Time travel is verboten!

Expanding on my current China theme:
This article (via BoingBoing) gives background on an impending official ban by China´s General Bureau of Radio, Film and Television on the production of a genre that has increased in popularity recently: time-travel . 
In these fictions the main characters find themselves transported from the contemporary to an era of China´s historical grandeur. 
A nostalgia for such imagined pasts is perceived as reactionary and disrespective of history by the authorities.

Culture Shock between the contemporary and the historic.
Image: still from the television series Shen Hua (Myth)

museum boom in China

China National Film Museum founded 2005, the world´s largest professional museum (not counting ecomuseum-regions)- with an architectural space of 38,000 sqm
image source: wikimedia commons Carla Antonini

China´s cultural infrastructures are under vigorous development- but what concepts of heritage and culture does the Chinese state want to establish and support?

"China´s New Age of Enlightenment" - from an article in the Art Newspaper:

"As of 2009 there were 3,020 museums in China, including 328 private museums (the American Association of Museums estimates 17,500 in the US). One hundred new museums are being added each year. In March the government made entry to museums of modern and contemporary art free. The torrid pace of museum development is part of a national drive to build cultural infrastructure and, as Cai Wu, the minister of culture, put it earlier this year in a published comment, “to establish a batch of world-famous cultural brands.”

“The next ten years should be a golden period for the development of every aspect of cultural industries in China,” said Ye Lang. “The country isn’t just satisfied with the economic achievements it had made,” the Xinhua news agency announced in January. “What it now needs is all-round cultural influence on an international scale.” The government backs these ambitions with a cultural outlay of $4.45bn in 2009, excluding construction costs."

link to article

Hypothetical adaptive re-use

Artist collective the Hypothetical Development Organisation, "dedicated to the recognition and extension of a new form of urban storytelling", has developed alternative perspectives towards the re-use of abandoned structures. Ten abandoned buildings in New Orleans were given hypothetical futures, "not bound by rules relating to commercial potential, practical materials, or physics". In accordance to their motto, "You won´t believe our plans!",  among the suggested developments have been a Loitering Centre, a Rubble Depot and an Authenticity Monument of a building in disrepair, to be conserved "as found".

Museum of the Self.
Image: screenshot Hypothetical Development Organization

To quote Architizer: 
"A brilliant way for architects to use those $100K rendering skills to actually do something with some impact on a community, besides warning people about the fresh hell their neighborhood is about to go through with the construction of that new 57-story tower."
Read more on their New Orleans development projects- link