In Houhai, a Shenzhen district heaving with eye-catching skyscrapers, the Róng Museum of Art, one of China's most anticipated new cultural institutions, is taking shape. It joins a city-wide cohort that includes Zaha Hadid Architects’ hulking Shenzhen Science & Technology Museum, and MAD Architects' soon-to-complete Shenzhen Bay Cultural Plaza. As China's third-largest city and home to tech giants Huawei and Tencent, Shenzhen has long staked the high ground as the country's Silicon Valley. Now, it is making equally serious moves on culture.
Explore the Róng Museum of Art through the eyes of Ole Scheeren
The Róng's creator is Ole Scheeren, the German architect whose global portfolio spans the gravity-defying CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, The Interlace in Singapore, and Tencent Helix, another head-turning Shenzhen project.
This latest commission comes from Tenova, a private venture of Pony Ma, co-founder of Tencent – the conglomerate behind WeChat and one of the world's most powerful digital ecosystems. That a tech company of this scale has turned its attention to building an independent cultural institution is, in itself, significant.
For starters, the Róng Museum of Art is not a corporate annexe. It is privately operated and carries a built-in argument that with economic power comes cultural responsibility. The jury, as ever, is out – but, based on what we can see of the works-in-progress, what’s rising out of the ground is hard to argue with.
Visually, the building – sprawling 4,500 sq m, with 2,300 sq m of gallery space – is unlike anything else already built or under construction in the city. Resting on what Scheeren’s office describes as ‘five sculptural pavilions that touch the ground as slender structures’, its cone-shaped volumes – stepping up to 53 metres – are wrapped in an intricately patterned, engineered outer layer of suspended fritted glass tubes, each independently lit, catching light softly by day and glowing after dark like a futuristic lantern.
The façade, developed with Shanghai-based consultant RFR, took extensive prototyping. ‘There is likely nothing similar globally,' he says, describing the silhouette as both performative and expressive, for the tubes diffuse light, reduce heat gain, and contribute to Shenzhen's sponge-city water management strategy through rainwater collection.
More crucially, the museum forms the cultural anchor of the Houhai Hybrid Campus (or, M80 as locals call it), Scheeren's larger mixed-use development of curvilinear towers connected by elevated promenades and a central oasis, due for completion later this year.
Scheeren resists describing the museum, which opens next June, as merely a destination within that whole. It is, instead, ‘an active component of its overall metabolism’. He envisages the museum operating across multiple public registers: a 24-hour art plaza at ground level, open and porous to the city; mid-level galleries where the building's different volumes 'grow together' to form flexible exhibition space, including a double-height room for large-scale installations; and a rooftop garden that extends the campus's central oasis upward, with views across Shenzhen's waterfront.
Róng’s very moniker – the Chinese character for convergence, symbiosis, fluid exchange – came after the design, not before. 'While at first, the name was an expression of the architecture, it not only reinforced its qualities but really focused its goals,’ Scheeren says. The building, he adds, is not something one can decode from the outside. It's an experience that unfolds as you move through ‘the major public art library, workshops, spaces for lectures and screenings, culture- focused retail and cafes and restaurants and the covered, naturally ventilated public plaza’.
Meanwhile, the museum’s founding director Pi Li – formerly of M+ and Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong – is currently assembling the inaugural exhibition programme, focused on visual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Details are not yet being released, but what is certain is that when the Róng Museum of Art opens in June 2027, Shenzhen will have made its most compelling case yet for being taken seriously as a cultural capital.