The Design Museum Built at "Shenzhen Speed," and Shenzhen's "Creative Ambition"

"To be here celebrating the museum's opening after such a short time — the speed is astonishing," the British partner said.

At 9 a.m. on December 1, the most important museum of Shenzhen's 38 years opened its doors.

It is a low, white building in Shekou. The name that had circulated beforehand — "the V&A's first overseas design museum" — was not quite right. But nobody stepped forward to correct the small error. Next to the official name, the Sea World Culture and Arts Center, "V&A" (Britain's Victoria and Albert Museum) obviously travels much further.

Besides the V&A, Shenzhen's other "investment" was Fumihiko Maki, the Japanese architect who won the Pritzker Prize in 1993. Maki is known for flexible buildings that evolve "organically" as populations grow. This is the first project in China for him and his firm: on a white platform sit three large pavilions, each facing one of Shekou's three defining features — the mountain, the sea and the city.

Maki, who is 89, was in his seat on time for the opening ceremony. Those attending included people involved in the project from the publicity department of the Shenzhen Municipal Party Committee, China Merchants Shekou, Britain's House of Lords and the V&A.

The project, called "Sea World," is not just a design museum. It also takes in an existing 50,000-square-meter commercial complex and a planned 700,000-square-meter new district, ringed by apartments, shopping malls and the Hilton Nanhai Hotel. This is a real estate project.

"It belongs to a regional urban upgrade. Between production and living you need leisure and culture," said Zhao Rong, assistant to the director at Design Society, the organization that actually runs the museum. The director is Ole Bouman, from the Netherlands, who once curated the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Shekou is in the middle of a fast rebuild. The special economic zone, famous for its pioneering reforms in the 1980s, has been losing its edge in recent years: fierce competition from neighboring cities, aging buildings, aging factory equipment. China Merchants Group plans to spend 60 billion yuan remaking all of Shekou. The design museum is only one piece of the Sea World area.

China Merchants Group traces its history to the late years of the Self-Strengthening Movement. Its operating headquarters is now in Hong Kong, and China Merchants Shekou (China Merchants Shekou Industrial Zone Holdings Co., Ltd.) is its most important company.

The buildings came first. When Maki and his firm took the design commission in 2011, nobody knew anything about the place beyond the words "a museum." Even those directly involved in the project did not know what it would collect and show.

1. "Shenzhen Speed"

In 2008, Shenzhen won the title "City of Design" from UNESCO, formally joining a cooperation and exchange network that UNESCO calls the Creative Cities Network. A total of 180 cities worldwide have joined the "Creative Cities" platform. Shenzhen was the first in China to do so; seven more Chinese cities have joined since.

In 2010, Xu Ting became head of Shenzhen's Creative Cities Network work, and in 2015 secretary-general of the Association for the Promotion of the City of Design. His main job now is receiving delegations from creative cities around the world when they visit Shenzhen, and leading Shenzhen designers on trips abroad. "The country has now realized that the most effective way to pull industry along is design." It was a line Xu Ting could say to QDaily without any risk of being wrong.

Shenzhen's design industry began with graphic design. A great deal of Hong Kong's printing work moved to Shenzhen, Shenzhen's color printing improved sharply, and graphic design grew with it.

From the year after Xu Ting took the job through 2016, Shenzhen kept announcing favorable policies and funding subsidies for the creative industries.

"Shenzhen speed" continues. When we met Xu Ting in his office at the Qianhai Shenzhen-Hong Kong Youth Innovation and Entrepreneurship Hub, he explained that Qianhai, not far from Shekou, is new land reclaimed from the sea five years ago; the buildings here cannot be too tall or too densely packed. "This land is still settling — the ground can sink or shift," Xu Ting said. "Once the settling period is over, all these buildings will have to come down and be built again."

Once a direction is fixed, the cultural industry moves with the same efficiency: expanding without pause, letting no gap go unused. Between 2004 and 2015, the value added by Shenzhen's cultural and creative industries rose from 4.6% to 10% of the city's GDP, growing 20% a year.

In 2016 the Shenzhen Cultural Innovation and Development 2020 (Implementation Plan) was approved. In it, Shenzhen said it would "build a group of landmark, major cultural facilities," and it set out a "major-project-driven" campaign: following the principle of "one district, one project," the city and district governments would together push forward the planning and construction of big projects — the Value Factory, the International Art Exhibition, the Dafen oil painting industrial base, the Huaqiang Cultural and Creative Park, the Huayi Brothers Cultural City, the Shenzhen Film and Cultural Creative Industrial Park — with an emphasis on headquarters-based cultural industries.

2. Why a Design Museum?

Against this background, building a large museum looks inevitable. That it turned out to be a design museum looks more like an accident.

On New Year's Day 2011, Zhang Lin — now deputy general manager of China Merchants Group and head of the Design Society project — was introduced to V&A director Martin Roth by Ma Weidu, founder of the Guanfu Museum, and Phillipe Dodd, a British scholar who has long worked to promote arts exchange between China and Britain. Roth had died not long before, and on opening day Zhang Lin choked up for a few seconds in his speech. After the pause he said again and again how much help Roth had given the China Merchants Shekou team on running a museum.

In the first discussions about whether this cultural project should be an art museum or a design museum, Zhang Lin said, he had assumed that what a museum collects is usually something extremely precious — until the V&A showed him a Shenzhen school uniform in its collection, and he saw that anything that records a society and its era can be collected.

That was not the only reason. "In 2011 there wasn't a single design museum in China. China Merchants Shekou wanted to use this to make itself different," Zhang Lin said.

The other reasons follow one from another, and they fit Chinese conditions well: a design museum is the sort of project China Merchants Group is suited to build. Shenzhen had won the "City of Design" title in 2008; "design" is the city's strategy and its future. The thousands of companies around the Pearl River Delta, manufacturers above all, need design to drive the upgrading of their products and their industries.

Departing a little from the common practice of setting up a board of trustees to run a museum, China Merchants Shekou, the developer itself, founded a cultural organization called Design Society to operate the new building. It is the organization Zhao Rong works for.

"Design Society" is also used to refer to the design museum itself. It consists of a non-profit foundation and a commercial arm that keeps the museum running.

In 2014, on Premier Li Keqiang's first visit to Britain after taking office, he and British Prime Minister David Cameron formally signed the cooperation agreement between China Merchants Shekou and the V&A.

3. "Coming to China, We Had to Learn Almost Everything"

The Sea World Culture and Arts Center covers more than 71,000 square meters, 30% of it public space; the cultural exhibition space and the commercial space each take more than 10,000 square meters. Galleries, cafes and museum shops have already opened in the commercial space.

In 2018 the fourth Guanfu Museum founded by Ma Weidu, along with a museum of reform and opening-up, will open here one after the other.

On the day the Sea World Culture and Arts Center opened, Values of Design (《设计的价值》), curated by the V&A, greeted visitors as one of the three inaugural shows. The V&A lent about 250 objects. The oldest is an Egyptian water filter from roughly 900-1200 CE; there are also famous classics from the history of design — the Valentine typewriter the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass drew in 1969, the alien-like juicer by the French designer Philippe Starck, and the No. 14 chair made in 1859 by the Thonet brothers of Vienna, the fathers of bentwood furniture.

The objects were divided into six sections — Problem Solving, Materials, Identity, Communication, Cost and Wonder. By showing everything from ancient artifacts to modern goods, the V&A tried to explain a very basic idea from a very basic angle: what design is.

"What is particular about China is that the audience comes from very varied, very complicated backgrounds. Naturally we can't please everyone. But the people we are mainly talking to are local residents of Shekou — above all young families with children; then people in the creative industries; then students," V&A deputy director Tim Reeve told QDaily in an interview. Brendan Cormier, the exhibition's lead curator, who trained as an architect, told QDaily that once the show opened the curatorial team would go on collecting feedback from visitors on site and go on adjusting the objects and the displays.

The way the V&A staged the whole exhibition shows the care of a first visit to China.

"Coming to China, we had to learn almost everything," Reeve said. "What people are interested in, the way they look at an exhibition, the lines they walk along, how every title and caption should be set, how readable a given typeface is to them, and so on. In Britain, for instance, we are known for immersive sound exhibitions: people put on headphones and move around the galleries as they please. But in China, after our research, we chose this kind of fixed, orderly route, where the face-to-face link between visitor and object is very clear and direct. If you put exactly this exhibition back in Britain, it would no doubt succeed too — it would just be the kind of exhibition you see all the time."

The V&A gallery inside the Sea World Culture and Arts Center is the V&A's first attempt at expanding overseas in 165 years. Tim Reeve came to Shekou to look the site over as early as 2013. His colleague Luisa Elena Mengoni, a senior curator at the V&A gallery, moved to Shenzhen full time in 2014 as director of the Design Society V&A Gallery, responsible for the research and curating that preceded the opening.

Behind the main entrance, through a door beside the V&A rooms, visitors reach the other main hall, which holds Digital Dimension (《数字之维》), curated by the Design Society team. Built around how digital technology is changing sensory experience, the making of products and human values, it brought in 50 designers and artists from around the world. Many of the works are being shown on the Chinese mainland for the first time.

The display design for the exhibition came from the well-known Dutch architecture studio MVRDV; the graphics came from the Dutch graphic design studio Thonik.

The two halls make an interesting contrast. In the V&A exhibition you can find objects that carry a "Shenzhen design" label: the Shenzhen school uniform from the V&A's own collection, a drone from DJI, which began in Shenzhen, and the first open-source hardware board developed by Shenzhen's Seeed Studio. In Digital Dimension, the 50 participating designers come from the Netherlands, the United States, Britain, Japan, Canada, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and elsewhere — but there is no work by a Shenzhen designer to be seen.

The only work with local hands in it stands in the atrium on the museum's first floor: the Tapigami project by the American artist Danny Scheible. He made it with 200 young volunteers from Shenzhen — a "city of the future" built out of sculptures of paper tape.

4. "Sea World"

On August 27, 1983, a luxury cruise ship reached Shekou Port at the end of its last voyage. It was built in 1962 at the Chantiers de l'Atlantique shipyard in Saint-Nazaire, France, and named ACEEVILLA. The Chinese government bought it in 1973, renamed it the Minghua, and ran it between China and Tanzania — China's first international cruise ship.

Once it was tied up at Shekou Port, the retired Minghua was bought by China Merchants Group for 3 million yuan and turned, using the ship's own fittings, into an all-purpose hotel. According to a 1984 report in International Trade, Shekou Bay, where the Minghua lay, would become "a sea-based amusement ground centered on the cruise ship. There will be sea fishing, rowing, sailing, surfing, cycling, restaurants, barbecues, camping and other recreational facilities and services, as well as a beach and an underwater world where you can dive and swim."

In 1984, Deng Xiaoping visited the Minghua and wrote out the four characters for "Sea World."

The Minghua worked another 19 years after that. As Shekou Bay was filled in, it went from a seagoing ship to a ship on land, wedged into a small inlet with ground in front of it and behind. It finally closed for good in December 1998, its equipment old and its fire-safety systems below standard. As the millennium approached, the whole Shekou Industrial Zone faced remaking once again.

Mixed-use complexes keep multiplying in Shenzhen. In 2012 the city had 110 new urban complexes on its plans. The large ones now under construction or just finished include Shum Yip Upperhills, which replaced the old SEG Hitachi picture-tube factory; China Resources MixC World, brand new on the site of Dachong Village, Shenzhen's largest urban-village redevelopment; and Hongshan 6979, developed beside Shenzhen North Railway Station by China Merchants Shekou together with OCT.

In every one of these plans, an arts or cultural institution — a theater, a history museum, an art gallery, a library — helps define the part the complex hopes to play.

In the middle of Shenzhen's Futian District, next to the city library, the imposing Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and the Shenzhen Urban Planning Exhibition Hall will also open at the end of December 2017. They sit in a more central spot, and the Shenzhen municipal government takes a direct hand in running them.

As for the Sea World Culture and Arts Center, the name Maki drew the world's attention before ground was broken; Lonely Planet named it one of the most anticipated cultural institutions in the world in 2017. And the V&A has become the capital with which Shekou, and Shenzhen beyond it, can attract more partners.

"When Shenzhen badly wants to work with the outside world, Hong Kong is obviously the nearest option. More and more Hong Kong new-media artists are working in Shenzhen, and the environment keeps getting better. I believe local creativity in Shenzhen will rise very fast," said Keith Lam, co-founder of the Hong Kong new-media art studio Dimension Plus. He now travels back and forth between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, because here there are "a lot of opportunities."

It is not only Lam: almost everyone believes Shenzhen will "rise very fast." And the museum in front of us has already given itself a fairly crowded timetable: two touring V&A exhibitions; a retrospective of the important works of the architect Fumihiko Maki's life; a "Graphic Design in China" exhibition, along with design courses run with local creative organizations; a series of craft workshops; a "Street Museum" project for the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture...

That is without counting what is already going on right now.

"I came to Shekou in 2013 to work out the framework for cooperation with the China Merchants Shekou team. To be here celebrating the museum's opening after such a short time — the speed is astonishing," Tim Reeve told QDaily.

The cover image and all images in this article without a credit are courtesy of Design Society.