Chinese Museums Open to the World

While the declining financial fortunes of the euro zone are causing most of Europe to look with envy on China’s rising economic power, in terms of art, at least, the East is looking West.

Leading Chinese museums are increasingly staging exhibitions from art centers across Europe, part of a wider cultural metamorphosis aimed at attracting more outward-looking Chinese youths, becoming more global in terms of exchanges, laying the groundwork for Chinese collections to be shown, in return, across the world.

The move to look abroad for art has also been prompted by a new willingness in China to highlight cultures across the continents and the centuries. The National Museum of China, for example, one of the great Stalinist structures built in Beijing to celebrate the first decade of Communist Party rule, marked its new incarnation after an extensive renovation with an extensive show on the European Enlightenment.

The year-long exhibition, “The Art of the Enlightenment,” staged in partnership with the Berlin State Museums, the Dresden State Art Collections and the Bavarian State Picture Collections, brought hundreds of works to the eastern edge of Tiananmen Square.

During the exhibition, which ended March 31, Socialist Realist paintings of revolutionary leaders that are part of the Chinese museum’s permanent collection were displayed alongside marble statues of the Greek goddess Aphrodite and early European clockwork models of the solar system. German and Chinese art scholars also held a series of dialogues that allowed the public to join a freewheeling discourse on subjects like the Enlightenment and China.

“Stepping up our staging of foreign art exhibitions and holding public dialogues with art experts from across the world is helping the museum become more international, more interactive and more popular,” said Chen Yu, the curator of the Enlightenment show, which attracted about four million visitors.

A short distance due west along the Avenue of Eternal Peace, China’s most prestigious boulevard, the Capital Museum is likewise expanding its exchanges with museums worldwide. Guo Xiaoling, a professor of world history who returned to Beijing after teaching at the University of Massachusetts and now heads the museum, said he had been shuttling between European capitals to coordinate future exhibitions.

Coming shows include a retrospective on the British architect Richard Rogers, which opens next month and runs through September. Other European initiatives by Mr. Guo include his transforming the Capital Museum into an ancient Greek city-state in 2008, when the Athens-based National Archaeological Museum displayed classical sculptures, painted clay vessels and other artifacts to mark China’s first staging of the Olympic Games.

“Every year the museum will stage several exhibitions from abroad,” he said. “These foreign museum exhibitions are helping young Chinese people become more global.”

At the same time, the government is pressing China’s leading museums to raise their international stature by sending more exhibitions abroad.

Mr. Guo said government leaders in Europe, especially in Britain and France, had been very active in promoting ties with Chinese museums. “Each year, the British Council will organize Chinese museum directors, curators and cultural groups to visit Britain,” he said.

“Similarly,” he added, “every year the French Embassy invites cultural leaders to France for cooperation.” As a result, “more and more French and British museums come to China to stage exhibitions.”

The United States, he noted, “is far behind” in terms of promoting cultural exchanges with China.

These closer cultural connections, Mr. Guo points out, mark a sharp contrast with an earlier era of encounters with France and Britain, when the two colonial powers deployed gunboats and troops to force the opening of China to global trade, including in opium.

“In high school,” Mr. Guo said, “every Chinese student will learn about united French and British forces occupying Beijing.”

These days, Britain’s presence in China is increasingly through arts events, which range from stagings of Shakespeare’s plays to exhibitions from the British Museum.

“At one time, the U.K. was an empire builder and a trading power,” said David Elliott, the arts director for the UK Now arts festival. But now, he added, “you could say it’s a cultural superpower.”

The festival, a British Council initiative that opened in April and runs through November, is being pitched as the biggest festival of British arts and creative industries held in China, with hundreds of events across 17 cities.

One highlight is an exhibition of sculptures by the British artist Tony Cragg, which showed at the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum through April 15 and will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chengdu in July and the Himalayas Art Museum in Shanghai in September.

Marianne Holtermann, an art dealer in London who is co-producing Mr. Cragg’s show in China, said the rapid expansion of Chinese cities and the frenetic pace of constructing new museums had started to open the way for more Western artworks to enter China. In a talk at the Beijing opening, she said art museums were playing a “tremendous role” in transforming Chinese cities.

“Taking highly sophisticated art from another part of the world and having a lot of people see it will have rippling effects throughout society,” she said. “Of course this is going to have an effect on China’s cultural evolution.”

Mr. Cragg, who will return to China to accompany his exhibition to Chengdu and Shanghai, said he had been impressed by “an enormous enthusiasm for contemporary art in China, especially among young people.”

He added that the expanding range of expression in the arts across China made him “hopeful for the future.”

Ms. Holtermann agreed that China’s efforts to open up culturally was important for increased global understanding. Many people in the West, she said, “think of China as an economic wunderkind — it’s important that we also exchange ideas and culture.”