As culture tops Chinese tourists’ reasons for visiting Paris, French art looks for a home in China
From the Musée Rodin to the celebrated Pompidou Centre, venerable French art institutions – encouraged by Chinese interest – are making China their first stop for collaborations, pop-up projects and overseas exhibitions
Angela Chan is directing her husband into position alongside Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, to shoot the perfect photo. The colossal bronze sculpture of a pensive nude male is arguably the most famous work by the Paris-born artist, who was a pioneer of modern sculpture. “A little to the right; no, go back to the left,” Hong Kong-born Chan instructs her spouse. “With your hand like this.”
Every day in the gardens of the Musée Rodin, on the French capital’s Left Bank, tourists come to sit beside The Thinker, invariably resting chin on hand in mimicry of Rodin’s 1903 creation.
“All of Rodin’s masterpieces, headed up by The Thinker, drew us here,” Chan says of the museum, which is housed in a rococo mansion built in the early 18th century, and where Rodin lived and worked from 1908. “We also like the outside exhibitions, with the sculptures placed throughout the beautiful garden.”
While many Asian tourists trawl the shops and boutiques of European capitals for designer fashions and bags – and Paris is, of course, celebrated for its grand department stores – according to the Paris Region Tourist Board, for the 1.1 million Chinese tourists (including those from Hong Kong) who made it to the French capital in 2017, visits to museums, monuments and other cultural attractions were the top draw, wooing 97 per cent of such visitors, with city walks coming in second, at 71 per cent, and shopping third, with 55 per cent.
Chinese represent the third largest group of tourists travelling to Paris after Americans and the British, and their numbers are expected to reach the 2 million mark by 2020. Of the 8.1 million foreign visitors to the Louvre – the world’s most visited museum – in 2017, some 626,000 were from China, a group second only in size to the million-strong American contingent.
“Each museum displays a different sense of French culture,” Chan says of the many such facilities in Paris. “The richness is in its display of architectural, historical and artistic values. And these values carry across all French museums, and through its people. We can see how life imitates art, with the French people’s awesome love of life, and their sense of fashion, architectural buildings and food.”
“Art has an unusual way of capturing human life and culture, it makes us think outside the box,” says Chan’s husband, Victor, adding that the couple’s two children “love the garden and the food served at the museum”.
