He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen
This chapter explicates the museum circuit of the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen as a process of interplay between the state’s political and cultural-economic agents, the museum’s curators and academic stakeholders, and the migrant educated elites. The museum’s intermediaries play a role in negotiating meaning at the interface of expertise and official discourse, and they arguably act as reflexive producers, contributing to a public sphere that has links to Habermasian ‘communicative rationality’. Besides, visitors can be categorized into six distinct identities, and they display limited alignment with the state interest in Chineseness or political patriotism. The study reflects on the national museum’s contingent institutional framework, the ideological dilemma driven by its curatorial activities, and the rise of a middle-class museum public.