Young collectors such as 26-year-old Michael Xufu Huang are opening their own museums and galleries, and providing a platform to nurture a new generation of artists, curators and art lovers
A massive metal X marked the spot this summer for one of Beijing’s latest art world openings: a sculptural entryway to the double-storey X Museum in the buzzing Chaoyang district. Like almost every other event in 2020, it was delayed, but despite Covid-19 locking down the Chinese capital for most of the first half of the year, this vernissage opened to much fanfare.
China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration counts more than 5,100 museums across the country, and rising, almost double the 2,601 of a decade ago. But what distinguishes X from the slew of recently established private institutions is what happens when you knock off the 01 from that last number, leaving you with co-founder Michael Xufu Huang’s age.
Most 26-year-olds are not in the business of opening museums (X is a nod to his name). But most 26-year-olds have also not spent a decade amassing a museum-sized art collection, curated with the goal of defining a new Chinese identity.
“What we really lack is global presence,” says Huang of the Chinese art scene. “We need to earn that cultural respect and I think we can do that. Lesser known, younger Chinese artists address global topics now, so they resonate more internationally.”
The inaugural exhibition, “X Museum Triennial – How Do We Begin?”, explored the “spirit of the age” and featured 33 artists under the age of 40 from China or of Chinese descent. The show opened on May 30 and among the featured artists were Miao Ying and Cui Jie, who use the internet either as a medium or subject to speak to a generation that has grown up in the digital age – which is, by default, global in nature.
Today, China is home to what seems like as many young collectors as young artists, part of the fuerdai, or “wealthy second generation”, growing up in the country’s post-reform society.
China’s art market is now the world’s third largest – after those of the United States and Britain – as well as its fastest growing. The rapidly increasing number of collectors – with even faster growing collections – has resulted in this proliferation of privately funded museums, with tastes ranging from blue-chip investments such as Picassos and Monets, to Chinese masters such as Zao Wou-Ki and Wu Guanzhong.
“Because it’s younger, we don’t have an art scene in general, we have a shorter history and the flexibility allows us to grow really fast,” Huang says. “Everything needs to start from somewhere. A lot of collectors from [the older] generation are very elite but went through a lot of hardship. Comparatively, as millennials, we’re lucky to have grown up with better living standards. Because of the internet, we can reach information easily and have more of a global mindset. Our experience is completely different.”
The art-history degree made me more confident in my judgment. I felt like I knew what I was buying and why I was buying it.Michael Xufu Huang, co-founder of Beijing’s X Museum
In Shanghai, where factories once fuelled 20th century industry, privately funded museum conversions crowd the West Bund, where some of the country’s most significant collectors have established exhibition spaces. Here, the likes of prolific Indonesian-Chinese collector Budi Tek’s Yuz Museum, mega-collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei’s Long Museum and Qiao Zhibing’s Tank Shanghai set the stage for a future generation of taste-making aficionados.
Huang’s aesthetic appreciation began on his 16th birthday, when he received a lithograph by renowned post-war abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler. While studying for his A-levels in art history at Britain’s Dulwich College, he took advantage of London’s art scene, visiting museums and galleries, then did the same as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, in the US. He became a regular at art fairs and exhibitions worldwide, establishing and developing his collection.
His experience was in direct contrast to that of earlier generations of Chinese collectors, with their censorious cultural education, who rarely if ever had the opportunity to travel abroad, let alone study art history in the West.
“The art-history degree made me more confident in my judgment,” says Huang. “I felt like I knew what I was buying and why I was buying it.”
Like so many of his generation, Huang is an only child, the son of a prominent lawyer father and a mother who found success in the biotech industry. The transition from accumulating a collection to opening a museum was one of wanting to share what he was seeing and feeling with the world. Not an uncommon millennial trait.
X Museum is not the first time Huang has established a cultural institution. In 2014, he helped co-found the prominent M Woods museum in Beijing, with fellow millennial collectors Lin Han and Wanwan Lei, and he is a stakeholder in Mine Project, a small commercial gallery in Hong Kong.
“We have a good life here now,” Huang says. “We’re one of the biggest countries. China is very powerful in the economic sense, but needs a richer culture. It’s the perfect time for people to develop more spiritual needs. We need more in our lives than buying products and consuming things.”
Huang seeks to increase cultural engagement by making art more accessible. “It’s making art less about the elite, and making it a part of everyone’s lifestyle,” he says. “Art is a very big umbrella – going to an art museum is about having mediums come together.
We’re doing music events, bridging art and fashion.
We want to bring all those sensations together and make it a multisensory experience. We don’t have any rules, it’s all about experimentation.”
For the launch of the X Virtual Museum in March (conceived pre-pandemic, in October 2019), Huang collaborated with Chinese rapper Lexie Liu to create and incorporate a theme song. A new globally accessible digital initiative, the virtual museum is almost like a computer game. The online platform was designed by architect Pete Jiadong Qiang, one of the artists taking part in the opening triennial, to offer visitors a more interactive experience.
“X Virtual Museum is not just an online copy of the physical museum, nor is it a simple documentation and archive of exhibitions and events that happened in the museum,” says X Museum’s chief curator Poppy Dongxue Wu, 27. “It’s an extension of the physical space and museum programmes. The idea is to disrupt and intervene in the way people use museums’ [websites] today.”
In his attempt to increase art’s accessibility, Huang has tried to appeal to the general public while also proving his credibility to the art world, initiating the X Museum Triennial Award to highlight artists who best define the future of Chinese contemporary art.
The star-studded jury for the first edition included Hans Ulrich Obrist, creative director of the Serpentine Galleries, London, and Diana Campbell Betancourt, chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, in Bangladesh, and artistic director of the Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation. New York-based artist Liu Xin won this year’s award for her tech infused fantasy video installation Living Distance.
“We like the idea of building institutions with people of our generation,” says Campbell Betancourt. “Sometimes it is easier to build something from scratch than to correct the generations of structurally imposed racial and class bias inherent in existing institutions.”
It is a curatorial reckoning taking place beyond matters of curatorial taste: non-Western cultures reassessing their identities outside the status quo of Western standards. A by-product of X Museum’s endeavour is to provide an institutional platform for emerging Chinese artists, allowing their own narrative to emerge from within the milieu.
Two new exhibitions opened at X Museum on December 6, including “Collection as Poem in the Age of Ephemerality”, showcasing works by an international roster of artists from the museum’ collection. “Good Clean Fun” is also on view, featuring works by the 27-year-old Issy Wood, one of her generation‘s most impactful painters.
“[Huang] is trying to expand points of reference so that Chinese artists are not only comparing themselves to their North American or European counterparts,” Campbell Betancourt says. “It’s great to see X Museum supporting emerging Chinese curatorial talent rather than the antiquated model of bringing in a foreign-branded curator to give legitimacy to a new institution. It is telling that the museum is opening with a show of emerging Chinese art curated by emerging Chinese curators.”
“Our concept is brand new,” Huang says. “I think we’re going to revolutionise, challenge and change the contemporary art scene.”
