How Modern: Reframing the Architecture of New China, 1949–1979

Organised by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montreal, in collaboration with M+, How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979 opened at the CCA on 20 November 2025. The exhibition, curated by Shirley Surya, Curator of Design and Architecture at M+, reconsiders the assumptions and misconceptions surrounding the development of architecture between the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 to the Chinese economic reform in 1979. We had the opportunity to speak to Shirley Surya on the conceptual frameworks that shaped this exhibition.

How did the topic of architecture in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1949–1979 come about?

As a research project in the form of an exhibition and publication, How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979 is at once a question and proposition addressing the ambiguous criteria used to assess the ‘modern’ in the architectural production of ‘New China’. The arguments were seeded in a graduate school paper I wrote while studying History of Design at the Royal College of Art in London titled ‘How Modern is Modern Architecture in China (1949–1979)—Probing for the Modern Movement Through Shifts in the State, Industrialisation and Style in China’s Architectural Production’. The paper was an exercise of historiography, reconsidering current arguments on the development of modern architecture in China primarily through China’s main architectural journal Jianzhu Xuebao, particularly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China up to the beginning of economic reform in 1979.

Despite architecture’s important role in shaping China’s vision of socialist modernity—through rebuilding of cities, transforming of the countryside, developing industry and infrastructure, and innovating materials and structural design—historians and practitioners largely perceived the development of modern architecture in this period as stunted, and, in some cases, questioning if it was even present. They attribute this lapse firstly to the demise of the architect’s professional autonomy, which they see as resulting from the shift from ‘independent’ practice in Republican China to a nationalised and collectivised model under New China’s proletarian autocracy. Secondly, the change from market-driven production to focusing on heavy industries also seemingly led to a lower quality of design for people’s wellbeing. Thirdly, explorations of modernist formalism were seen as hindered by political dogma prioritising a socialist realist ‘national style’ rooted in classical forms.

How Modern therefore reassesses a singular history of New China’s socialist modernity by foregrounding the varied conditions under which modernism was conceived, realised, and experienced. It is organised in three thematic sections corresponding to assumptions underpinning the perceived limited development of China’s modern architecture in this period: Agency, Industry, and Style.

Why is this an important part of M+’s research agenda?

As a museum based in Hong Kong, with a focus on investigating Asia with a global outlook, M+’s curatorial and collecting agenda has always been shaped by a commitment to document, unravel, and, at the same time, reconstruct the histories of art and design in this part of the world. It was heartening how my research in Mao-era design and architecture, as well as my interest in reconceptualising the ‘modern’ in socialist China through a more contextualised and plural framework, aligned with M+’s goal of building a more inclusive canon of design and architecture.

The M+ Sigg Collection of Chinese contemporary art already included works from the early 1970s, in particular Fusuijing Building (1975) by No Name Group artist Zhang Wei. The M+ Design and Architecture team, however, only began acquiring magazines, publications, posters, photographic works, and everyday objects from the 1950s to 1970s in 2014. What I personally acquired for the M+ Collections include 155 issues of Manhua, the PRC’s first national pictorial art magazine dedicated to popularising political cartoons published between 1950 and 1960, 57 photographic prints of the Great Hall of the People and Beijing Hotel by legendary cinematographer-turned-documentary photographer Wu Yinxian (1900–1994) and 135 of the later issues of Jianzhu Xuebao (1954–1979).

In 2018, we also co-organised a symposium ‘Post-1949 Visual and Material Culture in China’ with scholars Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Ho, to reexamine manifestations of China’s particular conception of socialist modernity through a multidisciplinary lens, proposing new ways of appraising the highly complex narratives of socialist cultural production often overlooked or oversimplified by historians.

What drove the collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture?

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal has been an exemplary model for M+ in the area of architectural research, collecting, and exhibitions, especially since 2014 when M+ joined the International Confederation of Architectural Museums (ICAM), which CCA was a key member of. At the ICAM20 Conference in 2021, I was in the same panel discussion titled ‘Challenging Histories within Architecture and Design’ as Giovanna Borasi (Director, CCA). Giovanna presented CCA’s research ‘Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture’, and I presented how the M+ Collections included works from Mao-era China, like Manhua and Wu Yinxian’s photographs, as part of building a more inclusive canon by expanding notions of socialist modernity. Giovanna and Francesco Garutti (Associate Director, Programs, CCA) then invited me to share more about these works and M+’s curatorial plans on the topic. One conversation then led to multiple discussions leading to M+-CCA collaboration.

Architecture in Mao-era China may seem like an unlikely topic for CCA to produce, but as Giovanna had expressed in the publication’s foreword, How Modern represents CCA’s interest in ‘uncovering the relationships between ideology, policy and the built environment’ and ‘producing new readings of modern architecture across different sociopolitical contexts and geographical frameworks’, which have characterised CCA’s past projects. The collaboration gave M+ an opportunity to present its collections alongside its unique readings of China’s plural modernities to a more discipline-specific and research-focused audience.

The use of the word ‘biographies’ was meant to highlight what you described as ‘social and cultural microhistories’. How do these histories challenge the conventional historiographical views framed by East-West, capitalist-socialist dichotomies?

The use of ‘biographies’ highlights our curatorial method not to provide a holistic survey but rather offer snapshots of key changes in structures and processes of design, design standards and inventiveness, as well as urban and rural environments across macro and micro scales. The general assumption has been about the flourishing of modern architecture in Republican China that abruptly stopped in 1949. Our arguments may have shown the limits of such an assumption derived from a specific Euro-American framework of modernism that prioritises notions of professional independence, novelty, progress, and well-known stylistic tropes such as transparency, fluidity, the use of industrial materials, minimalism, flat roofs, and rejection of traditional forms. Socialist realist architecture is still considered as radically anti-modernist and connected to totalitarian policies rather than democratic principles.

‘Social biographies’ include the various agents—the state, officials, architects, workers, and inhabitants—involved in architectural production, consumption, and mediation. Using ‘social biographies’ of architectural projects is therefore important to frame the nationwide project of building socialism not just as a top-down, ideological phenomenon, but as a process worked out in everyday practices that engages the senses and creative will of citizens. Characterised by material and technical inventiveness; continuities and discontinuities with social, economic, and political inclinations; and direct and indirect influences from within and beyond the Eastern Bloc, the case studies in How Modern challenge prevailing assessments of architectural practice in New China as monolithic, hermetic, and autocratic. Instead of privileging a Euro-American conception of modernism associated with the values of market economies, How Modern offers a more textured picture of twentieth-century modern architecture, particularly that of the PRC’s first three decades, as it was explored and understood in a global context. We hope the selected case studies demonstrate the flows and commingling of multiple economic and cultural systems. We also hope they reflect plurality and tensions that characterised architectural production in this period: between agency and control, scarcity and abundance, policy and practice, competition and collaboration, and craft and standardisation, as well as between the impact of domestic and foreign relations.

Apart from works in the M+ Collections, what are some of the rare materials you found for the exhibition?

The biggest challenge in turning a paper into an exhibition was finding the ‘objects’ for display. Reproducing an image from a magazine for print is easy, but finding original drawings, photographs, or models for an exhibition is tough as state institutional archives are hard to access and the work of documenting architecture from this period is often incomplete. I fortuitously found the physical documentation of the work of Zhang Kaiji—one of the chief architects of China’s influential Beijing Institute of Architectural Design (BIAD)—through his archive kept by his son Yung Ho Chang. Hong Kong-based collector Johnson Chang Tsong Zung also had a mind-blowing collection of rare photographs of the construction of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and the Great Hall of the People as well as ‘competition’ drawings of the Monument to the People’s Heroes.

My collaboration with Professor Li Hua (School of Architecture, Southeast University, Nanjing) was crucial to manifesting this project. As one of the eminent scholars who has been investigating this period of architectural production, Li Hua tapped into her network. This included architects who practised between 1949–1979 like Ma Guoxin and Zhu Guangya; archive holders like Zhang Guangyuan who provided access to key materials related to the foreign aid projects by China Architecture Design & Research Group (CADG); research teams from Huazhong University of Science and Technology School of Architecture and Urban Planning led by Tan Gangyi who provided documentation of former Third Front Construction site and from South China University of Technology Department of Architecture led by Feng Jiang who reproduced the models of important buildings in Guangzhou.

Most importantly, Li Hua suggested visiting key architectural sites to designed between 1949–1979 that were still actively occupied today including Huagang Guanyu Park (1955) in Hangzhou, Shougang Steel Mill (1959) in Beijing, Tongji University Auditorium (1962) in Shanghai, Baiyun Mountain Villa Hotel (1965) in Guangzhou, and Reed Flute Cave (1975) in Guilin. It was important for How Modern to not only be about historical documentation but also reflecting a continuity with the present by demonstrating how these buildings and sites have changed or are being used today. These visits informed the decision of the sites that we chose to photograph or film. Our rather serendipitous encounter with artist Wang Tuo eventually led to him filming ten of these sites.

Artist-filmmaker Wang Tuo created ten films for this exhibition. What led to this collaboration? What is the role of Wang’s films in this exhibition?

The M+ team already knew of Wang Tuo’s work as he was the Sigg Prize winner in 2023. But it was my visual art colleagues who, after knowing about my interest in architectural production between 1949–1979, pointed me to Wang Tuo’s film Obsessions (2019) filmed in Fusuijing Building (1960). This led to my meeting Wang Tuo in Beijing to visit buildings like Qijiayuan Diplomatic Residence Compound (1971–1973) and subsequent chats about the project.

CCA and M+ decided to commission Wang Tuo after learning more of his interest in the entangled histories and modernities of this period in the PRC and realising the filmic potential of ‘rendering’ the architectural sites alongside archival documentation. With each film informed by the exhibition’s thematic structuring, I’m utterly grateful to Wang Tuo for taking on this project. The arduous effort of Wang Tuo’s team including cinematographer Liang Xiaoguang and main actress Jin Jing led to Intensity in Ten Cities—a series of ten short films and six interviews about one woman’s scholarly journey of studying buildings constructed across China between 1949 and 1979.

The sites included a popular park in Hangzhou; a former agricultural commune in Shanxi province; a former iron and steel mill and an apartment built for collective living in Beijing; a university auditorium, workers’ housing, and an exhibition hall in Shanghai; a water pavilion and a hotel in Guangzhou; and a scenic site in Guilin. Chosen to invite reflection on continuing issues of agency, industry, and style, some of these sites have been highly altered or degraded over time, yet they still endure and remain inhabited.

The female character uncovers both an alternative ideological narrative absent from official architectural histories, as well as a hidden love story between her mother and another woman. The film entangles architectural history, identity, and the experience of sexual minorities to underline how their diverse and complex conditions were obscured during that period.

Presented alongside the archival documentation, Intensity in Ten Cities offers a different, embodied perspective on these ten sites that is not traced in archival documents, oral histories, and expert analyses. Juxtaposing fact and fiction, the personal and the historical, it reveals the tensions and layers that characterized architectural production in Mao-era China, and how its legacy continues to shape collective memories in the present.