Art Review Ltd and Modern Media Holdings Ltd are pleased to announce the acquisition of a majority shareholding in ArtReview, ArtReview Asia and artreview.com by Modern Media, China’s leading high-end communications group. As a result, ArtReview, ArtReview Asia and artreview.com will join a multimedia publishing organisation that includes The Art Newspaper China, LEAP, Modern Weekly, Nowness and Numéro, among other titles, and a group that can bring the magazines’ content to new platforms and new audiences worldwide.
The magazines will continue to operate out of their London headquarters and regional offices. Announcing the acquisition, Thomas Shao, chair and founder of Modern Media Holdings Ltd, said: ‘Modern Media’s art platform (Modern Art) lives by the motto “Integrate Art into Life and Rebuild Society with Art”. This is a philosophy we share with ArtReview, giving me high hopes and great confidence for our future together. Modern Media will consolidate its diverse resources: its brand network, funding streams, technology infrastructure and marketing clout, to support ArtReview and ArtReview Asia’s development, focusing especially on the expansion of digital and data platforms. Together we will also continue ArtReview’s innovation into live events and cross-regional and interdisciplinary fields of collaboration.’
‘ArtReview has a long and important history in the shaping of twentieth and now twenty-first-century art history,’ said Dennis Hotz, former chairman and, with Debbie Hotz, former sole shareholder of Art Review Ltd. ‘In recent years it has expanded into a global brand, leading the way in style, voice, opinion and design, including innovative new products such as the influential Power 100 ranking of the key individuals driving the contemporary artworld, and ArtReview Asia, which offers specialist coverage of the dynamic Asian art scene and an alternative perspective on the history of contemporary art. Modern Media, a company that has art and the creative industries at its heart, is ideally placed to build on the achievements and heritage of the magazines and take ArtReview and ArtReview Asia forward to engage with an increasingly globalised, multiplatform and fast-moving artworld.’
About ArtReview
ArtReview was founded in 1949 with the belief that art had a vital role – in terms of imagining new futures and alternative presents, and reinterpreting the past – to play in rebuilding civic society in a postwar and increasingly postcolonial world. The magazine aims to ensure that art and the discourses that surround it are accessible to the widest audience possible. For the past 70 years it has facilitated a multilateral dialogue between artists, audiences and the thinkers who have shaped art’s history: from Henri Matisse to Hito Steyerl, and from Clement Greenberg to Nicolas Bourriaud. From Pop art to institutional critique, many of the contemporary scene’s best-known movements were given a voice (often for the first time) within the pages of ArtReview.
About ArtReview Asia
In 2013 ArtReview Asia was founded on a similar philosophy aimed, during the rise of globalisation and the rapid expansion of contemporary art in Asia, at developing a history of contemporary art as viewed from this new and distinct perspective, one that is increasingly tied to more global contemporary issues of identity, culture and belonging. It seeks to explore and uncover the specific contexts from which art throughout the continent emerges, looking at art in relation to different or overlapping cultures, and more broadly, at histories and forms of expression that are often overlooked or marginalised in traditional Western publications.
About Modern Media
Modern Media, founded by Thomas Shao in 1993, has become a leading, innovative, high-end media group with a global perspective. The company has been listed on HKEX since 2009.
Modern Media owns various types of media platforms in the fields of business, culture, art, fashion and lifestyle. It has established several high-profile publications, including Modern Weekly, Life Magazine and City Magazine, among others. In the meantime, in partnership with many influential international media groups, such as Bloomberg News and Time Inc in the US, Numéro Presse SAS, IDEAT in France and The Art Newspaper in the UK, Modern Media co-publishes the Chinese versions of Bloomberg Businessweek, InStyle, Numéro, IDEAT, The Art Newspaper.
With its premium creative content and digital technology, Modern Media has vigorously ventured into digital publishing in recent years. In 2017, Modern Media acquired Nowness, the world’s leading creative digital video platform.
As a multimedia and multi-interface platform, Modern Media has also established creative space and art studios such as ZiWU and Modern Eye, thus becoming the first media group that operates in the realms of publishing, digital technology and art space in China.
Modern Media is an active player on the frontier of art in China and globally. It is the most committed art media publishing platform in China, and has launched in-depth collaborations with internationally renowned art institutions. Published in Chinese, English and French, LEAP, founded by Modern Media, is the only Chinese contemporary art publication distributed internationally. The Art Newspaper China was established in 2013, co-created by Modern Media and Umberto Allemandi & Co.
Modern Media has established a strategic cooperation with Britain’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the world’s largest museum of applied and decorative arts and design, and is a key sponsor of the Modern Media Gallery, in the V&A’s Photography Centre, which opened in 2018. Modern Media serves as an international platform for cultural and artistic exchange to build connections and dialogues between China and the world.
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