Liu Yiqian, the Chinese billionaire, swiped his American Express Centurion card 24 times.

Surrounded by the Chinese art world’s most elite collectors, Liu charged $36 million on his credit card to purchase “the holy grail” of Chinese art: a tea cup from the Ming dynasty. The cup, which is more than 500 years old, is only 8 centimeters in diameter and adorned with chickens pecking at their feed.

It was the summer of 2014, and Liu, a former taxi driver on the streets of Shanghai, knew he was making history. In front of invited media at Sotheby’s auction house in Hong Kong, the self-taught stock trader and founder of investment firm Sunline Group, poured tea into the cup and, with cameras flashing, casually drank from it. 

The sheer swagger of the moment underscored a larger trend in the art world: China had arrived on the scene. 

In 2006 China was home to only 5 percent of the global art market. By 2011, according to research by the European Fine Art Foundation, China’s share had skyrocketed to 30 percent, and it had overtaken the U.S. as the largest art and antiquities market in the world. 

But China’s presence has not only been felt at auctions and art fairs. The country has also come to dominate the global museum sector, building more museums than any nation on earth over the last decade. In 1978, China had 349 museums; in 2000, it had fewer than 1,200. Today, it has more than 6,000, according to the country’s National Cultural Heritage Administration. 

After the auction, Liu’s cup went on display at the Long Museum West Bund, a gleaming private museum that he had opened to the public in March 2014. Situated on the banks of the Huangpu River in an area of Shanghai designed to imitate London’s South Bank, it was China’s largest private museum at the time of its opening. 

A short walk away stands the Long Museum East, another Liu megastructure, which he opened in December 2012. Liu then opened a third space in Chongqing.¹ A fourth branch was scheduled to open in Wuhan, but never materialized. The museums are run by Liu’s wife, Wang Wei, and taken together, they house China’s largest private art collection.

Indeed, after the tea cup, Liu kept swiping his Amex. Later that year, in November 2014, he bid an astonishing $45 million for a silk ‘thangka’— a wall hanging from the Ming dynasty that had fetched about $4 million in 2002. Then, in 2015, he paid $170.4 million for Nu Couché, a painting of a nude woman by the Italian modernist Amedeo Modigliani. 

“The message to the West is clear,” Liu told The New York Times on the evening of the Modigliani auction. “We have bought their buildings, we have bought their companies, and now we are going to buy their art.”

But if Liu’s bullish arrival on the art scene was intended to send a message, his sheepish retreat less than a decade later also merits attention. In early October, he sold 50 pieces estimated to be worth $150 million from his private art collection at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong. Many of the pieces for sale — including significant works by Magritte, Modigliani and Hockney — failed to fetch good prices, and a quarter of the lots on offer did not even find a buyer. Liu walked away with just $58 million, less than 40 percent of the high presale expectations. An Asian art market insider called the auction “a bloodbath.” 

We’re in an economic downturn, and it’s absolutely a concern for museum directors in China. We can’t hide this.

X Zhu-Nowell, the artistic director of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai

Liu declined a request to be interviewed by The Wire China and has not commented on the reasons behind the sale. But the Long Museum’s deaccessioning has sent shockwaves throughout the global art world. Why, many observers are asking, is such a high-profile Chinese museum being gutted of its art? 

The answer likely lies in China’s current economic challenges. Liu’s Sunline Group, for instance, is a business conglomerate that invests in various sectors including pharmaceuticals and real estate, and it’s not doing well. In 2022, one of Liu’s largest investments, Hubei Biocause Group, reported net income of $41 million — only 17 percent of its 2019 net income.

“We’re in an economic downturn,” says X Zhu-Nowell, the artistic director of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, one of the city’s contemporary art spaces. “And it’s absolutely a concern for museum directors in China. We can’t hide this.”

Indeed, Liu is not alone. China’s museums seem to be shuttering as quickly as they opened, especially those tied to China’s troubled real estate developers. 

In October 2021, the highly regarded Guangdong Times Museum closed after 19 years of operations. Owned by the private real-estate developer Times China, the museum had close ties to the West, becoming the first Chinese art institution to open a partner space in Europe when it opened the Times Art Center Berlin in 2018. That branch closed in June 2021.

In 2022, the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT) museum chain, which had branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an and Shenzhen, also abruptly closed. The chain was owned by the real-estate developer Overseas Chinese Town Group, a state-owned enterprise based out of Shenzhen.

In the summer of 2023, Yuz Museum, a large private museum founded by the late Chinese-Indonesian businessman Budi Tek, moved from its enormous space in the West Bund area of Shanghai to a much smaller and remote space in Panlong Tiandi, a distant suburb.

And in November of this year, the Shanghai Centre of Photography, founded eight years ago by the world-famous documentary photographer Liu Heung Shing and known as the country’s largest space dedicated to contemporary photography, also closed.

“China’s economy has impacted its galleries. Investment in art is decreasing,” says Pan Baohui, founder of Magician Space, the leading contemporary art gallery in Beijing. The Covid epidemic, she adds, “weakened the relationship between art galleries and museums in China and the international scene.”

China’s art crisis, including its fraying ties with the West, is coming at an unfortunate time for Beijing. In recent years, the Chinese government has made a concerted effort to repatriate Chinese artifacts from museum holdings across the world. Until recently, those efforts were seen as likely to succeed — inevitable even. But as China struggles to hold on to the cultural artifacts it already possesses, its chances of securing those it most desires looks less certain.

‘THE PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF CULTURE’

After Xi Jinping was appointed as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he gave his first public speech at the National Museum of China. Established in 1959, just 10 years into the new Chinese Communist Party’s reign, the museum had a spotty record over the next four decades, often being closed to visitors due to political concerns. 

But in one of his earliest acts, Xi made clear that museums and culture were central to the “rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation. One of his signature policies, wenhua zixin, or “cultural self-confidence,” was plastered on billboards around the nation. In Xi’s vision, culture served not as a conduit for free expression, but to strengthen civic belief in the righteousness of Chinese communism and bolster China’s standing on the international stage.

“The Chinese want to be seen as a cultural powerhouse,” says Tomaso Radaelli, founder of MondoMostre, a company that displays exhibitions in China that were originally staged in Europe. “There’s a big demand for [Chinese] museums to be international.” 

Most historic museums in China, like the National Museum of China, are government controlled and funded. Well-known contemporary art institutions, meanwhile, like the Power Station of Art and the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai, are also subject to central governance even though they originated from splashy philanthropic largesse. 

But Xi introduced policies that encouraged private actors to get involved as well. Developers, for instance, can more easily obtain planning permits or tax incentives if they promise to include a museum in their project. As a result, many of China’s museums can be found within real-estate developments like shopping malls or residential buildings. 

The strategy worked: Not only did China see an unprecedented museum building boom, but museum culture became ingrained in society.

“Going to museums is a very trendy thing, particularly for younger generations,” says Zhu-Nowell, whose museum is managed by the Bund de Rockefeller Group Master Development company, a real-estate developer that restored the city’s former Royal Asiatic Society building in 2010. “The museum boom which happened in the early 2010s — of which the Rockbund Art Museum is part — has really redefined public life. The shift has been visible and dramatic.”

The new museum ecosystem also led to a new generation of art collectors, many of whom are fixtures at art markets like Frieze London and Art Basel.

“There is a real passion and connoisseurship among Chinese art collectors,” says Timothy Taylor, founder of the eponymous Mayfair gallery. China’s museums, he says, “are extraordinarily well attended, and they are doing an effective job of teaching a new Chinese audience about contemporary art and the history of art. Of course, that leads naturally into the commercial world.”

Indeed, China’s use of business incentives to push museum construction and attendance is often fêted by museum leaders in the West.

“The success of various art malls in China should give us [in the West] reason to pause,” says the China-based curator Rebecca Catching. “Land developers in China who mix art and retail, with the original intention of adding prestige to their properties, have inadvertently discovered an interesting funding model that the cultural industry [in the West] would be wise to appropriate.”

That is, so long as the real estate developers aren’t over leveraged. Yet even without a real estate crisis, China’s private museum owners face considerable challenges. For starters, unlike in many Western countries, China has not developed a tax credit system or a regulated system for philanthropic donations. As a result, when private museum funders hit a rough patch, there is very little incentive to keep their doors open. 

“By my count, of the 6,000 museums in China, about 1,500 are private museums,” says Kejia Wu, a columnist for the Chinese edition of the Financial Times and author of A Modern History of China’s Art Market. “Many will now be struggling to break even.”

…the government isn’t willing to allow true philanthropy to take root. The country is littered with the physical infrastructure of culture — but without the content.

Ian Johnson, a senior fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future

According to Zhu-Nowell, the recent rash of closures can be understood, in part, by funders’ lack of long term planning.

“Some of the people who opened museums did not realize the consistent input that is needed to make it work,” Zhu-Nowell says. “Supporting new artists, commissioning new works, creating important exhibitions — these things take time.” China’s museum ecosystem, they say, is little more than “an architectural facade: They don’t have a curatorial programme or the type of exhibition production we typically associate museums with.” 

Ian Johnson, a senior fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, echoes this point, arguing that the museum boom of the 2010s was largely superficial. 

“The problem with China’s approach is it inflates the numbers of cultural institutions by getting real estate developers to add in a museum or performing arts center to their blueprints,” he says. “These buildings, however, are often empty or underused because the government isn’t willing to allow true philanthropy to take root. The country is littered with the physical infrastructure of culture — but without the content.” 

And Beijing is increasingly desperate for the content.

‘AN OPEN WOUND’

In late August, a three-part film series titled Escape from the British Museum went viral on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. 

The fantastical series, which purports to be created by two independent Chinese influencers, depicts a jade teapot coming to life, morphing into a young Chinese woman, and, with the help of a Chinese journalist, plotting her flight home to China from the London museum. 

The jade teapot is real: It was created in 2011 by the contemporary Chinese artist Yu Ting and was acquired by the British Museum in 2017. In fact, the British Museum is the custodian of the largest collection of Chinese artifacts in the Western museum world. In May, the museum exhibited artifacts it holds from China’s late Imperial era in an exhibition titled The Hidden Century. 

But as Escape from the British Museum made clear, many in China now want Chinese art brought home. The film was heavily promoted by the algorithms of both Douyin and Weibo, China’s two largest social media networks, and gained more than 300 million views in the first week of its release. It also received plentiful coverage by state-endorsed media. On August 28, just two days before the film premiered on Douyin, the Global Times called for the British Museum to repatriate, in its entirety, what it said were “stolen” artifacts. 

“Restitution is a major issue in China,” says Radaelli of MondoMostre. “Their heritage has been pillaged and that is an open wound. So, obviously, they’re looking for restitution.”

China has a successful track record when it comes to restitution. In its modern history, it has facilitated the return of over 150,000 looted cultural relics, according to official party statistics published in the Global Times. In October, for example, seven ancient marble columns were displayed to the Chinese public for the first time after they were returned to the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. According to the Beijing Review, the marbles were acquired more than a century ago by a Norwegian military officer, and had been held by the KODE Art Museums in Bergen, Norway. They returned to China as part of a deal that involved Huang Nubo, the chairman of real estate developer Beijing Zhongkun Investment Group, donating about $1.6 million to the museum. 

In May, China also welcomed home a pair of 7th-century stone carvings that had been held in storage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The carvings are thought to have been cut from a Chinese tomb in the early 1990s. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Huang Ping, China’s Consul General in New York, said the carvings’ return “symbolizes our cooperation in protecting cultural heritage” and will “enhance friendship between our two peoples and bring positive energy into China-U.S. relations.”

The repatriation of carvings and teapots may not seem like a political act. But China’s relationships with museums around the world are increasingly defined by geopolitical tensions. And none more so than Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, which has the world’s largest collection of Chinese artifacts. 

When Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist movement realized it was losing a civil war to the Chinese Community Party, then led by Mao Zedong, Chiang moved thousands of treasures from Beijing’s Forbidden City to Taipei, the now capital of Taiwan. As a result, the National Palace Museum holds the bulk of Chinese Renaissance artwork.

“Imagine if the Louvre was not in France, or the Uffizi was not in Italy, or the National Gallery was not in England,” says Radaelli. “For the Chinese, their greatest national works are housed in a breakaway part of their country.” 

And Beijing wants them back. In fact, despite the size of its collection, the National Palace Museum rarely loans works overseas in order to prevent Chinese authorities from intercepting and obtaining them en route and then taking legal action to reclaim them. On the rare occasions that it does allow works to travel, the museum insists the host country secure immunity from judicial seizure laws. 

Observers say that if the Chinese Communist Party is serious about repatriating items from Taiwan, the United Kingdom or New York, it is yet to fully show its hand. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism, for instance, doesn’t have an official policy on the subject, and it likely won’t anytime soon. And if China’s museum sector continues to be buffeted by broader economic headwinds, the country’s ability to negotiate the return of its artifacts may be weakened.

“From a political point of view, a big restitution hunt would not do them any good,” says Kejia Wu. “Because, if you open this Pandora’s box, then there will be a treasure hunt around the world, and they will offend many museums. For the time being, I don’t think they are intent on taking serious action.” 

Indeed, for the time being the country has to focus instead on restoring some of that swagger and ‘cultural self-confidence’ that Liu Yiqian had in spades.

---