The Shekou Industrial Zone in Shenzhen, south China, is equal parts port and construction site. Along the coastal horizon, cranes appear to battle like enormous monsters. In spring 2017, this industrial zone will become home to a high-profile design museum created in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. “This is the first time the V&A has developed this kind of international collaboration,” says Tim Reeve, the V&A’s deputy director.
Designed by Fumihiko Maki, the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect, the Shekou Design Museum is wholly funded by the state-owned China Merchants Group. In 2013, it recruited the V&A to open a dedicated gallery inside the planned 70,000-sq.-m building. Chinese institutions frequently import one-off exhibitions from international venues, but this arrangement marks the first time a foreign museum has been fully integrated into the development of a Chinese institution.
Under the terms of the five-year partnership, the V&A will organise ongoing presentations of 20th- and 21st-century international design from its collection in the V&A Gallery. It will also organise two touring exhibitions, one in 2017 and another in 2018, and help train senior staff. The V&A receives a fee as part of the deal, but the museum declined to specify a figure.
“This will not be a branch of the V&A, nor is it a joint venture,” Reeve says. The arrangement “allows the V&A to contribute to a new design initiative in China, and to raise the profile of our ideas and collections there… without the major and expensive very long-term commitment needed to set up a permanent outpost.” The contract can be extended if both sides agree.
The Shekou Design Museum seeks to establish Shenzhen as more than a “factory of the world”, says Ole Bouman, the institution’s director. The city is home to thousands of design companies and hosted the first national exhibition of graphic design in 1992. Bouman anticipates visitors being a mix of “museum lovers and design professionals”. He hopes the programme will shed light on the “ongoing transformations in Chinese society and the role design has in it”.
China Merchants Group is heavily invested in property, and the design museum is part of an ambitious project to give Shekou a makeover. (The Hong Kong-based conglomerate created the area by blowing up its hills to level the site and provide fill for the harbour.) Even if China’s property market declines with the economy, Bouman says the museum should remain on track. “The project is not funded by casino money [from property speculation], but based on a multiyear commitment,” he says.
The V&A Gallery is led by Luisa Mengoni, the museum’s senior curator for Asian arts, who began a three-year stint in Shenzhen in October 2014. Reeve says: “This new institution is being conceived at a very interesting time for China, with growing ambition and expectation regarding the development of new ways of living.”