How artists in Chinese boomtown Shenzhen are striving to make its art scene more than just the ‘least important industry’

“The art scene is so small in Shenzhen. I think art is probably the least important industry here,” Shane Liu says with a chuckle. The 30-year-old is only half joking. Liu, who has been running an independent art space in the Chinese special economic zone for the past five years, notes that Shenzhen’s art scene is far less prominent than those of other first-tier cities in the country, despite being one of its richest. Sure, it has Ocat Shenzhen, a contemporary art venue founded in 2005, and the Sea World Culture and Arts Centre, opened in 2017, which houses the Design Society, an institution founded in partnership with the UK’s Victoria and Albert Museum. But the young age of Shenzhen – a city created in Baoan County bordering Hong Kong as the main test bed for Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms and liberalisation just 43 years ago – means that there is no large local art community, Liu says. One big reason is that talented young artists in the region would more likely choose to be in the historic city of Guangzhou, about 140km (90 miles) away, which has one of the country’s top three academies of art and a mature museum infrastructure, she says. The rise of Shenzhen, from seaside town to China’s Silicon Valley Still, Liu and other locally born, second-generation Shenzhen artists and curators are setting up their own venues, out of a strong sense of ownership and responsibility towards their hometown. One of the earliest grass-roots efforts is the New Who Art Village (also called the Aohu Art Village), which began in 2013 a year after Deng Chunru, now 46, a Shenzhen artist who studied at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, moved back to his hometown with his curator wife, Wang Ting, 42. Back then, the traditional Hakka village, around 40 minutes by car from Shenzhen’s city centre, was “very backwards and dilapidated”, Deng says. “It was an ordinary small village on the edge of the city.” Deng and Wang soon started to make changes in the village through various art projects to address the “barrenness of the environment”, he says. They also started public education activities and free art programmes for young people in the community. “This is where I was born. This is my hometown. So I felt that I should have a sense of responsibility to make it better,” Deng says. The wealth of art projects and the low rents in this outlying village soon attracted more artists to live and work there. While the community first started with Deng’s artist friends, more came as word gradually spread. Now the village houses more than 70 artists, who mostly come from Shenzhen, but also from Guangzhou, Beijing and even the US. “We have our own exhibition space in the village, and we also encourage artists to present their works in their own spaces in the village,” Deng says. “Some outside curators will also invite artists to participate in the exhibitions.” One such outside curator is Liu, who, like Deng, decided to serve her hometown the best way she knows – by giving a platform to local artists and diversifying the art offerings in the city. I don’t know how to describe my feelings for Shenzhen, but I only know I will continue to try my best to make the city better Artist Shane Liu She founded Arbre in the central district of Yuanling on the ground floor of an eight-storey residential building when she returned to Shenzhen after studying art and photojournalism in the UK. “Many friends from Shanghai who studied art with me in the UK ask me, ‘Why don’t you come to Shanghai? The art industry here is so much better,’” she says. “I always tell them that it’s because I’m from here. I’d say, ‘I don’t want to develop your city. I love my hometown.’” Since January 19, 17 exhibitions have been staged in Arbre’s 140 square metre (1,500 sq ft) space. The focus of its curation is on artworks that tell stories of Shenzhen identity, with the current exhibition, multimedia artist Shen Piji’s “Looking for Grandma”, an example. Shen, who has been based in Shenzhen since 1993, focuses on the human cost of migration – such as grandparents being absent from the lives of countless children whose parents moved to Shenzhen from other parts of the country for work. For Liu, funding the operation has been a constant challenge. She used to operate a cafe on the side while also regularly hosting movie screenings and art workshops. The café closed earlier this year, however, because competition in the neighbourhood became too fierce. The Covid-19 pandemic was a difficult time, but stringent government regulations also provided unexpected opportunities. “Because the whole country was closed off, artists and curators from other cities or even other countries couldn’t come to Shenzhen,” Liu says. “So locals, such as us, got opportunities to work with huge projects like the local government’s annual Glow Shenzhen art festival from 2020 to 2022.” Now that the pandemic is in the past, everyone in the city’s art industry is focusing on recovery – usually by putting more focus on revenue generation. Sea World Culture and Arts Centre recently rented out a large gallery to French luxury label Dior for a fashion show, after cutting short a major exhibition of German avant-garde artist Joseph Beuys’ works in the same space. At Arbre, Liu is thinking of adding an art shop that sells items designed by local artists and produced in small batches. “I don’t know how to describe my feelings for Shenzhen, but I only know I will continue to try my best to make the city better, which is a sentiment shared by most shen er dai [second-generation Shenzhen natives],” she says.