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New Museums in China
by Clare Jacobson
Beijing
Thursday, December 5, 2013
12:30pm–1:30pm
Architect@Work China
China International Exhibition Center
6 Beisanhuan Road, Chaoyang District
http://www.architectatwork.cn/#!bj-2013-conference/chww
Shanghai
Saturday, December 7, 2013
4:00pm–6:00pm
Rockbund Art Museum
YWCA Building
133 Yuanmingyuan Road, near the Bund
http://www.rockbundartmuseum.org/en/event/overview/a7agsx
China’s recent museum-building boom has been heavily chronicled—and critiqued. During the last decade, more than a thousand new buildings have opened in China: 100 per year on average, with a peak of approximately 400 new museums in 2011. A default narrative has taken hold. The rate of construction is outpacing available art. Museums are empty or filled with forgeries; they lack visitors, curators, and the weight of institutional direction needed for successful futures. They may soon be forgotten. Not so fast.
Book “New Museum in China” cover
The new book New Museums in China celebrates a golden era of museum building and cultural appreciation in the world’s most populous nation. Seizing the unique economic and creative opportunity, high-profile architecture firms and up-and-coming new designers are experimenting with form in dazzling ways. Exceptional, often cavernous architecture and smaller design gems are ushering in new physical, and with it mental, space for contemplating art. There are museums of glass, birds, wood, clocks, hand-crafted paper, and more traditional holdings. In mega-cities as well as tiny villages, China’s crop of new museums is impossibly young. Is their supposedly doomed future really set in stone—or steel? Author Clare Jacobson offers an alternative story.
Author Bio
Clare Jacobson is a Shanghai-based design writer and editor. She is the author of the book New Museums in China (2013) and co-author of Karlssonwilker Inc.’s Tell Me Why: The First 24 Months of a New York Design Company (2003). Jacobson is a contributing editor to Architectural Record, and her articles have also appeared in Engineering News Record, Architectural Review Asia Pacific, Azure, Landscape Architecture, and other magazines. As editor and editorial director at Princeton Architectural Press for 21 years, she originated, acquired, and developed more than 120 books on architecture, graphic design, landscape architecture, photography, and visual culture.
