Museum boom leaves exhibitions empty

The 80-year-old Nanjing Museum, one of China's top three museums, celebrated the International Museum Day on May 18 after being closed for renovations for over one year.

"Now our museum has over 10,000 visitors every day on weekends, and sometimes more than 20,000," said Gong Liang, curator of the museum, adding this was a significant rise from their previous visitor numbers.

On the same day, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage released statistics showing that China had 4,165 museums by the end of 2013, 299 more than the previous year. Chinese museums received more than 600 million visitors last year.

"In the past three years, China built a museum nearly every day," said Gong.

A plan regarding museums' long-term development issued by the administration at the end of 2011 said that by 2015, the number of public museums nationwide will reach 4,500 and will hit 6,000 by 2020.

The industry seems to be booming. However, experts warned that local governments tend to blindly pursue the grand appearance of museums to showcase their supposed political achievements instead of focusing on the functions of the sites. Moreover, a lack of professional talent is harming the industry.

Throwing up buildings

"It's a good thing that local governments value the development of museums. But why and how to build a museum is normally decided by officials and the museum becomes an ornament for their image," said Lu Jiansong, a professor from the Department of Cultural Heritage and Museology, Fudan University.

Over the past decade, many have criticized the blind pursuit of museums. Gong, who is also a deputy director general of the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Culture, said many officials have followed the trend, and want to build bigger museums than other places.

Wenzhou Museum in Zhejiang Province, built 10 years ago, has an area of 26,000 square meters and the sizes of the more recently constructed and expanded Chengdu Museum in Sichuan province and Taiyuan Museum in Shanxi province have been doubled. The size of Wuxi Museum, built in 2007, hit 71,000 square meters. The construction spree goes on.

"We have very large museums, but they do not necessarily meet the requirements," said Cheng Taining, a research fellow from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, adding that some museums with an investment of more than a billion yuan ($160.2 million) are a huge waste as their size far exceeds their quality.

"Some museums have a splendid appearance but end up being transformed into shopping malls due to a lack of collections and items on display," said Lu.

An evaluation report on the construction of the new Capital Museum launched by Beijing government illustrated the problem. The report stated that some museums are shaped like an inverted funnel and the display hall is a fan shape, hindering the arrangements of displays and wasting space, while the construction of some museums cannot live up to the requirements of exhibitions, forcing the whole project to be restarted from scratch.

Lu said that the construction of museums is a complicated project and needs comprehensive planning and research, but most museums start hastily and are finished in a very limited time.

Museums without exhibitions

In contrast to the boom in buildings, Chinese museums can't compete in artifacts.

The Palace Museum in Beijing has the most, with some 1.8 million items, and the Nanjing Museum has some 400,000, while the British Museum has more than 7.5 million items, said Lu.

And items in many Chinese museums are highly repetitive, consisting mostly of porcelain, bronzes, coins, jade, calligraphy and paintings.

Lu said that some museums at the city or county levels have very few relics, mostly of inferior quality and should not imitate provincial or national museums, but when he tried to help them build museums with their own features, he found the region has few relic materials.

"This is a prevailing phenomenon nationwide," Lu said.

Since officials pay excessive attention to construction instead of acquiring items, the funds for exhibitions, which are the most important part of a museum, are very limited.

The construction of museums is closely connected to academic support of item collections and academic research rather than just money, Lu said.

The education function of museums has been highlighted overseas, while domestically the function of museums still remains the collection and study of relics and antiques.

Talents in shortage

The lack of professionals is another barrier that restricts the museum industry.

A survey by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage in 2009 showed that only 13.5 percent of museum employees nationwide have a bachelor's degree. Even in developed regions, the prospects are still bleak. For example, at the Zhejiang Provincial Museum, only 27.6 percent of the employees have a bachelor degree.

"In a quarter of the museums, they only have an average of three professionals specializing in exhibition, research and social services," said Gong, noting that one county-level museum did not know what exhibition and community services meant when asked.

In some regions, positions in museums are filled by those who have connections, which prevents the professionals from entering, said Lu, noting that only some 300 students are admitted to museum-related majors nationwide every year, who still have trouble finding jobs.

Lu suggested that a qualification system on recruitment be set up, noting that a practice in Japan can be followed that only those who finish their study in a museum major with a bachelor's degree can be recruited.

"Jiangsu province plans to make every county have at least one museum by 2015, but it should be at least a museum instead of a building," said Gong.