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Abstract In recent years, the number of local museums in China has grown rapidly, but they often suffer from quality issues due to insufficient innovation. Despite investing in grand new buildings and digital technologies, many local museums exhibit similar content and fall into homogenization, epitomized by the saying “first-rate collections, third-rate exhibitions” and the “hundred museums, one face” phenomenon. Overcoming these shortcomings and achieving true innovation has become a pressing challenge for local museum development. Although some aspects of these issues have been discussed in previous studies, a comprehensive root-level analysis has been lacking.
In order to address this gap, the present study adopts an interdisciplinary museum studies approach combined with field research methods. In line with this approach, perspectives from history, architecture, anthropology, cultural studies and related disciplines are integrated to comprehensively examine the factors influencing museum innovation. The author conducted in-depth fieldwork at Suzhou Museum during 2019-2020 and found that Suzhou’s successful practices align closely with four key issues in local museum innovation. Accordingly, the study distills these issues into four pairs of core theoretical categories: “local historical materials and spiritual traits”, “government intentions and professionalism”, “local individuality and global commonality”, and “exhibition quality and cultural empathy”.
The four category pairs each represent a fundamental tension in local museum innovation and suggest corresponding solutions. Firstly, curators should extensively mine local historical sources and distill the region’s unique spiritual traits, thereby highlighting the museum’s distinctive character and avoiding homogenization of exhibits. Secondly, a professionalism-oriented mechanism needs to be established to balance governmental intentions with scholarly autonomy, ensuring scientific and independent decision-making in museum planning. Thirdly, exhibition content and design should integrate distinctive local cultural identity with universal values, embodying the concept of “globalization” to give local museums a globally resonant presence. Fourthly, enhancing exhibition quality through strategies that foster cultural empathy in audiences should be a primary goal, so that museum exhibits provide a deeper educational impact and emotional resonance.
The case of Suzhou Museum illustrates the practical value of this theoretical framework. For instance, during the planning and design of Suzhou Museum, renowned architect I.?M. Pei deeply researched Suzhou’s cultural heritage—especially its classical gardens—and extracted the essence of the “Suzhou style” as the spiritual core, seamlessly integrating these elements into the museum’s modern architecture and exhibits. This culturally rooted yet innovative approach enabled Suzhou Museum’s exhibitions to embody a unique local spirit while attaining broad international appeal, thus avoiding the homogenization seen in other regional museums. Suzhou’s success not only exemplifies an effective fusion of local identity with global vision, but also benefitted from strong governmental support for professional expertise and a commitment to enhancing visitors’ emotional engagement.
In conclusion, this study constructs a systematic framework of four fundamental theoretical categories to analyze and resolve the innovation challenges facing local museums. This work is among the first to systematically conceptualize the core relationships that underpin local museum innovation in China, thereby enriching the field of museum studies and providing a foundation for further research and practical improvement. In particular, the four category pairs proposed here serve both as critical levers to drive local museums’ de-homogenization and creative development, and as basic criteria to evaluate the success of museum practices.
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Published: 01 November 2025
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