Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai are teaming up with Qatar Museums (QM) in Doha as part of a new collaboration aimed at exchanging “art and ideas among the three cities”. The new partnership will develop exhibitions and curatorial projects; the inaugural show, In Production: Art and the Studio System, is due to open at the Yuz Museum next week (7 November-1 March 2020).
“Together, we are experimenting with new and innovative ways to share the collections and programmes from Lacma, Yuz, and QM with a larger global audience,” says Michael Govan, the director of Lacma, in a statement. Sheikha Al Mayassa Bint Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the chair of QM, says: “Thanks to this agreement, we can now look forward to sharing ideas, insights, and creative visions from Doha with the public in Shanghai and Los Angeles.”
Earlier this year in Hong Kong, Govan signed an agreement with Budi Tek, the founder of the Yuz Museum, which involves establishing a joint foundation. Tek, who is ill with pancreatic cancer, owns more than 1,500 contemporary works by artists such as Xu Bing and Yang Fudong. Govan told us at the time: “This is a complex step-by-step process, which will involve putting [most of] the collection into a foundation first.”
“Lacma and Yuz still intend to create the foundation to preserve the collection for the public,” a spokeswoman at Lacma says. Asked if the initiative has been modified in light of QM coming on board, she adds: “QM is in support of the exhibition programming; their involvement is unrelated to the foundation.”
In Production: Art and the Studio System will feature works by 24 contemporary artists, such as Douglas Gordon and Julie Orser “whose works critique, appropriate, and engage with Hollywood and the film studio system”, says a project statement. Most of the works entered Lacma’s permanent collection in recent years.
Two exhibitions will subsequently open at Yuz Museum next year as part of the new initiative: The Abode of Illusions: the Garden of Zhang Daqian (March–May 2020) and This Is Not a Selfie: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection (May–August 2020). The third exhibition in the schedule, Yoshitomo Nara, will launch at Lacma (5 April–2 August 2020) before travelling to Yuz Museum next autumn.
POSTSCRIPT: Hyundai is the presenting sponsor for In Production: Art and the Studio System, and will support two other exhibitions and public programmes at Lacma and Yuz Museum, a Lacma spokeswoman says.