painted by a group of artists led by the master Wang Hui, Hockney guides viewers through the vastness and subtlety of the scroll and its dynamic lessons in time and space. The exhibition reveals how Chinese painting has continued to have a profound influence on Hockney’s practice in terms of painting theory, technique and perspective. Presenting the rarely shown The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour (Scroll 6) alongside Hockney’s ‘Moving Focus’ series of prints as well more recent works in paintings and photography, the exhibition follows Hockney’s remarkable journey through the myriad ways he has interrogated the nature of looking and representation, from his days as a promising student to his place as one of the finest artists working today.

This is not the first time the Tate has exhibited in China. In 2018, Tate worked in partnership with Shanghai Museum and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing, on the staging of British Landscapes: Masterpieces from Tate Britain which went on to become the most visited exhibition in Tate’s history anywhere in the world. It received more than 614,000 visitors during its run in Shanghai, and in Beijing, the exhibition received more than 3,650 visitors each day. It introduced audiences in China to the important collections of art held by UK museums and galleries and was a platform for Tate to significantly increase its profile within a key region. The exhibition presented the best of British art to this international audience and showcased the UK’s continued position as a leader in the arts and cultural sector.

The presentation of David Hockney: Works from the Tate Collection is a collaboration between Tate and M Woods and runs until 5 January 2020.

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Over the past decade, China has been investing heavily in its high-speed rail industry. The CBBC has followed this sector closely, both within China, as well as the ever-growing international market – including countries across Africa. Rail is one of the 10 priority sectors under China’s Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025) national strategy (to find out more about this strategy see CBBC’s report on MIC 2025 here). However, at present, it is not only the high-speed rail industry that is grabbing the headlines.

On 2 June 2017, an entirely new type of intelligent urban transportation was launched in the city of Zhuzhou which is located in China’s southern province of Hunan. The name of this type of transportation is Autonomous Rail Transit (ART), also known as Smart Rail. It has been developed by the CSR (China Southern Rail) Zhuzhou Institute Co Ltd, a subsidiary of Chinese rail giant CRRC (China Railway Rollingstock Corporation).

CRRC began designing the ART system back in 2013 and the vehicle is a combination of a modern electric tram and a conventional bus, providing urban passengers with a whole new experience when it comes to public transportation. Compared with the high costs of building dedicated rail routes within cities, ART’s advantage is that it can transport large numbers of passengers; it requires minimal infrastructure investment and it is able to manoeuvre through traffic like a bus. Rather than having a physical track, ART utilises a technology known as a “virtual track control system” so that the vehicle runs along a virtual track. This virtual track can be adjusted according to the road conditions and the surrounding traffic.

The typical three carriage vehicle is 30-metres-long and can hold up to 300 passengers. The vehicle can be adapted to include an additional two carriages and therefore allow for an extra 200 passengers during peak hours. Due to its flexibility, ART can be an alternative to a metro system in first-tier cities, or can act as the main form of transportation in second-tier and third-tier cities.

Autonomous Rail can transport large numbers of passengers with minimal infrastructure investment

Similar to other modern rail and mass transit vehicles, ART’s operational top speed is set at 70 km/h. However, as it does not rely on physical rails, the completion time of a route is less than a year, vastly improving the lead-time from concept to completion.

Currently, each kilometre of China’s underground metro system costs between RMB 400-700 million to build, in comparison to RMB 150-200 million for a conventional tram. As ART requires only simple modifications to existing roads, the total investment is only one-fifth of that of a similar route for a conventional tram system. In other words, compared with a 10-kilometre tram route, ART could reduce capital investment by at least one billion RMB on a typical set of routes.

Under the current schedule, a 6.5km route in Zhuzhou is expected by the middle of 2018, and it is hoped ART will gradually improve the public transport system within the city. If the pilot project goes well, this new form of transport will not only spread to other cities in China but also around the world. So far, ART has already attracted interest from the Middle-East, the UK, and Canada. If ART comes to the UK, there will be opportunities for British businesses in areas including infrastructure development, after sales services and the relevant supply chain for components.

However, even though autonomous vehicles are being tipped as the future of transportation, they are not yet allowed on China’s public roads. Only last month, Robin Li, the head of Chinese online search engine giant Baidu, was investigated after riding in one of the firm’s driverless vehicles on a Beijing ring road. The regulation of autonomous public transportation is still being discussed at the top levels of government, as handling control of vehicles to artificial intelligence technologies still possess unknown safety and security challenges.

Products and equipment made in China traditionally have a poor reputation associated with low-cost manufacturing, as well as intellectual property issues. However, ART, along with the high-speed train, is proving that China is taking innovation seriously and is determined to follow the Made-in-China 2025 initiative and move up the value chain.

For more information on the rail and mass transit industry please contact the author, Mark Xu, sector lead for advanced manufacturing and transport at the China-Britain Business Council: mark.xu@cbbc.org.cn.

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