As with Muhammad and the mountain, if tourists do not go to museums, museums should go for tourists. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, that is what is happening now in China. Since March of last year, the country has closed its borders and only allows the entry of its nationals and foreigners with residence permits, who must also keep a three-week quarantine. By reciprocity, the European Union also does not grant tourist or business visas to the Chinese, who previously traveled the most and spent the most. To prevent them from moving abroad and bringing the virus back on their return, the Chinese authorities
neither are they renewing their citizens’ passports. In these last two years, the tourism industry has run out of the more than 100 million Chinese travelers that once flooded monuments, museums and luxury shops around the world. Of them, almost 900,000 landed in Spain in 2019, where they spent an average of about 2,500 euros, much more than the Germans and French.
Worst of all, it is not known when the borders of China will reopen, which maintains an iron policy of ‘Covid 0’. The appearance and rapid spread of the new Omicron variant has only strengthened its armor and, in addition, the Chinese regime has three major events on the horizon that force him to tighten his restrictions even more. To get started, Beijing hosts the Winter Olympics in February and in October it will celebrate the XX Communist Party Congress, in which Xi Jinping will remain in power. But his continuity as president of the People’s Republic will not be made official until the National Assembly that will take place in March 2023, which makes the most pessimistic fear that the Chinese borders will remain closed until after that date.
While waiting for Chinese travelers to leave again, the rest of the countries continue with their tourist promotions and Spain is no exception. While they arrive, museums like the Prado come out to meet you and they move their rooms to their most modern and cosmopolitan city: Shanghai. Specifically to his crowded subway, which from November 6 has hosted an exhibition with 29 of his most important paintings. Installed in an 810-square-meter corridor off Exit 2 of Longhua Central, near the French Concession, the exhibition exhibits life-size reproductions of works like ‘Las Meninas’,’ La maja dressed ‘and’ The man with his hand on his chest’.
“The idea is to reproduce a room in the Prado Museum in the heart of the city,” explains Inma González Puy, director of the Cervantes Institute Library in Shanghai, who organizes the exhibition together with the Embassy of Spain, AECID and Turespaña . To offer visitors the experience more similar to touring the national art gallery, all the details have been taken care of to the maximum. «From the Prado Museum they sent us color samples so that the reproductions made here in a professional workshop would be as reliable as possible. Even the moldings, which are made of wood, are similar to those of the Prado. Y we have even imitated the lighting so that it would resemble the interior of a museum room, ”explains González Puy. In his opinion, “the objective is for visitors to be fascinated by the Prado’s treasures and to be able to travel to Spain very soon to see the original works in Madrid.”
A master selection
For this, 29 paintings have been chosen not only by the main masters of Spanish painting, such as Velázquez, Goya or El Greco, but also Italian and Flemish. These include the famous equestrian portrait of ‘Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg’, by Titian, a copy of the ‘Mona Lisa’ from Leonardo Da Vinci’s Workshop, a self-portrait of Dürer, ‘The View’, by Jan Brueghel The Old Man and Rubens, and ‘The Painter’s Family’, by Jacob Jordaens.
But, reproduced at their impressive natural size, it is the great paintings by Spanish masters that delight the public, who are ecstatic before ‘Las meninas’, ‘La rendición de Breda’ and ‘Los borrachos’ by Velazquez, as well as before ‘La maja dressed’, ‘El parasol’ and ‘El Invierno’, by Goya. Due to its beauty, the portrait of the ‘Condesa de Vilches’, by Federico de Madrazo, is the work in front of which visitors are most portrayed next to the cardboard figure of a menina in which they can put their face in front of this marvel by Velázquez. “We have not left China for almost two years now and, as soon as we can travel abroad, we will go to Spain, among other things so that my family can see these original works,” says Mr. Zhang, whom his 7-year-old daughter has been the hand from painting to painting thinking that they are the real thing.
A ceramic tribute
To win over local audiences, the exhibition nods to China through the export porcelain. “In three of the paintings that can be seen here there are pieces of that porcelain, which came from China and were very fashionable in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries,” González Puy explains. This connection with the Chinese public is also achieved with the videos of a recital by the famous pianist Lang Lang at the Prado and of the exhibition that the artist Cai Guo-qiang starred there between 2017 and 2018.
Thanks to the didactic nature of the exhibition, Spanish history teachers in Shanghai, such as Rafael Martín Rodríguez, from the prestigious Fudan University, they take their students to this station to give them an art class on the ground.
So that visitors can get to know in depth the works and the rich collection of the Prado, the exhibition not only offers the usual explanatory posters, but also a QR code that is scanned with the popular WeChat application and opens a tour of the museum on the mobile .
Enabled by Turespaña, said audio guide has been completed by a live broadcast of two Chinese “influencers” from the Prado that had more than 1.2 million views on social networks. «We provide the context of the tourist destination and we explain the Landscape of Light in Madrid, recently recognized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, so that Chinese tourists associate the Prado with the symbolic value of the Forbidden City, which is their national treasure, ”says María Llinares, director from the Tourist Office of the Embassy of Spain in Beijing.
A growing demand
Although the appearance of new variants of the coronavirus forces us to be cautious about the return of Chinese tourists, Llinares highlights the «enormous accumulated demand and the excellent positioning of Spain, where travelers from this country have the longest stay compared to other competing markets. ‘
To keep the desire to go to Spain when the pandemic allows it, he insists on the need for promotional events such as this exhibition in the Shanghai metro, which is having a lot of success. Good proof of this is that it will last until February 28 and, in addition, it has aroused the interest of other large Chinese cities, such as Beijing, Canton (Guangzhou) and Chengdu, which also they want a room at the Prado in their respective metros.
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