Traditional or Contemporary Art? A Study of Educational Approaches to Children in Two Chinese Art Museums

ABSTRACT

Although the number of art museums in China has increased significantly in recent years, art museum educators find it difficult to create relevant, relatable, and engaging learning experiences for children in different contexts of art museums. I conducted this qualitative, comparative case study in Shanghai, China, examining how two different art museums, one contemporary art-based, and another one traditional Chinese art-based, conceptualize museum education for children. The research data included face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with museum educators and a content analysis of documents gathered from the museums’ websites. Using the frameworks for the contextual model of learning and constructivism theory in museum learning, I compared and contrasted the two art museums educational approaches in creating connections between educational programming and children’s learning. I found that both art museums were able to connect programming to children with their current exhibitions, but using two different approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning strategy
• art museum
• children’s program
• learning in different contexts
• China

Background of children’s programs in art museums in China

With the significant increase in the number of museums in China in the last 40 years, from 137 in 1980 to 5,452 in 2020,¹ museum attendance by young families has increased accordingly. Children’s development and education are increasingly seeing the benefits of art.² Museums have become extended classrooms, which provide children rich art education resources and socializing venues, as well as an excellent supplement to art education in kindergartens, schools, and homes.

However, as art museums have become vital institutions for children's art learning in the US and Western European countries,³ for many years the primary forms of educational activity available in Chinese art museums were guided tours, lectures, and art lessons, without much exploration of learning theories and teaching methods in museum educational programs.⁴ Art museum education is basically an emerging field that still lacks any theoretical framework in China.⁵ For these reasons, museum educators often find it difficult to create relevant, relatable, and engaging learning experiences for children.⁶ I became particularly interested in this disconnect because of my position and what I experienced during the past decades. As a college art educator who grew up in China and has studied Western art history and art education, and someone who has been to more than 100 art museums around the world, I clearly saw the gap between Chinese art museum education and that of the world's leading art museums.

In traditional Chinese art museums, the types of learning experiences that art museums generally offer in China (e.g. guided tours, lectures) are primarily designed for adults, who are better equipped to learn about and experience art through reading, listening, and observing.⁷ In Chinese contemporary art museums, direct contact with art is sometimes not enough to enable a fully immersive experience for young visitors. In order to understand and experience art, visitors have to follow a path of creative observation, reflection, comparison, self-questioning, and research.⁸ In short, for the reasons and background stated above, children's programs in many Chinese art museums are homogeneous, and some programs are copied from one another, resulting in a lack of originality and effectiveness. Educational programs do not promote museum-based learning for children.

The design of the study

In view of the above-mentioned status quo, I designed a qualitative comparative case study to describe how the different contexts of both contemporary art and traditional art museums influence educators in designing and implementing children's education programs in Shanghai, China. Three main questions were raised at the beginning of the study:

1. What are similarities and differences between contemporary and traditional art museums’ approaches to designing and implementing children's educational programs and curriculum?

2. How do contemporary and traditional art museums utilize history, venues, collections, and exhibitions to engage children in the museums and promote their learning and development?

3. In each of the art museums (contemporary and traditional), how do education programs contribute to children's learning?

The museums and their contexts

I selected two art museums in Shanghai that have good reputations in children’s programming. They reflect different types of art with one being a contemporary art-based and the other a traditional Chinese art-based. These two museums reveal different characteristics in terms of their history of establishment, venue characteristics, collections and exhibition orientation, and programming.

The contemporary art museum is Power Station of Art (PSA), the first state-owned contemporary art museum in mainland China, has an exhibition hall area of 15,000 square meters. It is located on the bank of Huangpu River, the central river in Shanghai and is the main venue of the Shanghai Biennale, the oldest art festival in China. It was transformed from a former Power Plant. Its rough and uninhibited industrial architectural style provides artists with rich imagination and creative possibilities. The goals of the art museum include: (1) to provide the public with an open platform for the display and learning of contemporary culture and art; (2) to eliminate the barriers between art and life; and (3) to promote cooperation and knowledge production between different cultural and art categories.⁹ All works exhibited in the collection are contemporary art works or design works.

The traditional art museum is Liu Haisu Art Museum (LHAM). This is the first provincial and municipal national art museum in China named after Liu Haisu, a renowned traditional Chinese artist and calligrapher and considered the pioneer of China's new art movement and the founder of Chinese modern art education. The art museum is based on the generous donations of Liu Haisu, including his main works, and his collection of paintings and calligraphy works of past dynasties. The museum is located on West Yan'an Road, Changning District, with a total construction area of 12,540 square meters. It sits hidden among the lush trees, and is often referred to as the most beautiful art museum west of the Huangpu River. With more than 2,000 pieces of art in the collection and its objective of (1) inheriting the founding artist’s art spirit, (2) developing young talents, (3) embracing innovation; and (4) advocating Chinese culture, the museum is set to lead China in terms of both research of the founding artist’s art and promotion of youth art.¹⁰

Qualitative case study

This study employed a qualitative, two-case study comparative methodology, with multiple methods, including semi-structured interviews and content analysis of documents. The case study methodology was selected to conduct this research because of the complex nature of studying learning in different contexts, as well as being “an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon with its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident.”¹¹

The interviews were conducted in each art museum with the educators of the education/learning departments. I had two face-to-face, 60–90 min, semi-structured interviews with both of them that focused on the purpose and philosophies of each art museum’s children’s programming, as well as information about their initial conception and their continuing development. The interviews were transcribed and done back translation to ensure its validity. Based on the interview transcript, four codes for the analysis were created: educational philosophy and values, program design and implementation, outcomes and goals, and future practices. During the coding process, I used a comparison table (Table 1) to examine the similarities and differences between the museums. In addition, I gathered documents from the museums’ official websites concerning the details about children’s educational programs. The purpose of this phase was to more clearly examine and list all the programs the museums provide and to make a comparison of the information gathered from the interviews.

Table 1. The similarities and differences between the PSA and the LHAM.

	Codes	PSA	LHAM
Similarities	Program design and implementation	Children’s programs are closely aligned with the current exhibitions
		Basic knowledge of the language of art is the main content of children's programs
	Outcomes and goals	Children's programs are well received by children and their parents
Differences	Educational philosophy and values	“Non-definition”; Change together with the change of contemporary art	Open and inclusive; close to public; the bridge that links people and society
	Program design and implementation	Extract the richness of the materials and media used in contemporary art and translate those into children's programs; the incorporation of critical spirit	Closely integrated with the communities, kindergartens, and schools
	Future practices	Covering many aspects, such as cooperation with commercial brands; developing long-term courses; developing children's products; etc.	Focus on the development of teaching materials and curricula, working with university teachers

To address the problem and to examine the contextual relevance and connection in different art museums of children’s educational programs, both interviews and documents data were analyzed with the framework of the contextual model of learning,¹² which defines context as being personal, sociocultural, and physical. In designing this study, I added a fourth aspect of “aesthetic context,” which includes all the information and background embodied in the exhibitions or artworks, as well as the positioning of the art museum, whether contemporary, modern, or traditional art-based. An additional analytical framework, the constructivist theory of museum learning was used for data analysis to examine how education programs help children construct knowledge by making connections between their lives and the objects they encounter in museums.¹³

The overall educational philosophy

PSA aims to give children a broader understanding of cultural and artistic understanding, as well as experiences of inclusiveness and empathy, through diversity, experimentation, and new technologies of contemporary art, thereby stimulating their curiosity and tapping into creativity and imagination. Because of the cross-media and cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary art, this provides children with more opportunities for interdisciplinary learning.¹⁴ In the interview, Lili Zhang, the Head of Learning Department of the PSA said,

The purpose of education and the fundamental value of contemporary art serve as the foundation for our children's programming. We continue to discover and extract these in our exhibitions, transforming them into a variety of activities for children to experience, thereby creating opportunities for children and parents to learn and grow together.¹⁵

It is because contemporary art is ongoing and evolving, and has “no topic, no medium, no process, no intention, no professional protocols, and no aesthetic principles are exempt.”¹⁶ Therefore, the museum can present to children what contemporary artists are thinking about regarding the current societal issues and art. Zhang emphasized, “Our educational programs place a strong emphasis on enabling children to think and share their own unique perspectives and experiences. For instance, I organized a children's program called ‘I have an artistic opinion’ (wo you yi jian) to encourage children to express their individual viewpoints on art and artworks as well as to hone their verbal expressions.”¹⁷

Compared to programs in the PSA, which are contemporary in content and form, and closely linked to the exhibition, the children's programs at the LHAM are more closely linked to the community. In the interview, Huiqin Zhu, the educator of the LHAM said: “We want the programs to be close to real life. We try to bring the museum closer to the public through various programs, so that the public can get closer to art. That's why we have a lot of programs in the community. For example, we have eight locations in Changning district and Hongkou district, as well as other cultural programs that do not have a location, such as the ‘Alcove Tour’ and the ‘Visit to the Historical Residence of the Shanghai Art Institute.’”¹⁸ In the LHAM's philosophy of education, educational programs are the bridge that links people and society, which are inseparably connected.

The current exhibition matters

According to the interviews, both the PSA and the LHAM are more effective with programming for children when their education programs closely align with the current exhibitions and their museum characteristics. The two art museums tend to design children's programs that are closely related to the exhibition, as they have found from past experience that such programs give children a better learning experience. In the interviews, the educators of the two art museums mentioned the following:

Most of our public programs are designed in conjunction with current exhibitions. The starting point for our activity planning is to research the content as thoroughly as possible before the exhibition opens, extract the core values in the exhibition that are appropriate for parent–child audiences to understand, and ensure that the planning concept does not contradict the exhibition's main idea.¹⁹ (Zhang, the Head of Learning Department of the PSA)

At present, programs are mainly based on collections, and children's programs generally follow the current exhibition. As an art museum, we must plan programs based on our own advantages and resources. Moreover, there will be better resources that can be mobilized during the exhibition, such as artist resources, to supplement children's programs.²⁰ (Zhu, the educator of the LHAM)

The artistic experience gained through the language of art matters

The two art museums have completely different orientations and styles in the positioning of collections and exhibitions. All the exhibitions the PSA exhibited are contemporary art works or design works. While the exhibitions in the LHAM are based on the main works of Liu Haisu, and other forms of traditional art and modern Chinese artworks.

Despite the two differing art museums’ collections and styles, both art education programs provide children a rich and creative experience by extracting art language from artworks, allowing them to experience the process of creating art and better comprehend the art media as well as the stories behind the artworks. The children’s programs shown below (case 1, case 2) from both art museums illustrate the above arguments.

Case 1 (from the PSA)

Activity’s name: The Power of Life

Artistic medium: line, silkworm and silk

Related exhibition: “Liang Shaoji: A Silky Entanglement”

Activity synopsis: Liang Shaoji is a Chinese artist who creates artwork during the growth cycle of silkworm eggs through hatching, adulthood, silk spinning, cocoon formation, and moth formation. In this program, children will visit the exhibition “Liang Shaoji: A Silky Entanglement,” listen to the artist's creative experience of acquaintance and companionship with silkworms, feel the charm of silk that combines hardness and softness, and generate the thoughts and questions about time and life contained in the works. Under the guidance of the workshop instructor, children will learn the specific operation of silk reeling, and try to extract silk from the cocoon; while waiting to dry, use iron wire to outline the form of life force in their mind, and finally, finish a installation work (Figure 1).²¹

Figure 1. The activity poster “The Power of Life.” Photo: The Power Station of Art, 2021.

A wet hand is plucking the silk, there are many small round stones below the silk.

Case 2 (from the LHAM)

Activity’s name: New Year's Printmaking programs Collection

Artistic medium: material, printmaking

Related exhibition: “Year After Year Archives 2021-The First Exhibition of Shanghai Contemporary Print Recommendation”

Activity synopsis: In conjunction with the exhibition “Year After Year Archives 2021 – The First Exhibition of Shanghai Contemporary Print Recommendation,” LHAM launches a series of printmaking programs. The exhibition period coincides with the Chinese Year of the Tiger, and the children are invited to explore the Chinese New Year in the prints with the theme of “Tiger.” The programs have both offline printmaking and online learning resources, including “Tiger” wood-block printing and blessing wooden sign making (offline), screen printing experience with “tiger” as pattern (offline), “Cute Tiger Goes to Huang Mountain” three-dimensional greeting card making (online), etc.²²

In both cases, the museum educators uncovered artistic language from the exhibitions themselves that could be used in educational activities. Most immediately evident is the use of the materials or media used in the exhibition, such as silk and printmaking. Of course, the use of materials also reveals the different characteristics of the two art museums, with the PSA making more and more innovative use of novel media, while the LHAM relies more on traditional media, but with innovative thinking about the use of traditional media. Zhang, the Head of Learning Deparment of PSA, emphasized in the interview that, “The basic visual elements of point, line, shape, structure, as well as classic and contemporary media and means of expression, are merely means and instruments, not the goal of our educational activities. However, it is true that works with rich visual effects will be more appealing.”²³

Through the interviews, I also learned that the registration and attendance of children's programs in the two art museums have reached their capacity. This indicates that despite the two differing art collections and contexts, the respective children's programs are well received by children and their parents. Both museums strive to effectively extract the current exhibition content into a certain artistic language and then specifically design a themed activity suitable for children according to their educational philosophy. Further, both art museums provide educators with effective implementation plans.

Context matters

Studies have shown that many people often struggle to understand and appreciate the value of modern and contemporary art.²⁴ The children (in the study) preferred paintings with easily recognizable figurative elements and works depicting their subject in a naturalistic way.²⁵ So, in the PSA, the approach that educators take to make contemporary art accessible and interesting to children is not just to work on the content of the artworks, but to extract the richness of the materials, media, artists’ experience used in contemporary artworks and translate those into children's programs. Examples for how various media helped children connect to art exhibits include: “There are ants, one, many … ,” which is part of the exhibition M/M Made in Shanghai and used the medium of immersive and body-sized installation (Figure 2); “The Power of Life,” a companion event to the exhibition Liang Shaoji: A Silky Entanglement used the medium of silk (Figure 1); and “Fish, Fish, Fish and Boat,” in conjunction with the Shanghai Biennale 2021 Water Bodies, used ultra-light clay as a material to build their oceanic aquascape (Figure 3). There are additional children's programs using collage, printmaking, Chinese painting, acrylic, bamboo weaving, electronic devices, etc. as media. Since contemporary art is defined in terms of time, rather than style, it is not limited by materials and media. Therefore, the PSA's children's programs show a rich diversity through the chosen materials and media inspired by the exhibition.

Figure 2. The installations of the exhibition M/M Made in Shanghai. Photo: The Power Station of Art, 2021.

There are a few artistic black and white tables on the floor and some artistic colorful patterns hanging on the walls.

Figure 3. “Fish, Fish, Fish and Boat” children’s workshop. Photo: The Power Station of Art, 2021.

An adult woman wearing a mask is kneading ultralight clay with a girl with long hair.

The most distinguishing features of the PSA's children's programs are their novelty and emphasis on modernity embedded in artworks. The PSA sought relevance for children to learn inside of the museum through various contemporary artists, designer resources, and cross-media experiences (Figure 4). In the interview, Zhang mentioned, “Our children's programs are contemporary and open to the public. We invite contemporary artists, designers, or relevant art teachers to participate in the workshops. We organize, coordinate, prepare various materials, and manage the site for events created and directed by artists. However, for the majority of the events that we plan and organize ourselves, we are the project planners and event theme content designers.”²⁶ The use of many emerging media extracted from contemporary artworks is what educators of the PSA considered most when designing programs for children. When confronted with relatively obscure contemporary artworks, educators sufficiently deconstructed the works, extracting the most important or central media, materials, or expressions from the works and transforming them into media that facilitate children's art learning. It is evident that they thoroughly consider the aesthetic context in contextual learning. Beside aesthetic context, the physical context is also taken into consideration in the programs designing. As the PSA is a former power plant, the unique architectural structure of the venue allows and supports innovative and experimental educational program design, and it also gives the children an artistic experience in different spaces.

Figure 4. Children’s programs of the PSA. Photo: The Power Station of Art.

Shadow play, ink painting, body play and many hands holding cell phones are the four images composed of photography.

Compared to the PSA, the LHAM connected more effectively with local audiences and children because it brought its programs out to the communities and schools (Figure 5). Bringing the arts to the community is part of their educational mission. As such, they have museum-kindergarten cooperations with Song Qingling Kindergarten, and museum-school cooperations with schools that support students with disabilities. For example, they have had a group of children from the schools (for children with autism or other disabilities) aged six to twelve complete painting activities with similarly-aged school children who do have not disabilities. This allows children to interact with their familiar social environment and new social relationships, such as family, classmates, friends, other community members, etc. as they participate in art programs. According to the Contextual Model of Learning,²⁷ the sociocultural context encompasses the experience of visitors as they interact with friends, family, peers, and other social groups during their museum-based learning.

Figure 5. School and community programs of the LHAM. Photo: Huiqin Zhu.

The image made up of the painting exhibition hall, the performance, children and adults showing paintings together, and children and adults painting a mural together, these four photographs.

As in response to the question “What do you hope children would gain from art programs?” Zhu, the educator of the LHAM, emphasized: “We hope that children will improve their teamwork skills in the programs. We found that many children are good at working alone, but not when they work in teams.”²⁸ The emphasis of community interaction and teamwork among children corresponds the sociocultural context. It also fits well with the goals in the Guidelines for Kindergarten Education and the China Child Development Program (2021-2030).²⁹ I can also see from here that the goals of art museums in the traditional art context are closer to the expectations of Chinese society for children's education programs.

Constructivism matters

According to museum educator and theorist George Hein,³⁰ visitors construct knowledge by making connections between their lives and the objects they encounter in museums. For children in particular, effective design and guidance of art museum programs will allow them to construct new knowledge by combining their newly acquired experiences in the programs with what they have experienced or seen. The children's programs show that educators in both art museums are aware of the role of constructivism in facilitating children's learning. Compared with the simple output of artistic knowledge, the two museums fully respect the subjectivity of children and participate in programs more as facilitators. So in interviews, I kept hearing words like “coordinator,” “facilitator,” “guide,” “observer,” and “working together.”³¹

In the PSA, although contemporary artworks are often slippery and elusive, they do bear some identifiable characteristics: contemporaneousness/time, liberation of practice, supremacy of concept, cross-disciplinary practice, radical aesthetics, inclusiveness, interaction with popular culture, and local and global perspectives.³² From these characteristics, we can see that contemporary art is rebellious, liberating, critical, inclusive, and open. These characteristics of contemporary art allow educators to design activities that are informative, but still leave room for educators. It also allows for more consideration to be given to embedding critical thinking into activities when designing activities for children. Chinese art critic Gu Chengfeng once said in an interview:

Especially in China, the core value of contemporary art still cannot be separated from enlightenment. It encompasses both an insistence on the critical spirit of the humanities in the present and an emphasis on insisting on a critical attitude toward mainstream consciousness.³³

In a similar manner, when identifying the most important potential areas of impact in children's programs, Zhang, the Head of Learning Department of the PSA, believed that cognitive learning (knowledge) is the most important. She emphasized, “We want our children to better understand and reflect the issues that the contemporary artists are thinking and expressing, and the way they present them and their perspectives. There is something creative to learn from them.”³⁴

Chinese educator Cai Weiren, who has proposed the concept of Critical Constructivism, argued for the fact that criticism and critical thinking are of central value to the success of constructive activities.³⁵ Learners construct their own life understandings and practical behaviors in the context of critique and constantly critique existing understandings and practices in the context of construction. So to a certain extent, constructing necessarily implies the existence of critique, and the individual's constructing journey is a journey of continuous critical thinking. Therefore, it is invaluable for children to gain such experience from artworks and art programs from an early age in the art museum. The critical thinking they build through cognitive learning in the face of a new selection of topics and media for each activity can help them bridge the prior knowledge and develop creativity and critical thinking from an early age.

Compared to the diversity and innovation of contemporary art in terms of subject, materials, and media use, traditional paintings in the LHAM are relatively more conservative. However, the core of traditional art is inherited from Chinese culture. Chinese painting is a representation of Chinese culture, it forms part of Chinese culture and is a visual image of the spirit of Chinese culture.³⁶ Therefore, it is more easily accepted and recognized by the public, and at the same time, it is more likely to meet the needs of the public. Moreover, the meanings visitors derive from their experience in the museum, which can be stimulated by all aspects of the museum, not just the art, are determined not only by the aims of exhibition designers, but also by the goals the visitors hold. Whether in the context of contemporary art or traditional art, contextual learning theory and constructivism tell us that a focus on children's prior knowledge and experience helps educators to integrate activities with children more effectively.

Conclusion and implication

Although China is still in the early stages of developing public education for children in art museums, and the two art museums still require more theoretical support and creative thinking for their children's education programs, their practice has actually provided Chinese art museum educators with fresh ideas and inspiration. The analysis of the children's programs at the two museums from a comparative standpoint also offers museum educators all around the world a fresh viewpoint on how to re-examine and re-evaluate their own program designs. The study demonstrated that different contexts do influence art museum educators' program design, but that there is no good-or-bad difference between contemporary and traditional contexts, and that children are mobilized to learn differently in different art museum contexts. Similar learning theories and styles could be used in both contemporary and traditional collections. I suggest art museum educators to discover and engage contemporary issues with older collections, and make connection with children’s life. I also suggest educators to take contextual learning theory and constructivist teaching into consideration, and utilize different and unique advantages, such as the history of establishment, venue characteristics, collections and exhibition orientation, and interaction with communities or other institutions, to develop children’s programs and promote contextual learning.

A richer understanding of children’s programming will aid in the development of education at Chinese art museums, as well as in the world’s art museums, which are a vital part of public life, benefiting their own institutions, their participants, and the surrounding community.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jingwen Li

Jingwen Li is a lecturer at Shanghai Normal University Tianhua College, China, and a PhD Candidate in Curriculum & Instruction at Northern Arizona University. Her research focuses on children's educational programs in art museums, taking a comparative perspective on how Chinese and international art museum educators promote children's learning through the curriculum design and implementation of programs.

Notes

1 Chang et al., “The Booming Number of Museums,” 4.

2 Read, The Meaning of Art; Zeki, “Art and the Brain”; Lehrer, Proust was a Neuroscientist.

3 Paris and Hapgood, “Children Learning with Objects,” 37; Bowers, “A Look at Early Childhood Programming,” 39.

4 Wang, The Basis of Chinese Museology; Su, “Cultural Collision and the Traditional Role”; Yang, “Art Museums as Educational Institutions.”

5 Yang, “Art Museums as Educational Institutions.”

6 Wang, The Basis of Chinese Museology; Su, “Cultural Collision and the Traditional Role”; Yang, “Art Museums as Educational Institutions.”

7 Yang, “Art Museums as Educational Institutions.”

8 Strnad, “Contemporary Art or Just Something,” 2.

9 From the PSA's official website: https://www.powerstationofart.com/whats-on

10 From the LHAM's official website: https://www.lhs-arts.org/en/index.html#

11 Yin, Case Study Research, 13.

12 Falk and Dierking, Learning from Museums.

13 Hein, Learning in the Museum.

14 The Head of the Learning Department of the PSA, in-person interview with author, January 23, 2021.

15 Ibid.

16 Weintraub, Making Contemporary Art.

17 The Head of the Learning Department of the PSA, in-person interview with author, January 23, 2021.

18 The educator of the Education Department of the LHAM, in-person interview with author, June 16, 2021.

19 The Head of the Learning Department of the PSA, in-person interview with author, January 23, 2021.

20 The educator of the Education Department of the LHAM, in-person interview with author, June 16, 2021.

21 PSA’s children workshop, “The Power of Life”, accessed February 20, 2022, https://www.powerstationofart.com/whats-on/activities/the-power-of-life.

22 LHAM’s children workshops, “New Year's Printmaking programs Collection”, accessed March 2, 2022, https://www.lhs-arts.org/exhibition/preview/item-2220983.

23 The Head of the Learning Department of the PSA, in-person interview with author, January 23, 2021.

24 Furnham and Walker, “Personality and Judgements of Abstract,” 58; Tröndle et al., “An Experimental Study on Visitors’ Judgement of Contemporary Art,” 327.

25 Szubielska et al., “The Effect of Educational Workshops in an Art Gallery,” 136.

26 The Head of the Learning Department of the PSA, in-person interview with author, January 23, 2021.

27 Falk and Dierking, Learning from Museums.

28 The educator of the Education Department of the LHAM, in-person interview with author, June 16, 2021.

29 Ministry of Education of People’s Republic of China, Guidelines for Kindergarten Education; and National Working Committee of Children and Women under State Council, China Child Development Program (2021-2030).

30 Hein, Learning in the Museum.

31 The interview with the Head of the Learning Department of the PSA and the educator of the Education Department of the LHAM.

32 Marshall et al., Teaching Contemporary Art with Young People.

33 Gu Chengfen, conversation with Wang Lin from China Painting and Calligraphy Website, 2019, http://www.chinashj.com/ysj-ft/9329.html

34 The Head of the Learning Department of the PSA, in-person interview with author, January 23, 2021.

35 Cai, “A New Way of Thinking about Pedagogy.”

36 Chen, “The Cultural Value of Chinese Painting,” 103.