JD.com Bets on Art With an Ambitious New Museum in Shenzhen

Shenzhen has historically been associated with innovation, emerging as it did from an unusually open encounter between East and West. Established as a Special Economic Zone in 1980 and located near Hong Kong, the city served as an experimental interface between socialist planning and capitalist market logic—a relentless engine of production defined by technological advancement, rapid iteration and large-scale implementation, as well as a testing ground where global cultural forms were subjected to extreme conditions of speed, density and technological proximity. Consequently, since at least the 1990s, Shenzhen’s markedly progressive music and art scene has reflected its broader role as a bridge between geographies shaped by global cultural flows.

This trajectory makes Shenzhen a particularly compelling site for a new museum dedicated to art and technology. Announced today (Jan. 20) and slated to open in late 2027, the new JD Museum aims to carve out a niche in contemporary visual and performing arts. Backed by the Chinese e-commerce and technology giant jd.com, the museum will be housed in the company’s new headquarters at the Shenzhen Bay Super Headquarters Base. The building itself—designed by Büro Ole Scheeren and described as a “Scenic City,” with spatial design by Neri&Hu Design and Research Office—embodies a promise of innovation with future-oriented aesthetics.

JD.com’s operations span retail, logistics, technology, healthcare, industrial services, property development and international markets. Rooted in JD.com’s mission of “Making Lives Better through Technology,” the namesake museum’s program will explore creative and imaginative possibilities at the intersection of art and technology, making it one of the first major examples of a technology firm investing in a cultural institution with a tech-forward mission.

“Our focus is on technology, a digital world that is mediated by embodied human experience,” Robin Peckham, who recently left his role as co-director of Taipei Dangdai Art & Ideas to become executive director of JD Museum, told Observer. In the past, Peckham has organized exhibitions on art, technology and popular culture for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, the Fosun Foundation and the K11 Art Foundation.

When asked about the museum’s programming, Peckham said that while the museum will host the kind of immersive exhibitions typically associated with art and technology, it will also explore how traditional crafts are carried forward in contemporary contexts and how the human body both generates and responds to performance-based environments. Dedicated facilities for these different approaches are already in the works, he added, in a 10,000-square-meter complex that will include spaces for live performance, immersive installations, exhibitions, participatory workshops and creative retail.

Embracing art as an inherently cross-disciplinary experience, JD Museum will address some of today’s most pressing issues—technology, ecology and urbanism—through a balance of technological inquiry and tactile human experience, to become a living laboratory for envisioning, reimagining and reengineering new solutions.

The museum’s first public initiative, “Unboxing JD Museum,” will launch in 2026 ahead of the institution’s official opening. Conceived as a “community art initiative,” it will take the form of pop-up workshops and exhibitions using JD.com’s iconic delivery boxes as both material and framework, inviting creative contributions from artists, curators, architects and the broader JD.com community, including employees and their families and friends.

“Technology has become one of the shaping forces throughout society today, as a consumer or as a producer, in China or in the West. This is something that art can engage with on many levels: as a tool, of course, but also as a horizon,” Peckham reflected. “Our intention is to think through all of this critically, offering a window into what our futures might look like by bridging the discourses of contemporary art, digital culture and new media and the tech industry,” he added. The vision is to make JD Museum a platform for conversation, speculation and experience on the most important intersection that is shaping our daily and future lives.”

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