What’s Happening: With more than a billion monthly users around the world, art-world institutions are flocking to China’s all-encompassing “super-app” WeChat. But the country’s predilection for surveillance and censorship is raising security concerns.

The Download: If you have any relation to China, chances are you’re on WeChat. With more than one billion active monthly users, the world’s largest standalone mobile app combines instant messaging, social media, payments, news sources, and search engines into an indispensable digital tool for millions in China. It’s so crucial to communication that when former president Trump considered banning Apple and Google’s app stores from distributing WeChat in 2020, some Chinese immigrants feared they wouldn’t know how to check in with their families. “Everything is about WeChat,” Frances He, an Angeleno who uses the app to speak with her brother in China, told USA Today. “It’s the only way we communicate.”

For artists, galleries, and museums, WeChat is becoming a crucial way to build an audience. Even before pandemic isolation forced the technology-averse art market to embrace virtual viewing rooms and NFTs, Blum & Poe, Perrotin, and David Zwirner were experimenting with WeChat’s manifold features to connect with potential buyers. Dealers say the app has been useful in reaching deep-pocketed Gen Z and millennial collectors—a hybrid generation dubbed “MZers” in South Korea—who were willing to test the waters of the art market during the pandemic and gained curiosity for contemporary art after exploring fashion drops and luxury collectibles.

Most galleries use WeChat to send news announcements to their followers, but some are getting more creative. According to an ARTnews report, the Swiss mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth is live-streaming exhibition walkthroughs and artist conversations. Videos of gallery tours featuring works by William Kentridge and Annie Leibovitz, for example, garnered 14,000 views apiece. David Zwirner found that WeChat features like live chatting can help facilitate e-commerce. A virtual presentation of Oscar Murillo paintings (pictured) resonated with Chinese viewers, selling for up to $350,000 each. WeChat also lets galleries learn key demographic information about their followers such as gender, age, and region.

During the pandemic, when galleries were closed and WeChat faced a stateside ban, the American Alliance of Museums sprung to the app’s defense. The year before, WeChat had promoted virtual tours of nearly a dozen institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, which saw a sharp increase in attendance from Chinese tourists after reopening in 2019. Building a presence on networks like WeChat and TikTok is a boon to cultural institutions, but most lack the resources to experiment on the platforms. JiaJia Fei, a digital media strategist in the arts, cited the “unpredictability of whether or not content will be accessible in the future” as a potential pitfall for cash-strapped museums if there’s a ban.

Casting doubt over WeChat’s feasibility is China’s propensity toward censorship and propaganda. As the app becomes more popular around the world, the global reach of China’s surveillance methods is expanding. WeChat recently banned users who shared images of a pro-democracy protest in Beijing. Chinese tech companies are storing vast amounts of data from foreign users—including millions of WeChat conversations—in a database connected to public security agencies. “The intention of keeping people safe by building these systems goes out the window the moment you don’t secure them at all,” Victor Gevers, co-founder of the nonprofit GDI Foundation, an open-source data security collective, told NPR.

In Their Own Words: “With all technology, it’s always up to each individual to choose their level of information sharing,” Elena Soboleva, David Zwirner’s global head of online sales, told ARTnews. “The best thing to do is be informed and aware of all apps.”

Surface Says: As the social media landscape moves to a place where content is continuously buried under inscrutable algorithms and users will soon be asked to pay to stay verified, exploring the possibilities of WeChat could be a strategic move to build a new audience.

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“I’ve been really lucky to breathe some life back into what was a very iconic spot here on Broadway,” says Jack Logue, food and beverage director at The Lambs Club. Housed inside a Stanford White–designed building, the original Lambs Club was born more than 70 years ago when a few theatergoers wanted a safe haven for some food and nightlife after their shows. After shuttering during the pandemic, the restaurant has returned to its former glory with James Beard award–winning chef Michael White taking the reins in a triumphant return to the New York City dining scene after parting ways with Altamarea Group in 2021.

With the backing of new owner David Rabin, the restaurateur behind Grand Tour Hospitality (American Bar, Saint Theo’s), White and Logue stay true to the American menu regulars have come to love while putting their own spin on it. Seasonality anchors dishes such as Montauk fluke crudo; scallops with sweet corn succotash, bacon, red bell pepper sauce; and one of the city’s best new burgers topped with gruyère, pickled onion, and an elevated rendition of Big Mac sauce.

The inimitable dining room, designed by Thierry Despont, retains its signature Art Deco touches, red leather upholstery, and a centerpiece fireplace. “It’s literally lined with the faces of people who were part of the original Lambs, like Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim,” Logue says. “If you look around, you realize those people were in these doors having the same experiences we are now giving.”

Over the past decade, while Oliver Haslegrave was busy establishing his Brooklyn design practice, Home Studios, as a go-to firm for crafting some of New York’s most cult-favorite bars and restaurants, the former fiction editor was taking exploratory trips to Greece. They were a necessary reprieve—Haslegrave spent day and night building out every aspect of the influential studio’s interior projects by hand. On recent trips to the remote Cycladic Island of Andros, he returned to his roots as a storyteller by crafting a six-piece chair collection packed with personality yet steeped in the traditions of their locales.

“Just as taking a portrait can reveal one’s inner dimension, building a chair can suggest a story of time and place that goes far beyond its most basic function and utility,” Haslegrave says of the six wooden chairs, whose distinct forms reflect an imagined inner life. Each piece pays homage to an area he explored in Andros—Amos, Chora, and Vitali among them—and draws from the magical realism of mythology, the placid lull of Aegean waves, and ancient Cycladic figurines. “My earliest interests were making, collage, portraits, and storytelling,” he says. “In creating these works, I’m able to combine all of those aspects of my life.”

Deeply inspired by H.R. Giger’s biomechanical visuals and sci-fi world-building, William Guillon hand-sculpts one-of-a-kind bronze lighting and accessories infused with drama, darkness, and romanticism that wouldn’t look out of place in a gothic mansion. The Bordeaux-based talent’s latest collection, a highly textural range of white bronze vases, bowls, candlesticks, and other curiosities called Omnia Vanitas (“All Is Vanity”), reckons with existential questions around impermanence and the passage of time. As he puts it: “All I want is to escape from reality.”

When: Until Nov. 30

Where: Aedes Architecture Forum, Berlin

What: Showcasing architectural models and photographs of buildings completed since Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu founded their Shanghai-based studio nearly two decades ago, “Reflective Nostalgia” highlights a theme that has long underpinned the practice. Instead of offering a single design style, the firm responds to the singular conditions of each place. “It represents our obsessions in response to the conditions of the city we live in,” Neri says. “Issues of dwelling, public and private, interiority, recasting what we conceive as vernacular, nostalgia or a lack of it, and how we deal with history and objects.”

​For the past two years, those passing through Paris’s fashionable rue de la Paix may have noticed something amiss along the street’s elegant sandstone buildings. Where Louis-François Cartier opened his namesake jeweler’s Parisian branch inside a Neoclassical-style facade clad in black and gold Portoro marble, passersby were actually looking at a simulacrum. The maison mounted a trompe-l’œil storefront while its history-laden flagship underwent a top-to-bottom makeover that honors its Parisian roots and forges an inviting atmosphere, a redesign that CEO Cyrille Vigneron describes as “a metamorphosis, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly by recomposing the same molecules in a new way.”

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