Creative space

A Shenzhen State-owned enterprise has teamed up with Britain's V&A to create a new cultural hub dedicated to design on the city's seafront. Lin Qi reports.

Speaking about the addition of WeChat to the Victoria and Albert Museum's permanent collection in September, Tim Reeve, chief operating officer of the London museum, says it has been "a great experiment" for them to address the current issue of how to collect and display digital designs within the context of a museum.

Visitors to the museum in the British capital can see the WeChat app, China's most popular social media platform, on a mobile phone shown at one of V&A's galleries, and digital stickers used on WeChat and their sketches are also displayed.

"We try to give to visitors to the exhibition a taste of what a particular platform is all about," Reeve says. "It is so fundamental and important to people's daily life, work, social interaction and business."

WeChat's developer, Shenzhen-headquartered Tencent Holdings, released a research report in April saying that the global network's 889 million active monthly users spent an average of 66 minutes on the app per day in 2016.

These users included Luisa Mengoni and Brendan Cormier, colleagues of Reeve who lived and worked in Shenzhen for three years from 2014. They were the preliminary researchers for the launch of the Design Society, a cultural hub based in the southern Chinese city, and a partnership between China Merchants Shekou Holdings, a Shenzhen-based State-owned enterprise, and the V&A.