Shekou Design Museum leads push to make Shenzhen the design capital of China
Shekou Design Museum intended to push city onto global stage as central government aims to support creative sectors
In the past decade, Shanghai has emerged as the centre of fashion design in China, Beijing as the heart of architecture and, more recently, Shenzhen as the home of graphic design. By giving these industrial powerhouses a sense of creative purpose, the central government hopes to show the world that China can innovate rather than merely imitate.
Shenzhen is home to more than 6,000 design companies employing over 60,000 designers, not including fashion experts and architects. Yet, it has so far lacked a definitive statement that it's a member of the global design community.
Such a statement is what the developers of the Shekou Design Museum aim to make. Due to open to the public in early 2017, the museum is being funded by the China Merchants Group, a large state-owned enterprise founded in 1872, working in partnership with the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in Britain.
Claimed to be the mainland’s first major design institution, the museum will showcase international design collections, and inspire them. The project is part of the broader redevelopment of the Shekou Industrial Zone, originally a base for foreign oil-platform workers in the 1980s.
“Shenzhen has been the centre of a large design community - particularly graphic designers - for the last 15 years or so, and it is now becoming one of the most important hubs for companies specialised in product and digital design,” says Luisa Mengoni, head of the V&A Gallery that will exist within the museum.
It seems fitting, then, that Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki, whose recent works include Tower 4 of New York’s new World Trade Centre and the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, is overseeing the project.
The city’s design community is not a new development. Bi Xuefeng, founder and creative director of IMAGRAM, a Shenzhen-based graphic design company, says the economic deregulation of the 1980s encouraged the launch of several design enterprises despite there being a lack of local culture and government support at the time. Since then, the central government has supported graphic design more directly.
