The acclaimed Guangdong Times Museum has relaunched in Guangzhou, China, 18 months after it suspended exhibitions in October 2022. The hiatus was due to the economic struggles facing the museum’s backer, the property developer Times China. The venue has reopened in its 2010 exhibition space, designed by Rem Koolhaas and Alain Fouraux, following a successful fundraising auction in January of works provided by 65 artists, mostly from or based in the Pearl River Delta region.
Marge Monko’s Flawless Seamless (2016), showing at Guangdong Times Museum Photo: Martin Polák
The associate director and chief curator Nikita Yingqian Cai, who remained on staff throughout the suspension, says the museum will pursue a “model of sustainability” in the future, cultivating a range of donors instead of depending on a single backer, as it did previously. Compared with Beijing and Shanghai, collectors in southern China are more institutionally focused, she says. Guangzhou’s influential Canton Gallery has also reopened after its own temporary pandemic-related closure.
Now operating with a quarter of its prior budget, the Times Museum has reduced its curatorial staff from 18 to three and is working with several guest curators. Cai says popular past programmes like the Social Practice Lab and the Media Lab will not return at this stage.
The reopening exhibition is a show curated by the artist Qu Chang. Follow the Feeling (until 23 June) is named after a song by the Taiwanese chanteuse Julie Sue (aka Su Rui), who became popular in mainland China in early 1989, embodying that hopeful moment. The programme will continue in July with a photography show organised by He Yining, a Tan Yue-curated exhibition about the Indo-Pacific islands in October and a solo show of the Beijing-based painter and animator Sun Xun.
