WHEN YINA SONG, the international boss of Chinese tech powerhouse Silkroad Visual Technology, decided to visit one of her firm’s immersive museum exhibits in mainland China, she was in for a shock.
“I called the museum to say I wanted to come, the museum director told me I would have to join the two-month queue,” she said in disbelief.
The museum scene in mainland China is exploding, and it’s not just about dusty old relics. These days, museums are packed with cutting-edge tech and queues that rival theme park rollercoasters.
“It’s just so competitive now,” Song told me on the sidelines of Hong Kong’s Museum Summit, an annual jamboree where 7,000 of the world’s top curators and museum experts gather to talk shop.
APPETITE FOR SELF-EDUCATION
With great popularity comes great responsibility and Song and other museum bigwigs are worried about the sustainability of this boom. How do you manage the crowds without turning museums into zoos? And how do you protect fragile artifacts from the hordes of visitors?
Last year, China saw a whopping 1.4 billion museum visits, according to Professor Zhao Feng of the National Museum of China. That’s 1.4 billion sweaty bodies breathing on priceless relics and 14 billion fingers poking at exhibits.
The crowds are so massive that bottlenecks and queues are inevitable. And the temptation to throw in some quick tech fixes is strong, to the point that experts now warn of oversaturation of certain tech opiates in the museum space.
It’s tempting for us boomers to blame the flood of AR, VR and QR on Gen-Z or Gen-alpha. But the demand for novelty is nothing new. As Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa, director of Turin’s Palazzo Madama, reminded us with a Latin quote, even the ancient Romans complained about the need to provide “novelty to the masses”.
Yannick Lintz, president of The Guimet – National Museum of Asian Arts in France, revealed that 80% of their visitors come for temporary displays, which make up only 20% of the museum’s space. It’s the new and shiny that draws the crowds—but it’s also what causes the biggest headaches both in terms of sustainability and in protecting each museum’s role of a “permanent institution in the service of society”, as professionals define these places.
IMMERSION: GENIUS OR GIMMICK
The buzzword in almost every Museum Summit presentation in 2025 was “immersive”. It’s the new “multimedia”, and it can mean anything from a simple interactive display to a full-on virtual reality experience.
Some immersive tech is pure magic. Take the Jazz Luminaries exhibit, a mesmerizing web of blue filaments representing the careers and performances of jazz artists, with each filament connecting to filaments of other artists where they recorded or played together. Visitors can lie under this glowing jellyfish— with BB King at the top and centre—and “tune in” to their favourite sounds from the whole world’s jazz repository by moving their bodies around. Truly mind-blowing.
But then there’s the duds. Cue scoffing from art lovers at the Summit when a picture flashed up of two hapless museumgoers gawking into VR goggles in front of a priceless Caravaggio. “If you thought the Italians hated pineapple on pizza…” as my wry seatmate whispered.
Museum folk are generally not snobbish about art but they are very protective of the authenticity of visitor experience. Contemplating genuine art is found to have remarkable mental health benefits on visitors of all ages (even babies, according to one avante garde programme at the Palazzo Madama in Italy) while Christiane Lange, director of the Staastsgalerie in Stuttgart said every euro a society invests in museums yields three euros saved in healthcare.
Experts globally are, thankfully, concluding that VR headsets are not at all suitable for museum environments.
But Sarah Kenderdine, the museum tech expert who leads the Laboratory for Experimental Museology at Swiss research university EPFL and who co-developed the genius Jazz Luminaries project and many others, warns that too much of any immersive technology can be overwhelming. “The balance between the real objects and the digital space is so critical,” she said.
“That’s why the fully immersive thing is no fun. It’s the tension between the real and the virtual that makes the virtual interesting and augments the real.”
CONSTABLE’S HIDDEN WIFE
While curators grapple with the right dosage of tech in the display halls, behind the scenes technology is nothing but a boon for research and conservation. Most of the museum directors from the 39 different countries attending the Museum Summit are already using high-precision laser scanning, digitising their collections at the rate of thousands of relics a day. The National Museum of China has 3D scanners, for example, now capable of capturing details invisible to the naked eye.
And away from visitor games, AI has some fascinating roles: renowned art detective Hassan Ugail, professor at the Centre of Visual Computing and Intelligent Systems at the UK’s University of Bradford has turned facial recognition into “brush stroke recognition” to spot fake paintings: he’s exposed a famous Raphael painting, Madonna della Rosa, as likely only part-painted by Raphael, while confirming many valuable artefacts to be real.
Ugail went the extra mile with a recent investigation into an 18th century John Constable painting: although his system flagged it as likely genuine, he x-rayed the painting for a closer look and found the ghostly image of a woman underneath the countryside scene – traditional facial recognition then pinpointed that woman as Constable’s wife, Maria Bicknell, giving the detective a confident answer to his colleague’s question on the painting’s provenance. The counterfeit art trade must get up pretty early to fool these skilled experts.
STORYTELLING HOLDS THE SECRET
Panel moderator Walter Ngai, secretary general of the Tsz Shan Monastery in Hong Kong, asked directors a provocative question of whether we even needed physical museums in our world, given the digitisation and visualisation power of AI and a Gen-alpha wedded to screens.
Elizabeth Escamilla, assistant director for education and public programs at the J. Paul Getty Museum in the US said that museums had been concerned that the internet would kill them off back in the 1980s. “That didn’t happen,” she said.
In fact, she said, young people were incredibly excited to come to a bricks-and-mortar museum “as long as you make it a place they belong”.
Lei Xiufo, director of the Anhui Museum in China concurred.
“Halls of human culture are irreplaceable,” he said.
But, as museums around the world grapple with the siren call of technology and the challenges of overtourism (and its ever-present shadow, under-tourism), one thing is clear: the museum of the future will need to strike a delicate balance between tradition and innovation.
For the chairman of Silkroad Visual Technology, Li Mengdi, it comes back to the most basic human skill of all: storytelling.
He says professionals face a dilemma. The scramble to be “first” or to produce the most novel immersive technology means the basic storytelling can be lost.
“Everybody is moving too fast. We should have more profound thinking about content,” he said.
“Without a story, or a plot, immersive VR will quickly produce fatigue in the audience. We need cultural thinking behind the visualisations, and need to know that telling a good story is vital.”
‘A WORLD OF CULTURES’
Li points to recent Chinese blockbusters such as Black Myth: Wukong, Wandering Earth and Nezha 2 as models for telling cultural stories—”spectacular, seductive and popular”, as Summit moderator Jeffrey Shaw of the Hong Kong Baptist University put it—and says museum curators could “pay homage” to these cinematic masterpieces.
But Li also called for more globalisation of storytelling across the world. “We are all part of a whole world of cultures,” he said.
“We should not segregate our civilisations’ stories; we should integrate them.”
James Ockenden is a writer and editor in Hong Kong.
Images above from Hong Kong government sources unless otherwise specified.