  hen the China National Art Museum was reopened in July of 2003 after its year-long reconstruction and renovation work was completed, another bigger extension project was announced. To the west of the museum, a new museum would be built, covering a space of about 40,000 square meters, almost one and a half times as large as the old one. Though this huge extension project is still in the planning stages, the various reforms accompanying this plan have been carried out inside the Museum.
Fan Di’an, the director of the museum, says the goal of the reforms is to transform the National Art Museum of China into “a modern national art museum of international standard.” It was not a simple play of words to redefine the Museum as an “art museum,” but embodied a change in the Museum’s mission.
The change means the Museum will change from being an “art exhibition hall,” an idea that originated in Japan about a century ago. Since the Nationalist Government founded the National Art Exhibition Hall in Nanjing in 1936, the idea of “undertaking exhibitions” had dominated in the building and development of Chinese museums for a long time. So the Jiangsu Provincial Museum, founded in the 1950s on the basis of National Art Exhibition Hall, and Shanghai Art Museum, founded in 1956, had all acted on such an idea.
Back then, a museum was believed to be an establishment for exhibitions, not a museum that housed collections, research, exhibition and education material. That idea led to a long-time belief among Chinese that museums were simply exhibition halls, or places for “hanging paintings.”
“Running a museum is a costly game,” says Li Xu, current director of Zhangjiang Contemporary Art Museum. Having worked for many years in the academic department of the Shanghai Art Museum, Li firmly believed that “the only way out for Chinese museums is to turn into art museums and follow the rules similar to those of a soccer game: you have to abide by international rules if you want to play the game”.
 While international rules of art museums are complicated, the collection, preservation, research and exhibition functions and non-profitability have always been fundamental elements to art museums, the “special establishments for art treasures.” But in China today, almost all national and provincial museums are renting out openly or in disguised forms spaces to whoever applies for exhibitions. “Museums are not the genuine art museums so long as such a situation exists,” says Li Xiangyang, the former director of Shanghai Art Museum.
Fan Di’an launched a series of reforms after he became director of the China National Museum in October 2004. By dividing the research sector into two sections: a division that studies painting and sculpture and a division that researches folk art, calligraphy and other maters; and by creating a division to feature collections, he sought to demonstrate that this would become a full-fledged museum.
Explorations and practices related to academic orientation, exhibition, collection, research and educational extension of art museums were also going on in the government-funded museums in Shanghai, Guangzhou and other places. But the system still has a long way to go.
About this situation, the artist Chen Danqing, who stayed overseas for many years, had a more frank statement to make. With his experience in foreign art museums for over ten years, this artist and cultural scholar remarked, “Though so many museums have come out in the last seven years after I came back, I would still say that there aren’t genuine art museums in China yet.”
One. Academic Orientation and Exhibition Planning
 rom the end of 1999 to early 2000, the Shanghai Art Museum witnessed the completion of its whole relocation project. The space for the new museum was once the site of a horse racing facility for old Shanghai. Only a street away from the old museum, this famous British-style building has a space of 18,000 square meters, being three times as large as the old one. The newly relocated Shanghai Art Museum began to keep an eye to extending its functions. Thus its English name, the “Shanghai Art Museum,” was decided on in 1986 when its reconstruction was begun on the basis of the former Shanghai Art Exhibition Hall, began to take on its true meaning by highlighting the functions of an “art museum.”
 The new Shanghai Art Museum held in November 2000 a major exhibition “Shanghai•Haishang (meaning ‘on the sea’)” – the third Shanghai Biennale, which for the first time invited overseas artists to exhibit as well as followed the curatorial practice in the last two Shanghai Biennales. The exhibition embraced all categories of art extending from single oil paintings or ink and wash paintings to sculptures, installations, photographical and architectural works, to meet the standards of international art exhibitions.
With an academic orientation of “presenting the trends and current status of contemporary Chinese art and promoting the exchange and dialogue between contemporary Chinese art and international art,” the Shanghai Art Museum has held the Shanghai Biennale six times now and has turned it into an academic brand name.
“Before opening the new museum, we dealt almost totally with renting out exhibition spaces,” recalled Li Xiangyang, the former executive director. “After the new museum was put to use, we decided to reduce the application exhibitions that brought profit but had no academic values and lasted only three to five days. To increase invitation exhibitions that had academic influence though brought no income or even loss of money, like the exhibitions of works by Dali, Chen Danqing and Cai Guoqiang. Meanwhile, we also initiated some exhibitions of certain academic values.” The series of academic exhibitions he mentioned included the “Metaphysic” abstract art exhibitions conducted four times and the exhibition series of works by contemporary new-edge artists.
As for presenting exhibitions under their own academic orientations, China National Museum is apparently more privileged than provincial museums. More than 3,000 exhibitions held by the National Museum after its inauguration shows no lack of large-scale foreign and domestic exchange exhibitions, such as “Picasso’s Original Painting Show,” “Italian Modern Painting Show” and the like. With academic review exhibition of domestic art, there exist “National Exhibition of Fine Art Works” held every five years and “Beijing Biennale of International Fine Arts.” Director Fan Di’an believed that art museums should engage in the work of building and reflecting domestic contemporary art. He said, “What an art museum should do is to find out the research subject from its own art history and present its academic judgment in the manner of exhibitions by way of sorting out extant classic collections.”
He also clarified it with an example: the China National Museum sorted out from the extant collections an exhibition themed as “Farmer•Farmer” this year. Farmers turned the focal object in the 20th century Chinese art scenes, and such a phenomenon never existed in ancient Chinese art history, nor did it in western modern art. The farmer’s image in art formed a series of image records, and the image study presented over time featuring a farmer’s image can bring out the modernity of Chinese art.
Two. Collection, Exhibition and Research
 bout the relationship between exhibitions and collections, Li Xu produced a vivid metaphor: just like a theatrical performance, there should be equally large space for both the stage and the backstage.
Collections are fundamental to both art museums and museums. Due to a long-time separation of art museums from museums, most art museums cannot compete with museums in terms of collections. The idea that “ancient art treasures go to museums and museums are used as places for exhibitions” seems to have become a stereotype. The Shanghai Art Museum is a case in point. It acquired almost no functions of collection and research before 1986; it also enjoyed fewer collections after its formal inauguration. “There might be a collection of about 2,000 pieces when I began to work there, including quite a few commercial paintings, engraving works and book-collector’s stamps,” recalls Li Xiangyang.
Museums in different places of China usually feature a strong local character in their collections and researches. The Collection of the Shanghai Art Museum came mostly from Shanghai and its surrounding regions; The Guangdong Art Museum mainly collected works of modern art in southeastern coastal regions. And museums in other places achieved even less in terms of their collections.
 Because of its standing as a national institution, the China National Art Museum enjoys a collection of about 70,000 pieces of art works, far superior to other museums. Early collections in the Museum came mainly from artists’ donations to state institutions, yet exhibitions, collection and research did not feature prominently. Chen lvsheng, who works in the research division of the Museum, says, “Our earliest collection was the works by Han Leran, a North Korean artist who was a classmate of Chang Shuhong when they studied in France. The Museum had not yet been built immediately after the liberation, so Han’s family donated his works to the care of Ministry of Culture. After the Museum was inaugurated, those works were transferred there. I believed that was the earliest collection the China National Museum had ever acquired.”
After the 1980s, sources for collections gradually expanded and the Museum began to take in donations from foreign collectors and artists. In 1996, German collectors named Ludwig donated to the Museum their long-time collection -- 117 pieces of European and American art works, including four original Picassos.
Collections of the Museum embrace traditional Chinese paintings, oil paintings, engraving and sculptural works as well as folk art works like New Year’s pictures, paper-cuts and toys, reflecting to a greater extent the developing course of Chinese art in the 20th century. Most of the collected works are prize-winning works at various national art exhibitions in different years, and also some are important works selected from other exhibitions. But only in recent years has the Museum begun to set aside special funds for targeted collections of various kinds.
About the donations and collections of the Museum, Liu Xilin, who works in the research division, said, “In the early period there were fewer donations and the state couldn’t afford to pay for materials; it is true that there were donations before the Cultural Revolution and the Museum also paid artists something like 150 to 200 RMB yuan as a fee, or issued qualification certificates to them; but during the Cultural Revolution, those artists were accused of being unsatisfied with the payments -- it’s a very awkward situation today; after the Cultural Revolution, the Ministry of Culture prescribed for the Museum that 30 RMB be paid to a living artist for one ninth square meter of a piece of art work, and the yearly money for donations was only 100,000 RMB at that time. Later, when the market rose and prices of art works soared, the money for donations was not in place, and the Museum had great difficulty in collecting art work.”
‘The collections of museums depend upon private donations and government financial allocations, but in a system of balanced financial allocation, museums were always unable to make both ends meet after they paid the working staff and the daily operation and maintenance of equipment. Though some museums acquired quite a few art works by holding large-scale academic exhibitions in recent years, their collections were still far from the scales of genuine art museums. Meanwhile, the display and research of collected works and the academic publications of the museums have not financially secured either.
On the other hand, while financial support is guaranteed to a certain extent, there is no law to encourage philanthropic donations. “After putting money into the running of projects of the museums, donors usually have to pay taxes for their donations to cultural undertakings, and this punishment-like taxation system greatly dampened donor enthusiasm,” Li Xu said at a forum on Chinese museums in 2003.
Three. Public Education and Exchange Services
 n the second Guangzhou Triennial in November 2005, the construction project entitled “Koolhaas Gave Birth to a Child in Guangzhou” turned out to be one of the most eye-catching works. That was a project designed by distinguished Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas for a new branch of Guangdong Art Museum --- the Times Museum in Times Rose Park. With a total space of 28,000 square meters, this new branch is designed to integrate into urban communities, and now it enters the last stage of intensive construction and expects to be inaugurated this May. About it, Wang Huangsheng, the director of Guangdong Art Museum, said, “Koolhaas produced an excellent original concept; that is to integrate the museum into communities.”
 “Western people have grown up in museums,” he said. People with some idea of western art museums would utter a sigh like this. Artist Chen Danqing even declared, “The citizens who received some education in art museums are different from those who didn’t.” Though in Chinese art movements, pioneering artists like Cai Yuanpei and Xu Beihong have repeatedly sponsored the ‘aesthetic education’ function of museums, due to reasons of various kinds in recent decades, the cultural education areas including art museums have not received much attention, and it was only in the 1980s that public education and service functions of museums began to be invoked.
The Shanghai Art Museum took the lead in 1999 by setting up an education division responsible for exchange and extension services for the public. Apart from founding a website and creating a web exhibition space, and giving regular lectures and on-the-spot explanations, it also issued “Museum Friends,” a printed handout that provided timely information about exhibitions and activities every month in the Shanghai Art Museum. As a pioneer executor in this area, the late director of the Museum’s education division, Ma Chuhua, said in an interview once that it was the public education service that distinguished modern art museums from traditional museums. “Work in the education division is diverse and trifling and needs constant enthusiasm as well as strong professional dedication,” he said.
Either for its short history or for its location in economically well-developed Guangdong Province, the Guangdong Art Museum, founded in the 1990s, always enjoys a clear-minded guideline and has developed relatively well. Since its inauguration in 1997, this provincial museum has gradually worked out its academic orientation and functional image in which education and extension services had been planned in detail.
As the first cooperative project between the Museum and the enterprise, the Times branch, with a total space of 8,000 square meters, was built in 2003. After a three-year effort to integrate into communities by offering free visits, academic exchanges and comprehensive services, this new branch has managed to draw closer to the platform of a general public. Koolhaas’ break-through design of this new branch distributes the museum’s functions to various aspects of a residential building by dividing the museum into several parts that were embedded into the residential building, thus achieving its integration into the community.
 In terms of its structural conception, the Times branch is more like a non-profit space that provides studios for artists’ to work for long periods. It also stresses more of the experimental and modern nature of art. “In the future, the Times branch will turn more modern and hold more avant-garde exhibitions than the original Guangdong Art Museum,” says Wang Huangsheng. About the two branches, which were built in cooperation with real estate entrepreneurs, this director said emphatically, “We keep to the dominant role of the museums and won’t allow the entrepreneurs to collect and deal in art works in the name of the museums.”
Guangdong Art Museum cooperated with another enterprise and built a branch in Dongguan, an industrial city in Guangdong. Then this provincial museum alone enjoys three museums that bear different academic orientations. “The original Guangdong Art Museum deals with contemporary art as well as other arts; its Dongguan branch is devoted to classic art and the Times branch concentrates on contemporary art.” Such a blueprint has inevitably drawn attention to the trend of the Guangdong Art Museum’s development.
And the Guangzhou Triennial initiated in 2002 and the Photographic Biennale helped promote the Guangdong Art Museum. It was originally oriented toward “fine arts of coastal regions and overseas Chinese in modern times and contemporary art of Guangdong Province.”
Wang, the director, says: “Contemporary art currently has turned into a famous school of thought; our activities easily draw attentions from art circles home and abroad who believe we only deal with contemporary art, but actually our museums have done much to research and exhibit modern art.” In school, he majored in art history and became interested in what he calls “awareness.” According to him, the “awareness” was embodied in the work of collecting and sorting out key works in art history in terms of their academic orientations and then doing research to reveal their values on the one hand, and in the “enthusiasm and responsibility for participation in and promotion of modern history” on the other.
As a new museum with a history of only 10 years, Guangdong Art Museum is consciously fashioning its features of collections in contemporary art as well as undertaking to collect works in Guangdong. By holding exhibitions, it has collected quite a few contemporary art works this year, notably photographic pieces. With the documentary photographic exhibitions in 2003, over 600 pieces were added to its collections.  “But now, three years later, after the photographic art market began to boom and prices skyrocketed, we can’t afford to collect so many photographic works. So now we have adjusted our strategy by focusing on the targeted collections, such as our recent collection of six pieces by the Iranian movie master Abas,” Wang Huangsheng said.
Four. Concluding Remarks
 ince the 1990s, China has witnessed an upsurge of newly built museums, either government or private funded. In a decade from the middle 1990s till today, there have emerged in different places about 40 new museums, including private ones like Shanghe Museum in Chengdu, Golden Wheel Museum in Ningbo, Square Museum in Nanjing, and rival government-funded ones like Mountain Pass Moon Museum in Shenzhen, Duolun Modern Art Museum in Shanghai and Gansu Museum, which was built in the Great West Development wave, as well as others, all under the jurisdiction of governments at various levels.
The building of new museums has become in many provinces the mandatory criteria for the achievement of the government in trying to develop culture; while in non-governmental areas, quite a few enterprises and private businesses have begun to invest in museums as a way to create their own cultural brand images. But, as the museum industry booms, some experts are beginning to ask questions like these: Has the age of China’s modern museums really come?
 It is reported that government intends to build 1,500 new museums before the year of 2015. Some say the number is too large while others say it is far from enough. But not all of the museums now operating are prospering; most of them are actually deserted places. After a huge amount of money is lavished on the construction of a museum, does the museum have a clear function and academic orientation? How does it conduct research and acquire collections? Does it have regular plans for exhibitions and displays? How does it realize its public aesthetic and educational function? How does it educate and train related personnel to meet its needs? These aspects that demand a careful and exact academic conception are blind areas for many provincial museums that have been rushed to construction without systematic plans. Though government funded museums in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, and also some private museums, are beginning to put the ideal of “art museums” to practice, it may need the efforts of several generations to truly reach this goal.
image 1 Shanghai Art Museum
image 2 The old National Art Museum
image 3 Abstract Art exhibition in Shanghai Art Museum
image 4 Farmer•Farmer exhibition in National Art Museum
image 5 Han Leran’s work
image 6 the collection of National Art Museum which donated by German Ludwig
imgae 7 work of Iranian movie master Abas
image 8 Today Art Museum in Beijing
image 9 Shanghe Art Museum in Chengdu
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