New Identities of China’s Private Art Museum within the Scope of Global Art World

Abstract

Based on a worldview, the core issue of cultural globalization is pacing toward the contemporary art world. Within the triangular circuit among contemporary art museums, global art markets and the plurality of identity from a world scape, the role play of contemporary art museum pushes itself on the crest of a wave. From the first shaping of a “white box” to today’s spectacular architecture, the accelerated speed of its “reproducible” construction gives today’s contemporary art museum an opportunity to mapping a global journey under the umbrella of “global art” (Völckers & Farenholtz, 2013). For all we know, such sense of “global” implicates the threats of singularity and homogenization, which are intensified in partial non-western counties and regions. That is to say, during the postwar time, the global (contemporary) art indicates the tremendous expansion of its regional and world circulation targeting on these nonwestern counties and regions (Mosquera, 2001). To interplant these “mass-produced artistic goods” reasonably, one of the crucial role play of the new museums here is to actualize as an art market to ensure this circulation vitalized. Among these regional art markets, indisputably, China is one of the most characteristic cases. However, what is more intriguing that, the reason of the rising of contemporary art in China is initially due to a political issue. Impacted by the global art market this contemporary Chinese art shifted dramatically as the up-and-coming Chinese contemporary art (Wu Hung, 2008). Overnight, all the megapolis and Metropolis in China give the public a dazzling architecture show as the history once occurred in the Western repeats itself again. These vanity projects once again triggers a fierce debate about the function of a new museum and the orientation of a (contemporary) art museum in China. Meanwhile, continuously affected by globalization, the new models of contemporary art museum in western countries are also emerged in China, especially in the South China. Hereto, this final work aims to critically discuss the principal transformations of China’s (non-profit) private art museums which are actually characterized as private contemporary art museums under the world’s backgrounds of the issue about the mapping of global contemporary art museums. At the same time, this thesis also intends to observe the reactions and interactions between China’s private art museums and the influences of global museums’ brand identity by means of three in-depth-case analysis of China’s private art museums. Last but not least, through all the researches which are employed by the mixed methodology based on qualitative and quantitative approaches under the theoretical framework of new models of museums undertaken, this thesis would ultimately find out one of the feasible possibilities of new models for China’s private art museum’s future with a raised question of which is more significant between the issue of China’s private art museums will be and the issue about what China’s private art museums could include and present.