The Space Age

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On a late autumn day in November 2025, I arrived at the former site of the Lagena Primary School, built in 1935 in downtown Shanghai, to view an unusual artistic project staged in the abandoned campus. Initiated by artist Xu Zhen following his departure from MadeIn Company (the artist collective, gallery and museum of the same name he co-founded between 2009 and 2022) after a controversial dispute between the founders, Artist’s Treat gathered artists from around the city to curate their own exhibitions throughout the concrete, modernist space.

Artists including Cai Jian, Lu Pingyuan, and Li Hanwei (all formerly represented by MadeIn) imbued these with a distinct personal aesthetic, and in turn invited others whose work resonated with their own to showcase this as part of these informal presentations. Accompanying the project was a display curated by Xia Tian which loosely attempted to create an archive of the artist-run spaces across China that remain active. Both a veteran artist and a businessman, Xu Zhen’s decision to stage a temporary, artist-run project rather than opening a new permanent gallery space, was significant. The occupation of the empty building by artists felt radical, and briefly made visible what happens when they step outside institutional walls.

The site itself did much of the talking. Five years earlier, the primary school building made international headlines when it was lifted off the ground in its entirety and relocated using mechanical ‘legs’ to accommodate a commercial redevelopment project. The architectural feat became a minor spectacle at the time, emblematic of how cultural heritage could be made pliable under real estate logic. UCCA Center for Contemporary Art—a privately owned museum founded in Beijing in 2007 that has become one of China’s leading institutional spaces for the exhibition of contemporary art—later rented the space, only to vacate it shortly afterwards, allegedly because of budget concerns. By 2025, UCCA had paused its Shanghai exhibition programme entirely and was embroiled in public debate amid reports of withheld wages.

The announcement in January of director and CEO Philip Tinari leaving the museum for Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun cultural complex pushed public confidence further into obscurity. It cemented whispers among local artists and curators that confidence in the institution-at-large in mainland China is waning. The latest move proved ‘the growing bleakness of Beijing’, as one local outlet suggested.

This systemic fragility is not a recent glitch but the logical conclusion of the way the scene was structured from the start. China’s private museum boom of the 2000s and 2010s was built on unstable ground, driven by a property-fueled economy and amplified by international enthusiasm. Many museums functioned less as public institutions than as instruments of cultural branding or extensions of personal collections. Governance structures were often thin or symbolic; boards and committees rarely buffered institutions from market volatility. Over time, many became simply expanded exhibition halls for rent, or trial zones for international blue-chips testing the Chinese market with mid-career artists.

In 2023, when billionaire husband-and-wife art collectors Wang Wei and Liu Yiqian poured a number of works by Chinese and Western artists into auction and received disappointing results, it seemingly signaled the end of this era. Subsequent rumours of operational struggles at the Long Museum, which the pair founded in Shanghai in 2012, proved the unsustainability of China’s fragile bubble—which fused private collection, museum operation and market craze into a messy cluster of interests. By 2025, these weaknesses could no longer be absorbed. Globally, galleries were closing and auction confidence was faltering; domestically, institutions around China contracted alongside the real estate downturn. Programmes were suspended, ambitions recalibrated, and responsibility—toward artists, staff and audiences alike—was often deferred.

“China’s private museum boom was built on unstable ground”

There are now signs of revival, though they arrive unevenly and with familiar contradictions. Shenzhen has recently stepped into the spotlight, where several major museums have opened through co-efforts between local government and some of China’s largest tech companies, including technology conglomerate Tencent and online retail platform JD. The JD Museum, which will occupy more than 10,000 square metres within the company’s under-construction JD Shenzhen headquarters tower, will be led by executive director Robin Peckham, who has just left Taiwan-based art fair Taipei Dangdai.

This shift also suggests a broader vision to reposition the city from a finance- and tech-driven economy toward cultural production, reinforcing its key role in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). As high-level curators migrate towards or within this axis, they describe a centrifugal force spinning away from the exhausted centres. However, as Hong Kong’s cultural environment continues to shift under the National Security Law, whether the GBA can meaningfully assume a regional cultural role beyond mere ‘cultural production’ remains a high-stakes experiment.

Elsewhere, the real estate–museum formula repeats with almost weary predictability. By now, the Aranya model has become a default script: art deployed as an instrument of neighbourhood gentrification in places where contemporary art has little historical grounding, appearing alongside cafés, boutiques and leisure infrastructure. When H+ Museum opened this January in Suzhou—launched by Huamao Enterprises as part of an all-in-one development—the sense of déjà vu was hard to ignore. Another landmark site, another signature architect—this time Tadao Ando—and another opening exhibition populated by familiar international names such as Antony Gormley. I recall Gormley’s previous major solo exhibition in China, staged at TAG Museum in Qingdao, a Jean Nouvel-designed building once promoted as ‘the most beautiful seaside museum’. The biggest 2025 news from TAG was its abrupt closure after only four years, when its heavy investment became unsustainable.

In this insecure climate of institutional boom and bust, the revival of artist-led initiatives has begun to feel less like a side project and more like a necessary counterweight. Prioritising community and playfulness over permanence or spectacle, such attempts never disappeared in China during the 2000s boom at the opposite end of the market, though many failed to survive the pandemic. In Changsha, Hunan Province, a group of artists started One-half Space in a dingy former nightclub building in early 2024. It became one of the most surreal, chaotic scenes I experienced last year: in a kitschy rotunda, artist Yu Aijun presented poetry and drawings against thick Corinthian columns and golden decor; downstairs, live-streaming studios filming young girls dancing for Douyin and cheap dance halls for the elderly produce never-ending noise.

“The real estate–museum formula repeats with almost weary predictability”

Meme to Jam, initiated by Hangzhou-based artists Li Ming and Zhu Changquan in 2024, unfolded as a large-scale experiment. The project involved more than 200 artists across the country in a decentralised process of co-creation. The protocol was interpreted through AI into more than 2,000 images, becoming a ‘meme’ that was passed from one artist to the next. The mutating process was flat, free, contagious and resistant to authorship—an explosion of paintings as pleasure-driven visual excess, seeded by friendship and misunderstanding. Its presentation at J7 Art—another ‘museum’ embedded within a real-estate project in Shanghai—was a telling reminder that individual artists and curators can revert the roles and educate hollowed-out institutions about exhibition-making.

Towards the end of 2025, in Beijing’s 798 Art District, Tao Dance Theatre staged a six-hour daily improvisational performance inside a former factory building, foregrounding endurance and labour rather than production value. After playing musical chairs with two performers, I lay on one of the sofas, shoes off, staring into the Bauhaus-inspired arched concrete ceiling. I noticed the artist Fan Xi, co-curator of the event, was strolling leisurely through the space with Pi Li, head of art at Tai Kwun. That was some weeks before the announcement in December of Pi Li’s upcoming departure from Hong Kong for Shenzhen, where he will take up a leadership role in establishing a new art museum in the city.

Undercurrents are flowing. Earlier this year, another alternative nomadic space named ‘suite’ was inaugurated in an office block in downtown Shanghai. Launched by a group of art writers and curators, including You Yiyi and Damien Zhang, the space temporarily takes over empty individual offices when tenants move out—reportedly a favour from an art-enthusiast landlord. This guerrilla state is a positive and resilient response towards the unstable economic reality of the local scene.

On the outskirts of Beijing in Hebei Province, artists Chu Yun and Hu Qingtai are working with recent art school graduates to establish a self-organised space. The area, named Yanjiao (meaning ‘suburban Beijing’), has gathered over 1500 artists, a lot of whom increasingly marginalised by market mechanisms; the feelings of excess, frustration, and anxiety ferment here. This will not be Chu Yun’s first alternative art location. Outside Art Space, launched in 2023, was among the very few alternative spaces in Beijing, alongside my own writer-run exhibition and publishing project, 4b(3). Chu and I have had many conversations about the dilemma of such spaces, and finally he found his answer: with cheap rent and a more autonomous, communal model, he can activate the agency of younger artists by involving them directly into not just exhibition-making but the infrastructure that supports it.

“The revival of artist-led initiatives feels less like a side project and more like a necessary counterweight”

In a moment when China’s museums increasingly retreat from reality and new models have yet to shape, these artist-run initiatives do not pretend to replace institutions. But despite the constant fragility of these alternative spaces, I see a cycle of new normal emerging—or, at least, I hope so. I hope they offer a solution to structural decline as they quietly insist on another possibility which is more than a temporary survival tactic: artists and art practitioners can shape the conditions of practice. In China’s art scene today, this modest insistence may be where the most credible energy now resides. —[O]

Main image: Installation view, Ya, curated by Li Hanwei at Xu Zhen's Artist's Treat, Lagena Primary School, Shanghai (2025). Courtesy HOL.