Shenzhen has taken two major steps toward becoming one of China's densest art destinations in a single week. Fotografiska Shenzhen opened on October 1 inside the Shenzhen Bay MIXC complex in Nanshan district, and the immersive digital venue BASE opened next door the day before, on September 30.

The 5,300-square-meter Fotografiska is the Stockholm-born institution's fifth venue worldwide and its second in China after Shanghai, which opened in 2023. It houses five exhibition rooms plus a restaurant, shop, and event space, and launched with five cross-media shows. They include a re-staging of Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari's TOILETPAPER project, the Prix Pictet's eleventh edition Storm, a solo by Chinese artist Shi Guowei, and Michael Najjar's climate-focused Morphing Equilibrium.

Next door, BASE is a purpose-built digital art center centered on a 16-meter-high space wrapped in five-sided projection with 360-degree sound. Its opening programs are David Hockney's immersive Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) — presented with a new Cantonese version for local audiences — and Prehistoric Planet: Dinosaurs, adapted from the natural-history series. Programs themed on David Bowie and Vogue are already scheduled to follow.

The openings are only the start. Tencent and JD are each planning new museums for Shenzhen in 2027, a corporate-backed wave of cultural building that would put the tech capital on a different footing from Beijing and Shanghai. For now, the concentration of photography, immersive media, and retail programming at Shenzhen Bay signals the city's bet: culture as an extension of its consumer and technology economy.