A Future Museum for China is a speculative, hopeful, and specific effort to imagine a museum of contemporary art in China.

Around the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, there was much talk about the Chinese government’s plan to build “a thousand museums” throughout the country. Little of that grandiose plan has come to fruition, while the state of contemporary Chinese art remains unclear and its market highly unpredictable. It is against this backdrop that the project hopes to offer a conceptual proposal at once modest and long-term in its view.

This is also a personal initiative that developed in response to two motivations: the curator was invited to develop a project for the inaugural Gerrit Lansing Independent Vision Award, which he received from the Independent Curators International (ICI) in December 2010; soon afterwards, he also received an invitation to contribute a gift to “A Wedding,” a banquet and benefit fundraiser organized by The Pavilion, Beijing in conjunction with Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong.

The project manifests itself as a small exhibition-within-an-exhibition at Para/Site, May 26–July 31, 2011, and this website, which will continually record the project’s future evolutions.

The Project Team
Curator: Doryun Chong, New York
Project coordinators: Bridget Finn (Independent Curators International), New York; Yung Ma (Para/Site Art Space), Hong Kong
Project assistants: Mandy Sa and Nancy Lim, New York
Designer: Scott Ponik, Portland, Oregon
Project initiators and advisors: William Lim, Hong Kong; Zhang Wei and Hu Fang (The Pavilion), Beijing

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