Wedged between a landlocked cruise liner and gothic apartment blocks, the V&A’s first international foothold, built in the cradle of the new China, is more luxury mall than magical museum

A fake iPhone is on display next to a mobile designed for the elderly in the V&A’s new outpost in Shenzhen, southern China, the first overseas branch in the museum’s history, which opens on Saturday. Both phones were made nearby, one the product of the region’s many counterfeit factories, the other developed by a young local designer with an enlarged keypad and SOS button. It might look like a simple moral pairing of the bad copy vs the good innovation, until you learn that the knock-off iPhone was also an improvement on the original: it features a double SIM-card slot, essential for the many people who shuttle between Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

“We wanted to show that the ‘copycat China’ stereotype isn’t as black and white as people might think,” says Brendan Cormier, curator of the V&A’s inaugural exhibition, Values of Design, which sees 250 items loaned from the London institution’s collection for the next two years, including a handful of new contemporary Chinese acquisitions. “Shenzhen has gone from being a place where things are simply made, to a centre of innovation where these truly disruptive products are being designed.”

Transformed from a sleepy fishing village to a 15-million strong megalopolis in just 35 years, Shenzhen is a suitably high-speed laboratory for the venerable museum’s first foray into setting up an international outpost. Initiated just three years ago, the idea for the V&A satellite came at the invitation of China Merchants Group, which wanted a cultural anchor for its latest waterfront property development – an idea it had tested by hosting an architecture biennale on various industrial sites slated for redevelopment.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Sea World Culture and Arts Center is a vast £145m building sandwiched between luxury apartment towers and a Hilton hotel. Photograph: Design Society

As one of the country’s oldest and biggest state-owned conglomerates (with fingers in every pie, from container shipping to mining, banking and real estate), CMG led China’s first flirtation with free-market capitalism in 1979, when the Shekou peninsula, where the museum is located, became the test bed for Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening policy. As the outward-looking cradle of modern China, where land reform, private enterprise and foreign investment were first nurtured, it is a fitting place for the V&A to be testing its own international ambitions.

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“It is increasingly important to be showing what the UK is good at overseas,” says the museum’s deputy director, Tim Reeve, echoing the Brexit-conscious rhetoric of his new boss, Tristram Hunt. When the Louvre opened its outpost in Abu Dhabi last month, Hunt hailed the project as “a template for the mix of ingenuity, vision and spirit of collaboration which post-Brexit Britain will need to display on the world stage”. Although it was conceived by his late predecessor, the energetic Martin Roth, the Shenzhen project is the V&A’s light-footed version of that ambition.

“It’s a very different model to the Louvre,” says Reeve. “We want to be more nimble and responsive, creating something suitable to the particular context here, then we might go somewhere else.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Cascading steps lead up between boxy white cantilevered volumes of granite’ ... Sea World Culture and Arts Center. Photograph: Design Society

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The V&A gallery occupies part of the ground floor of the new Sea World Culture and Arts Center, a vast RMB 1.3bn (£146m) building designed by the 89-year-old Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, sandwiched between luxury apartment towers and a Hilton hotel. Cascading steps lead up between boxy white cantilevered volumes of granite and aluminium to a big planted roof terrace, from where you can take in expansive views across the bay to Hong Kong, and back to the bristling skyline of Shenzhen.

Perhaps in response to president Xi Jinping’s plea for “no more weird architecture”, the building provides a blank foil to the mad Las Vegas jumble of Sea World next door, a kitsch fantasy of Venetian-styled restaurants, gothic apartment buildings and a landlocked cruise-liner hotel. But for all its architectural straightforwardness (which verges on the dull), the museum doesn’t quite seem to know what it is on the inside.

“We see it as a vibrant ecosystem of interconnected design communities,” says Ole Bouman, the Dutch director of Design Society, the organisation co-founded by CMG and the V&A to oversee the curation of the complex. “It’s a cultural podium for China to show its creative drive to the world and to nurture its quest for international inspiration,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Phantom drone, one of the exhibits in the V&A’s new Shenzhen space. Photograph: Mark Passmore/Apex/The Observer

It is a strange hybrid institution, containing a mix of galleries, restaurants and luxury lifestyle shops, its six levels connected by escalators around a big atrium, giving more the feeling of a mall than a museum. It is a distinctly Chinese combination, where the propaganda-heavy Shekou Museum of Reform and Opening sits side by side with exclusive private dining suites, a handmade silk clothes boutique and a Unesco-affiliated gallery to showcase Shenzhen’s “city of design” status. A gaping ground-floor exhibition hall opens with a big survey of digital design, displaying a wide range of things variously squirted out by 3D-printers, milled by robots and manipulated by algorithms. The whole thing feels like an apt reflection of contemporary China, good and bad.

The V&A fits into this heady cocktail as a strategic partner, having signed a five-year deal in 2014 to provide expertise in setting up the institution, curating one of the galleries and establishing a wide range of educational programmes, for an undisclosed sum. “It’s enough to cover our costs,” is all Reeve will say, “and then a bit more on top.”

Drawing on the museum’s recent “rapid response collecting” initiative, of acquiring topical items relating to stories in the news, his team has done a good job of curating a show that fuses historical objects from the V&A’s 2.5m-strong collection with more recent acquisitions to spice things up. Local success stories include the Phantom drone, a popular consumer quadcopter produced by Da-Jiang Innovations, a Shenzhen tech startup founded in 2006 and now valued at more than $8bn. It is only trumped by the WeChat phone app, a messaging and payment service now used by 800 million people, developed by Shenzhen-headquartered company Tencent – which was recently valued at $522bn, making it worth more even than Facebook.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A blank foil to the mad Las Vegas jumble of Sea World next door.’ Photograph: Design Society

Some items are displayed as pairs to draw parallels or make a particular point: in a section on the communicative role of design, a celestial globe from 17-century Pakistan is shown next to the Blackphone, a smartphone designed with extra security privacy features. A section on performance pairs an astrolabe with an absurd Swiss army knife that has 80 different functions, while a display on problem-solving shows an iron corset with a paralympic running blade.



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The approach can sometimes seem a bit scattershot, but it provides an intriguing overview of the V&A to an uninitiated audience, enhanced by an exhibition design that revels in its voracious palette of novel material combinations. The section on performance employs foamed aluminium and colour-changing dichroic film, the area on cost combines lavish slabs of green marble (matched to the V&A’s own lobby in South Kensington) with the plywood of museum packing crates, while the display on “wonder” is enveloped in a slinky curtain of chainmail.

“We imagined it as something between a cathedral and a shopping centre,” says the exhibition’s designer, Sam Jacob. “You are browsing, but also worshipping.” It is a good metaphor for the entire building, whose nave-like atrium is lined on either side with alternating chapels of culture and consumerism – not all yet fully tenanted.

The main question hanging over it all is what will happen when the V&A deal expires in two years, by which time the complex is supposed to be financially self-sustaining. China’s recent museum boom (which saw 415 new museums open in 2014 alone, bringing the total to 4,510) has left many echoing exhibition halls struggling to find content. Design Society has no plans to acquire a collection of its own, so there is a danger that the mall could ultimately swallow the museum.

“Every day is a new day for us,” is the gnomic answer from Zhang Lin, CMG’s deputy general manager. “Things will change, but our international friendship will always remain.”