Inside the growing art scenes of the Pearl River Delta

‘Don’t Open Art Galleries in Guangzhou!’ proclaimed a 2019 article published on ARTDBL, an online platform focusing on China’s Pearl River Delta region, also known as the Greater Bay Area. Written by editor Zhong Gang, this was a provocative statement to make considering the breakneck speed at which art scenes in this vast swathe of the country that stretches from Hong Kong to Zhuhai are developing – and nowhere more quickly than in Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

The affordable living standards associated with Guangzhou – home to the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, artist Cao Fei’s alma mater – attract many young artists, and nonprofit initiatives abound. These include HB Station, an independent art institution grown under the auspices of the Guangdong Times Museum, whose members went on to create the autonomous collectives SJT and Lightning Fax Machine; and Sabaki Space in Xiaozhou Village, which has been in operation since 2008 and shows 10 artists per year in a space of less than 6 square meters.

One of the city’s many trailblazers is the artist Chen Tong, who founded the nonprofit bookstore and gallery space Libreria Borges in 1993. Libreria Borges became a crucible for a new generation of artists in 1990s Guangzhou, while the Pearl River Delta’s first wave of transformation, which resulted from Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, was in full swing. Among the Libreria Borges regulars were the Big Tail Elephant Group – composed of artists Chen Shaoxiong, Lin Yilin, Liang Juhui, and Xu Tan – whose public interventions included Lin Yilin’s iconic 1995 street action Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road, for which the artist made his way across a busy street, assembling and disassembling a brick wall.

Chen Tong is also credited with introducing Guangzhou-born star curator Hou Hanru to Cao, and he, in turn, connected the artist to uber-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. In the late 1990s, Hou and Obrist collaborated on the traveling exhibition Cities on the Move, which focused on artistic practices developing in urban centers across Asia. It debuted in Vienna in 1997 before touring to New York, London, and beyond. That year, Rem Koolhaas initiated research into the Pearl River Delta region as part of the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Project on the City, which was shown at Catherine David’s documenta X. Hou and Obrist would go on to curate the Guangzhou Triennial in 2005 – the second edition after the event was launched by the Guangdong Museum of Art in 2002, the year Vitamin Creative Space was founded in the city. This independent space-cum-commercial gallery went on to open Mirrored Gardens, a Sou Fujimoto-designed arts complex, in rural Guangzhou in 2015. 

With this history in mind, a warning against opening a gallery in Guangzhou ought to be taken as a challenge. And while Zhong’s article was responding to a handful of closures, Guangzhou remains fertile ground for indie creativity. A new generation is rising to the task of establishing viable galleries in town. The artists Hu Xiangqian, Lin Aojie, and Lin Jingxin founded the commercial space Canton Gallery in 2015, with a focus on supporting art in the Pearl River Delta. Created for a city with no shortage of artists but with few art galleries, Canton Gallery experienced a growth that would not have happened without the support of its peers. The vast majority of the artists it represents, such as Huang He and Huang Shan, are emerging names, and it was thanks to Hu’s Beijing and Shanghai connections that the gallery was first invited to exhibit at the West Bund Art & Design fair in 2017. In terms of surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, Lin‚ whose business strategy involves controlling costs and selling at lower margins – he managed to sell me an artwork during my interview with him – acknowledged an element of luck. Purchases by White Rabbit Gallery, a Sydney-based collection of Chinese art, along with other sales, allowed Canton Gallery to stay afloat during this difficult period.

As the Chinese artworld stirred back to life in the second half of 2020, positive signs emerged on Guangzhou’s horizon. Launched by Wuhan native and former museum director Ai Hai, the first Guangzhou Contemporary Art Fair opened at the iconic Haixinsha Exhibition Hall, on Guangzhou’s Pearl River, that December. While sheltering in Guangzhou during the COVID-19 outbreak, Ai turned to investor Liu Yi, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Jumbo Bus Group and founder of Guangzhou YouYou Contemporary Art Center, with the idea of establishing a new contemporary art fair in the city. He then called his gallery connections and the rest is history: The fair came together, with 33 galleries from home and abroad participating, including Beijing stalwarts Beijing Commune, Galleria Continua, Magician Space, Tang Contemporary Art, Ink Studio, and Asia Art Center.

So began Guangzhou’s first major contemporary art fair. Its second edition is scheduled to open on December 26,2021, with galleries including Asia Art Center, MadeIn Gallery, and O2 Art participating, and it looks poised for success. Although another art fair – Art Canton – has been running in the city for 11 years, its focus on works by members of artists’ associations and folk art has meant it has never received international attention. This may point to one of the issues when it comes to the survival of contemporary art galleries in Guangzhou. In the Pearl River Delta region, the artistic, curatorial, and collector market remains in large part dominated by artists’ associations and the Lingnan School of painting, whose more traditional aesthetics occupy most of the resources of official art museums. What’s more, while industry players successfully supported the first Guangzhou Contemporary Art Fair, challenges remain, including competitive pressure from Art Shenzhen, founded in 2013.

Shenzhen’s story is quite different from Guangzhou’s, with a momentum notably signaled by the opening of Midea Group’s Tadao Ando-designed He Art Museum, located in the Shunde district of Foshan, in October 2020, as well as the launch of DnA Shenzhen fair at the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning in the fall of 2021. The third art fair created by the ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair team, the inaugural DnA Shenzhen featured 40 galleries, including China-based Antenna Space and ShanghART Gallery, as well as overseas galleries with spaces or representatives in mainland China, such as Lisson Gallery, Almine Rech, and Tina Keng Gallery. Among the Shenzhen spaces was Mangrove Gallery, founded by Deng Binbin. Located in the landmark One Shenzhen Bay, with a physical space designed by the renowned architect Liu Xiaodu, the gallery launched in March 2020 with a show by the Berlin-based Romanian conceptual artist Daniel Knorr, his first solo exhibition in mainland China.

While contemporary art galleries in Shenzhen are yet to match those in Shanghai and Beijing in number and caliber, a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship abounds in Hong Kong’s next-door neighbor. Enclave Contemporary, for instance – founded by Younghwa Jeon, the former director of Bonacon Gallery in Guangzhou,and Zhang Er, founder of the magazine Enclave – has adopted a particularly innovative model. Enclave magazine was founded in 2012, followed by the launch of Enclave bookstore four years later. Enclave Contemporary’s inaugural exhibition opened in March 2021, featuring artists who have appeared on the cover of Enclave in the past 10 years, including He Xiangyu, Ding Yi, and Lin Ke. The Enclave app was also launched in 2021, targeting a growing community of young art lovers in a strategy that relies on converting public education and outreach into collector growth.

In the context of a global art world defined by networked aesthetics, audiences, locations, and values, the closer a gallery is to its target audience, the more likely it is to succeed, and in the Greater Bay Area that target audience is made up of the overlapping networks of people and places that define the Pearl River Delta region itself. Among the key figures is Hong Kong restaurateur Alan Lo. A longstanding collector of note, Lo is the founding chairman of Design Trust, which funds projects in the Pearl River Delta, and has also served on the Great Pearl River Delta Business Council.

It remains to be seen whether the region’s cities will move toward a Hong Kong-style model in due course and nurture an art ecology defined by a strong network of galleries, museums, and nonprofits with a major international art fair that attracts a global audience. Like Hong Kong itself, they are navigating and constantly reinventing their position within the changing landscape of the Pearl River Delta, not to mention of China, Asia, and the world at large.

Wu Jianru is a curator and writer based in Guangzhou.

Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. The Guangzhou skyline. Photo via Flickr. 2. The Guangdong Times Museum. Courtesy of the Guangdong Times Museum. 3. Installation view of Asia Art Center's booth at Art Basel Hong Kong 2021. 4. Exterior viewof He Art Museum. © HEM. 5. The Shenzhen skyline. Photo via Flickr.