On April 25, 2024, Design Society of China Merchants Shekou and National Victoria and Albert Museum of the United Kingdom (V&A) jointly announced their cooperation on a new design award and entered into a collaboration agreement at the V&A Museum in London, the United Kingdom. The winning designs, as an important testament to the success of the collaboration, are scheduled to debut at Sea World Culture and Arts Center in late 2025. The V&A will also select some of the winning works to display at V&A South Kensington in London. The exhibitions will build a new platform for visionary art professionals, demonstrating to a broader audience how they harness creativity to build a more sustainable and humanistic future. Additionally, this initiative will open a new window for the exchange and communication between Chinese and global creative cultures.

As an integrated cultural and creative industry platform under China Merchants Shekou, Design Society is the only cultural institution in China founded in collaboration with the V&A, a world top-tier art, design, and performing arts museum. This collaboration forged a groundbreaking model of close partnership between domestic enterprises and international national museums, which brought together outstanding cultural and creative experts and industry leaders from home and abroad, delivering high-quality content and rich cultural experiences of international standards to audiences and offering a wealth of resources and inspiration for enhanced urban life.

The V&A is a family of museums dedicated to the power of creativity. It aims to promote creative entertainment in life, touch people’s hearts, enrich lives, broaden minds, and transform society. The V&A fully utilizes and shares the power of creativity through a series of exhibitions, events, educational projects, and digital experiences. It showcases its extensive collection of 2.8 million precious artifacts to the public, while focusing on the creation of new works, cultural heritage protection, research, and sustainable design efforts. The V&A presents a history of human creativity spanning five thousand years, promoting cultural understanding around the world and continuously inspiring designers, artisans, manufacturers, and innovators of today and the future.

As legal counsel for Design Society in this project, Zhong Lun Law Firm provided comprehensive legal services for the execution of the collaboration agreement, including reviewing, revising, and translating the agreement, assisting with commercial negotiation, and issuing legal opinion. The legal team for this project was led by partners Wayne Wang and Alan Xu, and included associates Nina Liu, Stephen Wong, Zixian Liu, Claire Wei, and Hailey Zhang.