Managing cultural assets starts with a head count

Many of these new art museums and galleries have enriched their city's skyline with an extravagant coating but overlook their biggest problem-an empty storehouse. The well-established museums, on the other hand, boast abundant collections but only a small fraction is accessible to the public.

To solve the imbalanced distribution of collections, well-established museums, mostly located in Beijing and Shanghai, would display their collections in provincial- and city-level museums.

The National Art Museum of China, for example, loaned about 5,000 works from its storage of 110,000 items to other museums across the country last year. A landmark work of China's modern art history, Luo Zhongli's Father travels so frequently to boost the image of newly opened museums in second- and third-tier cities that the NAMOC finds it impossible to exhibit the oil painting as a permanent display.

The constant tours also put the artworks on loan at risk of damage.

Apart from the exterior of the building, visitors distinguish one museum from another based on their collections and academic features, says NAMOC's director Fan Di'an.

"The census will give a boost to academic researchers at museums with affluent collections and help them to reinvent permanent display," he says.

"It will also help new museums outline a sensible collection plan."

The data will be helpful information when the government drafts policies related to the State's art collection, not just in terms of increasing financial input.

Fan says the census will help balance the distribution of private artworks with the public collection system, so that they are not highly concentrated in only one or two museums.