CREATIVE SPACE
A Shenzhen State-owned enterprise has teamed up with Britain’s V&A to create a new cultural hub dedicated to design on the city’s seafront. Lin Qi reports.
Speaking about the addition of WeChat to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s permanent collection in September, Tim Reeve, chief operating officer of the London museum, says it has been “a great experiment” for them to address the current issue of how to collect and display digital designs within the context of a museum.
Visitors to the museum in the British capital can see the WeChat app, China’s most popular social media platform, on a mobile phone shown at one of V&A’s galleries, and digital stickers used on WeChat and their sketches are also displayed.
“We try to give to visitors to the exhibition a taste of what a particular platform is all about,” Reeve says. “It is so fundamental and important to people’s daily life, work, social interaction and business.”
WeChat’s developer, Shenzhen-headquartered Tencent Holdings, released a research report in April saying that the global network’s 889 million active monthly users spent an average of 66 minutes on the app per day in 2016.
These users included Luisa Mengoni and Brendan Cormier, colleagues of Reeve who lived and worked in Shenzhen for three years from 2014. They were the preliminary researchers for the launch of the Design Society, a cultural hub based in the southern Chinese city, and a partnership between China Merchants Shekou Holdings, a Shenzhenbased State-owned enterprise, and the V&A.
The Design Society officially opened early this month in the city’s western Shekou district.
The V&A team’s preparatory work for the museum relied heavily on WeChat, which lead to the idea of using the app as a key exhibit in the museum’s collection.
The acquisition of WeChat is just a part of collaboration between the UK museum and CMSK.
The V&A is providing professional advice and training to help its Chinese partner develop the Design Society into a world-class design museum in its own right.
Speaking about their decision to come to Shenzhen, Reeve explains: “China is important to the V&A. Historically, collecting in China was one of the earliest priorities for the museum. We have 18,000 objects from China in our current collection. China is an obvious place where the V&A tries to have a big footprint.”
He adds that new developments in the design and creative industries are helping to drive Shenzhen’s economy.
“So, it’s quite a straightforward decision for us to make, from either a historical or a contemporary perspective.”
And the opening of the Design Society features an exhibition of 250 objects of design from the V&A’s collections. The show, Values of Design, will run at a V&A Gallery through Aug 4, 2019.
The exhibition displays objects dating from as early as 900 AD, such as an Egyptian clay water filter, right up to the present day, as in the case of Flappy Bird, a popular free game app developed by Vietnamese designer Dong Nguyen. The exhibits are drawn from several V&A curatorial departments that originate from 31 different countries.
“The population in China is extremely large,” says Reeve. “It’s an opportunity to get our objects out there and displayed in front of a public who has the thirst and desire for more understanding about design.”
Another two shows running until June 2018 are: Minding the Digital, which features contemporary works of creativity providing an immersive experience, and Nurturing Dreams in Recent Work, an exhibition by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, founder of Maki and Associates and the designer of the Shenzhen art hub’s seafront building.
“We’re relying on the famous collections, strong brand names and individuals like the designers featured at the opening shows to promote the hub,” says Ole Bouman, director of the Design Society.
“While exploring these shows, visitors will pick up the many clues and tips on how to be experimental and gradually turn into designers themselves. It’s an explicit invitation to think like a designer.”
Apart from the gallery space already open to the public, meeting rooms, designers’ workshops, designer stores and other gallery spaces are due to open soon. Bouman says about 75 percent of the Design Society’s space is already in operation.
He says that thanks to new metro lines connecting the city center with Shekou, visitors will be able to spend hours at the cultural hub studying examples of good design from over the centuries.
Reeve says the Design Society team was in no hurry to set out a specific plan for the cultural hub over the next five to 10 years, especially since they are only halfway finished setting up the current collaboration.
“What I’m very keen to do is to wait for maybe three to six months after the opening and see how the general public uses the Design Society and the V&A gallery and see how they respond. It’s important to evaluate such things before deciding what happens next,” he says.
“But I think we already have a feeling that it’s going to be a success. Maybe in a year or so, it will be time to discuss future projects for the V&A and China.”