The Museum of Migrant Worker Culture and Art 打工文化艺术博物馆, in Picun, on the outskirts of Beijing, will be demolished in the very near future, to make way for urban development. The Migrant Workers Home 工友之家, of which the Museum is a part, is organizing a get-together on May 20th to bid the Museum farewell. Here’s an announcement from the community, with beautiful single-shot video and beautiful, carefully paced voice-over by someone who sounds like they are poet Xiao Hai 小海: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/FJ7P9LMwcWInU2hk2dclrw
The Picun Museum of Migrant Worker Culture and Art. Source.
Founded in 2008, the Museum has been a unique monument to migrant worker culture, produced by migrant workers for migrant workers (while welcoming others as well) to document and reflect on the migrant worker experience. The announcement mentioned above says it has seen over 50.000 visitors over the years.
The Museum is a shining example of the cultural education 文化教育 that is a key element of the Home’s mission to advance migrant worker rights (other designations of this social group include “new workers” 新工人 and “battlers” 打工者). Alongside achievements in music, literature, theater, digital video, and so on, it embodies the rich and complex force field in which migrant worker culture emerges: socioeconomic insecurity, political constraints, class-based hierarchies of aesthetics, DIY infrastructure, media interest propelled by a mix of social concern and engagement with voyeurism and othering.
Member of the Migrant Workers Home said in personal communication that they are considering ways of salvaging the Museum’s holdings and securing safe storage and possibly new exhibition venues in future.
The Museum’s imminent closure and demolition throws the Home’s mission statement into sharp relief: “Without our culture, we have no history. Without our history, we have no future” 没有我们的文化，就没有我们的历史。没有我们的历史，就没有我们的未来.
There is plentiful Chinese-language material on the museum. Here’s a Baidu search, for starters: https://edu.nl/vnxv7
For material in English, see the Migrant Workers and Subalternity theme on the MCLC Resource Center at https://u.osu.edu/mclc/bibliographies/lit/theme-1/#MWS: e.g. He & Sexton 2008, Thelle 2013, Lian & Oliver 2018, Qiu & Wang 2018, van Crevel 2019, Qian & Florence 2020.
Maghiel van Crevel