GUANGDONG TIMES MUSEUM WILL REOPEN
The Guangdong Times Museum, which ceased mounting exhibitions in 2022, will reopen in March, the South China Morning Post reports. The Guangzhou institution will relaunch in its roughly 13,000-square-foot Rem Koolhaas–designed exhibition space, located on the nineteenth floor of a high-rise residential building, with a group show centered on themes of intimacy and feelings in present-day China, organized by Hong Kong– and Shenzhen-based curator Qu Chang. Two more group exhibitions—“The Poetics of Images, Fields and Geography” and “There Is Also a Way on the Island”—will take place in July and October, respectively, followed by a midcareer survey of Fuxin-born artist Sun Xun, the date of which has not yet been announced.
The nonprofit private museum, one of the few independent arts institutions in South China, was forced to close after nineteen years in operation when, thanks to the grinding Covid-19 crisis and the slowdown experienced by the Chinese economy, its main sponsor, property developer Times China, withdrew funding. In the ensuing months, the museum’s five remaining staff members organized film screenings and seminars and kept up a digital art program. The team this past January mounted an online auction with the goal of raising funds to reopen: Sixty-five artists, many from Guangdong Province and Hong Kong, participated, with the top work fetching $47,000. Though artists were allowed to keep half the proceeds, many donated their shares to the museum. The undisclosed amount raised was only a small portion of the institution’s earlier annual budget of roughly 10 million yuan ($1.4 million), but the museum has promised to keep ticket prices low in order to remain accessible to the public.
“We want to restart not because the conditions have become very good now, or because the future capital budget has been secured,” said Times Museum deputy director Nikita Cai Yingqian. “It is because too many people have expectations from us. This is also a responsibility, a responsibility for this ecology of art and we want to continue to be able to do something.”
