NOUVEAUX REGARDS interview with Julie Narbey (YL France-China 2017)

Interview transcribed by Jean-Raphaël Peytregnet

What led you to apply for the role of Director General of the Centre Pompidou? Did it stem from an interest in modern and contemporary art?

I was appointed Director of the Centre Pompidou in 2017, after a full experience and immersion in contemporary art that lasted six years as Director General of the Palais de Tokyo. It was a smaller establishment and I had more time to dedicate to artists and the contemporary creation that fascinated me.

Our mission was to reveal and support young artists, most of whom did not have galleries, and to offer them their first exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. It was also about producing projects with more experienced French artists like Philippe Parreno, Camille Henrot, Jean-Michel Alberola, Fabrice Hyber, to name just a few. Part of my mission was to oversee the production of all these major exhibitions. The Palais de Tokyo was like a small laboratory for me compared to the Centre Pompidou, which is ten times larger in terms of budget, staff, size and scope. At the Centre Pompidou, I also discovered another more international, diplomatic dimension, involving negotiations, projects and partnerships abroad, including China, with the opening of the Centre Pompidou in Shanghai in 2019, Brussels in preparation in 2018 for an opening scheduled for 2025, Jersey City in 2027, Malaga which has already opened and with whom we will renew our partnership, and finally Korea in 2025.

Beaubourg will be closed for five years. What will the Centre become during that time?

It involves a major renovation of the building, which is iconic but also a prototype that will need to be completely renovated, including its facade which we will change to make the building more environmentally friendly. In addition, there is a cultural project to rethink the museum's scenography, transform the library to adapt it to the new uses of students and users. We will also create a large multidisciplinary platform dedicated to contemporary creation, transform the forum with an area for youth, shared with the Public Information Library, a more commercial area with shops and a restaurant. We will also regain transparency onto the city that we had somewhat lost.

During the renovations, the Centre Pompidou will be present in Paris, in the regions and internationally through numerous partnerships that we are grouping under the name "constellation project".

In Shanghai, you renewed your partnership for five years and it was inaugurated by President Macron in 2019, so two years after your appointment, just before the Covid crisis. Did you not fear at that moment that the project might be compromised? What was your state of mind at that time?

This is an international cultural cooperation partnership between a museum called the West Bund Museum, which our partner wanted to create to boost the West Bund area and turn it into an economic and cultural development zone. For them, it was important to have an international partnership like the Centre Pompidou.

The partner is responsible for its investment, operations and operational budget. The Centre Pompidou contributes to this partnership its works, its know-how, its expertise, its curators for the exhibitions, training as well as its brand in association since the project bears the name West Bund Museum - Centre Pompidou.

When I arrived at the Centre Pompidou, I spent two years negotiating the contract and preparing the opening of the museum and the upskilling of their teams. The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, came in November 2019 to inaugurate the Museum and at the end of January 2020, Covid appeared in China, causing the border to close and preventing our teams from returning to Shanghai from January 2020 to April 2023.

We did indeed fear that the project might not survive this difficult period. This shows its strength and the solidity of the teams on both sides, united to make it happen. In fact, the Museum was not closed during the whole period. We had exhibitions, including one devoted to Kandinsky, an exhibition on design or even architecture. The curators were on WhatsApp video with their Chinese counterparts to make these exhibitions possible. The exhibitions went very well despite the total absence on site of the French teams but with very professional Chinese teams who were listening and able to continue the programming despite the two lockdown periods in China.

But it is true that in 2022, given the situation of the health crisis in China, some could have thought that we would not be able to renew our partnership. At the beginning of 2023, President Macron's visit to China facilitated the renewal of the contract in the joint declaration, which made it possible to extend it at the time when the border reopened.

So the West Bund Museum - Centre Pompidou is not a permanent installation. Isn't that inconvenient for a museum like the Centre Pompidou? 

The approach the Centre Pompidou has chosen is a bit different from that of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which signed a 30-year contract. It's a short-term approach to learn how to work together and see if we want to continue our collaboration. For example, with Malaga in Andalusia, we have a five-year contract that has been renewed once and is now being renegotiated for an additional ten years.

As for China, both on the Chinese side and the French side, we said that a five-year partnership was a good duration to learn how to work together, for the Chinese as well as for the Centre Pompidou. We finally came to the conclusion that it was worth extending this partnership for a second period.

I'm not sure if there is a desire for this partnership to become permanent. At the Centre Pompidou we are more in a logic of transferring experience and expertise, and our partner probably wants, ultimately, to be autonomous. Our second contract includes twice as few exhibitions that will be designed by our teams, which means that they will be in charge of programming half of the exhibitions.

This decision preceded you, but why did you choose Shanghai rather than Seoul or Tokyo, which are far more advanced than China in terms of contemporary art and modern art?

The Centre Pompidou had long wanted to work with China. The artistic relations between France and China are long-standing. There was a curiosity on our part for the Chinese scene and a desire to work with this country. Moreover, we built a project in Seoul in 2025 which is a bit different since it is only an exhibition program, there is less this logic of expertise transfer, training, space for children which are really the complete components of the Museum in Shanghai. In Japan, there are already many museums.

With them, we are more in a logic of circulating exhibitions. We have presented in recent years a Matisse exhibition in Tokyo. I also went in September to inaugurate an exhibition on Cubism which will open this month in Kyoto. Other exhibitions are also planned during the renovation period of the Centre Pompidou. Our works will circulate all over the world and particularly in Asia.

And regarding India? 

Today we have few links with the major Indian museums. This is an area that we will have to develop. On the other hand, there is a significant demand for expertise and, of course, an exciting artistic scene. In these partnership projects, the cultural exchanges and the discovery and promotion of artists, whether in China or India, are very valuable for us. To enrich the collections of the Centre Pompidou, there is also a logic of acquiring works by some of the artists we discover during these multi-year projects.

With India, we are obviously dealing with a very rich scene, both contemporary and historical. This is how we organized, in 2023, in cooperation with the France-Asia Foundation, an exhibition of the painter Sayed Haider Raza.

Can you tell us about the collaboration you have with the Chinese authorities in your exhibition projects?

We know that there are subjects that are difficult to show. In the field of modern, contemporary art and our collection, we have an immense space of possibilities to make exhibitions. For example, we have done an exhibition on women and abstraction which was magnificent, a Kandinsky exhibition, as I mentioned before.

We have also shown contemporary Chinese artists. We opened, at the inauguration of the museum in 2019, with a video art exhibition. All the works, the exhibitions are supervised in China by the Ministry of Culture with which we discuss. It may happen that works are rejected but it is very infrequent.

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the establishment of Franco-Chinese diplomatic relations, do you have any exhibition projects, in particular with the West Bund Museum?

In Shanghai, there is no specific programming. We had the announcement of the renewal of the partnership between our two museums, which is the strong element of our collaboration that begins this anniversary year. In France, the contract we have with our Chinese partners provides for the organization of events around Chinese artists who will be presented in October at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. This is the result of a Franco-Chinese co-curatorship and research that we have conducted together on the contemporary Chinese scene.

When we compare the architecture of the Centre Pompidou, nicknamed "Notre Dame des Tuyaux" (Our Lady of the Pipes), and that of the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, the architecture of the latter appears more conventional, less modern or contemporary?

When discussions begin with a foreign partner, it sometimes happens that they already have an idea of the architect they wish to entrust with the construction or renovation of the museum, which was the case with the West Bund Museum. David Chipperfield was selected for the design of this project and we were delighted, he is a very renowned world-class architect.

Do you have any other projects in Asia?

We have touring exhibition projects. In China, we would like to tour the exhibitions to other cities, whether those presented at the West Bund Museum or others. We are observing a real craze among Chinese museums and major Chinese cities for our exhibitions.

We regularly welcome delegations, from Shenzhen, today from Chengdu with which we had already worked in 2018 on a contemporary art project with young emerging artists, and perhaps Macau. We have had longstanding relations with the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, and we also do exhibitions there. As for Southeast Asia, we are carrying out a great deal of research on artists in connection with a curator from the Museum and a curator from Singapore.

Our objective is to better promote this scene in France as well as to bring Asian works into the Centre Pompidou's collection.

We also wish to organize conferences or events around these works and these artists from Southeast Asia. From this point of view, Singapore is really an important hub, a gateway to the art of Southeast Asia. It is therefore very valuable for our research projects. In the new geographies of contemporary art, this is not necessarily a sector that has historically been highly specialized at the Centre Pompidou. It is therefore an area where we are investing a lot, more in terms of research than exhibitions or partnerships.

We are coming to the end of our interview. Is there a particular subject you would like to address? 

Yes, the audiences. We recently did an exhibition on Surrealism and Asia highlighting some Asian inspirations of the Surrealist movement.

In the Kandinsky exhibition, there were bronzes from the Shanghai Museum that showed that Kandinsky, in his work, had been inspired by exhibitions of Asian art. In this exhibition, there were indeed exceptional works loaned by the Shanghai museum, including paintings, calligraphies, which show the dialogue between our collection and Asian art. We have an increasingly interested, young audience, and we see that there is a real craze in China for contemporary art. What is interesting is that the museum is geographically positioned opposite the site of the Shanghai Fair or Biennial, an area that is therefore very culturally frequented.

Of course, these are not the attendance figures that we find in France. Last year we had around two hundred thousand visitors, which is low compared to exhibitions in France but which, for China, is starting to become quite significant.

We wish, over time, to arouse the desire of the Chinese public, the Shanghainese, to come, among friends, among young people. With Chinese schools, it is more difficult but there are still some group visits that work. We wish to engage in a dialogue of cultures.

These collaborations take time. The first few years were complicated. But we are really happy to renew our partnership to establish this collaboration in the long term. Again, this is not a Centre Pompidou like in Paris, it is not the Centre Pompidou that does everything, that moves forward alone and that establishes itself in Shanghai.

It is a partnership with a museum that is being created and that wants to learn how to put on exhibitions, to learn how to train its staff. It is really a cultural cooperation project with a dimension of expertise and training, with excellent interlocutors. Regarding the cultural programming in a new place, in a country where the Centre Pompidou has not worked before, we are learning over time.

We need to adjust our programming according to what works, what resonates with the public. For the first exhibitions, we did what we collectively thought was good. We can see it today, which is why I was telling you about Surrealism and Asia, the exhibition on design, we see that the public likes the dialogue between Chinese artists and the collections that are ours.

Do you think the West Bund will be able to appropriate the concept of the Centre Pompidou?

What is surprising, unlike other museums that are being created, is that they are absolutely not in a logic of acquiring collections. They do not buy works. The Abu Dhabi Museum has spent a lot of money to build its own collection over time. The West Bund is not at all in this acquisition logic. What will be the artistic direction of a museum if the collaboration with the Pompidou Center stops? I cannot say. I think they have very strong ambitions and that this project contributes to making Shanghai and the West Bund area in particular an international-level hub in cultural terms. They want it to be a nerve center of contemporary world art.

What is interesting is that since we have set up there, the cultural ecosystem in Shanghai has evolved very quickly. As soon as it opened, the Pudong Museum in the Jean Nouvel building, which is at the foot of the Shanghai Tower, benefited from significant tourist traffic. Shanghai's museums have started to do a lot of international exhibitions with major museums. I had not been back to Shanghai since 2019. Today I observe a real change. At the time, the Centre Pompidou was one of the few to do exhibitions in the field of contemporary and modern art.

Today when you go to Shanghai, you have a choice between five or six international-level exhibitions.

The finding is that after the Covid health crisis, we have witnessed an exponential development of the number of cultural venues with international partners, and therefore much higher attendance for exhibitions than before.

The Centre Pompidou certainly had a ripple effect on the ecosystem around modern and contemporary art, but it is difficult to measure!

This project arouses interest and curiosity. The contract has been renewed for a period of five years and we very frequently receive Chinese delegations since the border reopened.

We even recently welcomed the Chinese Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mr. Sun Yeli, who was in Paris. He came to visit the Centre Pompidou and told us that he was delighted with this cultural collaboration.