The partnership continues to foster dialogue, innovation, and creative exchange - with the V&A contributing its experience and collections. Through exhibitions, educational programmes, and projects - including the newly launched Design Values Award - this partnership explores how design shapes contemporary society and inspires sustainable futures. It serves as a platform for global perspectives in design, encouraging engagement amongst designers, artists, and audiences.
Design Values Award
The Design Values Award is a newly launched international award celebrating contemporary Chinese design. Established in 2024 through a collaboration between the V&A Museum in London and Design Society in Shenzhen, the award celebrates outstanding work across Architecture and Environmental Design, Fashion and Textile Design, Product Design, Visual Communication Design, and Interactive Design.
Prioritising sustainable development, cultural dialogue, and quality of life, the award offers a global platform for innovative designers to shape and inspire the future of design. This biannual award reflects an ongoing commitment to excellence and cultural exchange.
Values of Design: China in the Making
On 18 January 2020, Values of Design: China in the Making opened at the V&A Gallery at Design Society. It is the first exhibition in China to explore the growing field of Chinese design and the first to attempt to understand how changing and evolving values are helping to shape what we design, produce and consume. Initiated and curated by Design Society, in collaboration with the V&A, the exhibition continues the success of the institutions’ long-term partnership. This exhibition is a follow-up to Values of Design, the inaugural V&A Gallery exhibition produced by the V&A in collaboration with Design Society in 2017.
Values of Design
The initial Values of Design exhibition, that opened in December 2017, presented more than 250 objects drawn from the V&A’s extensive permanent collection. It offered local audiences a unique opportunity to explore the historical and geographical diversity of its objects, while exploring critical issues about design. The exhibition touched on and highlighted some of the most important design movements from the past, providing a global perspective.
Research in action
Southern China is one of the fastest growing design and technology hubs in the world. Across the Greater Bay Area, cities like Shenzhen have fostered a vast manufacturing ecosystem to respond to global demand. Today a decisive shift is occurring, as entrepreneurs, designers, and policymakers seek to take that manufacturing infrastructure and know-how, cultivated over the years, and turn it into a robust design economy. In 2008, Shenzhen was designated a UNESCO City of Design, explicitly signalling its ambition to compete with other design capitals around the world.
Since the project was initiated in 2014, the V&A has worked extensively in close collaboration with Design Society to build a local network and engage with creative practices, museum professionals, educators and the wider community.
As part of its research activity, the V&A presented the exhibition Unidentified Acts of Design at the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale (UABB) in 2015. Unidentified Acts of Design profiled a series of cases where design plays out in the region, outside of the conventional designer studio. Each of the cases built on the region's unique eco-system of rapid growth, bounding ambition, and easy access to supplies and know-how.
The exhibition also featured at the V&A as part of London Design Festival in 2016.
The V&A's Chinese Art and Design Collection
The V&A houses one of the most comprehensive collections of Chinese art and design outside East Asia, with objects dating from 3000 BC to the present day. Highlights range from rare historical pieces made in the Ming and Qing dynasties, to contemporary design works acquired during the museum's ground-breaking exhibition project China Design Now (2008).
The V&A acquired its first group of Chinese objects in 1852. Today, the collection holds approximately 18,000 objects, encompassing all branches of Chinese art, including ceramics, jade, metalwork, lacquer, textiles, furniture, sculpture, ivory, bamboo, rhinoceros horn, glass, paintings, manuscripts, and prints. Visitors can view this exceptional collection in the T.T. Tsui Gallery (China Gallery, Room 44) at the V&A South Kensington in London, and explore images of the collection online via the Museum's database, Explore the Collections.
The rich artistic achievements of Chinese culture in art, craft, and design are reflected in the work of many contemporary practitioners worldwide, continuing a legacy of inspiration and innovation.