M+ Goes Overseas to Explore Communist Chinese Architecture

There’s a new M+ exhibition that explores the architecture of the first three decades of the People’s Republic of China. But to see it, you’ll need to travel a lot further than to the museum’s home in West Kowloon — nearly 12,500 kilometres further, in fact.

Opened last month at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979 presents a seemingly esoteric topic in an innovative and engaging way, with materials pulled from the M+ collection and a new film created by Sigg Prize-winning filmmaker Wang Tuo. It’s the result of a long collaboration between the CCA and Shirley Surya, the M+ curator of design and architecture, who first approached the topic of early mainland modernism when she was a student at the Royal College of Art in London.

“It started as a paper in grad school,” she explains, standing in a hushed corridor inside the CCA, which is renowned for its vast archive and library, along with research programmes and public exhibitions. It’s a museum for architecture nerds, but also anyone interested in people and the spaces they inhabit. And it’s exactly the kind of institution that would see the potential in turning a scholarly paper into a remarkably lively exhibition.

“We are really interested in different forms of modernity across geographies — and trying to construct an alternative reading of modernity,” says CCA’s associate director of programmes, Francesco Garutti. The first decades of the People’s Republic of China, under the increasingly totalitarian leadership of Mao Zedong, were ripe for investigation. 

“There’s a perception that there is no architecture from that period, just cookie cutter production,” says Surya. “The assumption is that once architecture became a state project, architects lose their autonomy, and therefore there was no modern architecture.” But as Surya and her collaborators discovered, what was being built in early Communist China was more varied and dynamic than people realise. “Our goal is to open up to say, there were more heterogeneous forms [of building], there were multiple motivations and there were anomalies.” 

Shougang Iron and Steel Mill, Beijing (1959) Still from Intensity in Ten Cities (2025), a film by Wang Tuo commissioned by the CCA and M+, Hong Kong, 2025. CCA Collection © Wang Tuo

Overlooked history

“This is not a fast exhibition to go through,” warns Surya as she steps inside the CCA’s main gallery. “You’re going to see artworks, you’re going to see oral history, you’re going to see Wang Tuo’s films. It’s not a purely archival documentation. We also want to see how all of this matters today, because these places still exist.”

Set within a lively exhibition design by Los Angeles-based studio Johnston Marklee — bold colours and mirrored walls avoid any sort of dour academic atmosphere — How Modern is divided into three thematic sections. First, there’s “Agency,” which explores the role of designers and architects within collective systems and mass campaigns like the Great Leap Forward. “Industry” examines how architects responded to industrialisation in a command economy. Then there’s “Style,” which shows how the day-to-day reality of building in China was more diverse than the so-called “national style” imposed by Mao’s government. 

All of this comes to life through an eclectic array of objects, documents and other exhibits. Video interviews with architects like Zhu Guangya reveal the realities of working in an era that straddled collective ambition and ruthless politics. Surya’s research partner, Nanjing-based architectural historian Li Hua, managed to unearth extraordinary historical documents like photographs depicting the reconstruction of Tiananmen Square. Comics and newspaper clippings reveal surprisingly critical conversations about the meaning and significance of architecture; one cartoon seems to parody national style, while a page from a student journal reveals how young architects were actively engaged with what was being designed outside China’s closed borders. 

The specific buildings highlighted in the exhibition range from Beijing’s enormous Shougang Iron and Steel Mill, originally founded in 1919 but expanded significantly under Mao, to Dazhai, an agriculture commune in Shanxi built by farmers independently of the government, which was later upheld by Mao as an example to follow in the rest of the country. There’s also the Fusuijing apartment block in Beijing, built in 1960 using leftover materials from the Ten Great Buildings, which include the Great Hall of the People and the Workers’ Stadium. Its tumultuous history is recounted in a video interview with artist Zhang Wei: early utopian years of low rent and shared resources gave way to the harrowing decade of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, when the building became a kind of prison for its residents, many of whom had artistic or intellectual backgrounds that made them suspect to Mao’s regime.

Items from the M+ collection help flesh out these stories. There’s a somewhat mournful 2012 oil painting by Zhang, “Fusuijing Building, 1975,” plus other works of art from Hong Kong collector Johnson Chang; objects like a vintage Chinese television and tea flask give form to the ordinary lives of people who lived and worked in the buildings documented by the exhibition. 

Following visitors through the exhibition are clips from Wang Tuo’s film, Intensity in Ten Cities. It records architecture not as a documentary but as a work of fiction, with actors performing scenes in the buildings described in the exhibition. Presented in a non-linear way, it’s up to the viewer to piece together the film’s story, which follows a woman’s quest to understand the spaces that defined her mother’s generation. “There are so many dimensions to the films, we are still figuring it out as we watch them,” says Surya. 

The human element

The decision to commission a film emerged from Surya and Garutti’s discussions about how best to document the present-day realities of the structures in the exhibition. “We told Wang Tuo, ‘Just go to the sites and shoot what you want,’” says Surya. 

As Wang describes it, his goal was to convey the human significance of those places. “Architecture is not just space, architecture is time,” he says. “When we wetter architecture, it’s a chance to go back in history.” That’s especially significant as so much of China’s recent past remains politically contentious. “People cannot talk about it and young people cannot learn about it,” says Wang. And yet the physical spaces where those histories played out remain as silent witnesses.

There is plenty to interest the architectural scholar in How Modern, particularly Surya’s argument about architectural agency being as much a collective as an individual endeavour. As critic Christopher Hawthorne notes in his glowing review of the show, the exhibition even contains material that seems to disagree with Surya’s thesis, especially comments from University of Hong Kong architecture dean Yung Ho Chang, whose father was a Mao-era architect. (Chang points out that, for all the creativity that emerged at the time, architecture was ultimately at the mercy of political struggles, which continues to put a damper on a “more thoughtful” approach to design, even today.) “I wish more architecture shows would accommodate this kind of internal push and pull,” writes Hawthorne.

Fusuijing Apartment Building, Beijing (1960) Still from Intensity in Ten Cities (2025), a film by Wang Tuo commissioned by the CCA and M+, Hong Kong, 2025. CCA Collection © Wang Tuo

But for the more casual viewer — the architecture enthusiast rather than the architectural historian — it is Wang’s film and the variety of materials on display that give the exhibition a compelling human dimension. In that sense, it’s perhaps not surprising to learn that Surya’s interest in the topic was sparked by a very personal connection: her mother’s time living in 1960s Guangzhou. There, she joined other members of the diaspora in the Overseas Chinese Village, built in 1958 as lavish accommodations for ethnic Chinese “returnees” from 20 different countries, who had come to China to escape discrimination or hardship where they had been living, to help with the socialist nation-building project, or some combination of both. Surya’s mother had come from Indonesia and stayed until the Cultural Revolution. “She always told us stories about it,” she says. “It gave it a very human aspect.”

No Hong Kong show — but a book instead

How Modern runs at the CCA until April. Will it come to Hong Kong afterwards? CCA director Giovanna Borasi sounds hopeful that the show could one day make it to these shores. But Ikko Yokoyama, lead curator for architecture and design at M+, says there are no plans to host a reciprocal exhibition. “This is something that really fits the CCA,” she says, adding that it may not align with M+’s schedule for upcoming exhibitions.

There’s good news for those who can’t make their way to Montreal, however: How Modern is also being released as a book with “20 percent more material than in the exhibition,” notes Surya. It is not yet clear, however, whether the book will be available at the M+ bookshop.

Photo in slider; Former Sino-Soviet Friendship Building, Shanghai (1955), Still from Intensity in Ten Cities (2025), a film by Wang Tuo commissioned by the CCA and M+, Hong Kong, 2025. CCA Collection © Wang Tuo

How Modern: Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979 runs until 5 April 2026 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.