“Everything is bigger in America.” I heard this repeatedly from English friends while living in London in the 1970s and ’80s. And, for the most part, they were right. Cars, houses, shopping malls, food portions—everything was bigger in America. Even the saga of J.R. Ewing on Dallas, the era’s emblematic TV show, symbolized the size, excess, and opportunity of the United States at the time.
MIA director Kaywin Feldman and deputy director Matthew Welch touring a museum in China.
On my recent trip to China, I became conscious of how often I uttered, “Everything is bigger in China.”
China is projected to surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy by 2030 and its 1.35 billion people—the most of any nation—are urbanizing quickly. More than 50 percent live in cities, including 16.5 million in Shanghai and 15.6 million in Beijing. Of course, large urban populations present great opportunities for museums.
The China Art Museum in Shanghai, built around the former China Pavilion of Expo 2010, opened in 2012 as Asia’s largest art museum.
The boom in Chinese museums is nothing short of astonishing. Over the past five years, some 200 museums on average were opened every year—395 in 2011 alone—and 200 more are expected to open in the next couple of years. The size of these museums is overwhelming. The renovated National Museum of China (shown above) claims to be the largest museum in the world, with 2.07 million square feet. The China Art Museum in Shanghai, covering 1.8 million square feet, opened on the same day in 2012 as another massive museum right across the river, the Power Station of Art, which features contemporary work. With millions of objects in their collections, museum staffs still have trouble filling these spaces. The lobbies are gargantuan: the entrance hall of the National Museum is 850 feet long and 100 feet high. When we asked why the empty lobby of the Capital Museum was so incredibly vast, we were told it was so they could hang an airplane inside, should the need arise.
The enormous smokestack of the Power Station of Art is a beacon of contemporary art in Shanghai.
The museum tradition is still relatively young in China. We couldn’t impress our colleagues with the size of the MIA (its building or collection), but our 98-year history raised some eyebrows. Most Chinese museums opened after 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was established. If I wasn’t gasping at the size of projects in China, I was marveling about “Chinese time”—the Chinese seem to collapse into weeks what it takes us years to do. The new Power Station of Art in Shanghai (weighing in at a mere 440,000 square feet) was renovated and opened in eight months. We were told that an exhibition publication could be produced in just a month. The energy, optimism, and confidence in a big future for museums in China is palpable, and I look forward to seeing what develops just in my lifetime.