The shopping mall that thinks it’s a museum
After much convincing, Paris’ Marmottan Monet Museum recently lent Cheng more than 40 artworks for an exhibition in Shanghai. The exhibition attracted more than 340,000 visitors. According to Cheng, the “commercial museum” can only succeed in China. “There is no audience development in China. Finding locations and sites for exhibitions is a problem,” he told the Financial Times. “There is also no sustainable financial model to support shows. So where do people like going? Out shopping in malls . . . People want to buy and invest in heritage so I created this new retail and culture experience.” The store aisles are lined with works by Yoshitomo Nara, Olafur Eliasson and Damien Hirst. His personal collection however is very different and includes works by Tatiana Trouvé, Adrián Villar Rojas, Zhang Enli et Zhang Ding.
First China, then Global
More than 190 events have been organized by the K11 Art Foundation in Hong Kong and China, varying between workshops, exhibitions and artist talks. The 50 annual exhibitions attract more than 1,000 visitors a day, and are financed via profits from his commercial centre. Cheng is equally involved on the international art scene. He is a member of Tate Modern’s Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee, member of the International Circle of the Centre Pompidou and is on the Visiting Committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A three-year project between the K11 Art Foundation and Palais de Tokyo, initiated last September, aims to promote Chinese art in France and vice versa, displaying “a series of international exchanges and presentations of emerging art scenes in France and China”, says Palais de Tokyo curator Jo-ey Tang.
The first exhibition, Inside China: l’Intérieur du Géant, projected emerging Chinese artists Li Gang, Edwin Lo, Wu Hao, Yu Ji and Zhao Yao. Cheng told Artnews, “I think the new contemporary Chinese art is reinventing Chinese cultural identity and building up a new Chinese culture.”
A Chinese Kunsthalle
But Cheng is ambitious. He is constantly engaged in new projects, the next includes his museum in Beijing and his 17 shopping malls. The museum will be unlike anything he has done before, based solely on the idea of a Kunsthalle. Despite his unimaginable success, Cheng remains modest. “I am only an entrepreneur and businessman, a collector and art pioneer, but I try to bring this discussion to a different platform,” he explains here.
