The pandemic has been a strange time for the art world. The most visited art museum in 2021 was not the Louvre in Paris, but the Guangdong Museum in Guangzhou, China, which recorded 3.8 million visitors. It is a large edifice overlooking the Pearl River, built to look like a traditional lacquer box and featuring displays of calligraphy, architecture and scroll paintings.
If China’s figures had been included in our list last year, Chinese museums would have filled half of the top ten spots.
The Chinese government does not release public museum attendance figures until May of the following year. Therefore, figures for 2021 arrived too late to be included in our survey, and figures for 2022 are currently not available. But if China’s figures had been included in The arts journallast year, half of the top ten places would have been taken by them. The National Museum of China in Beijing would have been third, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York would have come eighth rather than fourth, pushed by the Xinjiang Museum and the Nanjing Museum in Jiangsu. The British Museum would have been 20th, ousted by the Sanxingdui Museum in Guanghan, Sichuan, the Hunan Museum in Changsha and the Datong Museum in Shanxi.
doldrums
It’s what you would expect from a country with the largest population in the world. Nonetheless, China’s largest state museums still saw a decline from pre-pandemic levels. The number of visitors to the National Museum of China fell by 68% compared to 2019. The largest drop, of 82%, was recorded at the Xi’an Museum in Shaanxi, with a drop in the number of visitors of 3 .4 million to just 615,000.
The cause was China’s zero Covid policy, launched in 2020 and only recently reversed. China has imposed severe travel restrictions on non-Chinese travelers from overseas, banning foreign tourists. Domestic visitors have been stranded by intercity travel restrictions and intermittent closures. Public buildings had irregular openings, closing if a handful of cases were detected in the area. Caps have also been placed on the number of daily visitors to limit the risk of cross infection – the National Museum of China, for example, is still limited to 6,000 visitors per day (less than 2.2 million per year) .
For much of 2022, Chinese cities were either locked down or primed for a
The drop in 2022 will be even more pronounced. While other countries have returned to normal, for much of the year Chinese cities have been either in lockdown or prepared to have one. The increased contagion of the Omicron variant meant that trips to museums became more risky. Visiting at the same time as someone infected with Covid-19 could prevent you from accessing all public buildings, offices, supermarkets and transport. Confirmed cases could be removed from their homes and placed in an isolation center for weeks. It is therefore unlikely that the attendance of 2022 will be as impressive as that of 2021.
