Chinese art museum’s European offshoot in Berlin closes, a victim of social and political turbulence and funding issues, its artistic director says
- Times Art Center Berlin, opened in 2018 as an independent offshoot of the Guangdong Times Museum to show southern Chinese art in Europe, has closed down
- Reflecting the growing hostility between nations and cultures and looming end of globalisation, the closure caps a bold attempt at meaningful dialogue about art
The first and only Western offshoot of a Chinese art museum has closed in Berlin, with its artistic director blaming social and political turbulence and problems with funding.
Opened four years ago in the German capital’s central Mitte district, the three-storey Times Art Center Berlin (TACB) had been a rare place in Europe where art from the mainly Cantonese-speaking Pearl River Delta region of southern China was regularly exhibited.
It also facilitated collaborations and projects involving local Berlin artists and artists from other parts of the world, informed by the cosmopolitanism of the original, now 12-year-old Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou.
Founded in 2018, the Berlin branch was set up as an independent affiliate of the Chinese museum and backed by the same sponsor - the Hong Kong-listed Times China property company controlled by husband and wife Shum Chiu-hung and Li Yiping.
Hou Hanru, the Guangzhou-born artistic director of the Maxxi museum in Rome, was heavily involved in both the Guangzhou and Berlin entities. Together with Chinese-born curator Xi Bei, the artistic director of Times Art Center Berlin and a long-time resident of Berlin, Hou curated a three-part, large-scale survey of Pearl River Delta video art in 2018 to help launch the Berlin centre at its temporary first home in Potsdamer Strasse, not far from the permanent site it moved to a year later.