Art museums are different from other types of museums, which are each bound by their own disciplinary or field perspectives. As noted in the introductory chapter, meishuguan and buowuguan are managed by two different administrative bodies in mainland China. Thus, before examining the practices that contemporary art museums engage in, this chapter will revisit the distinctive discourses and practices associated with art museums, their historical origins, and the transformations of their material, institutional, and contextual aspects, both in mainland China and Hong Kong. I shall focus on the history of art museums in China by reprising their changing roles and demonstrating how they have been locally transformed in response to the dynamic internal and external challenges of the country in different periods of time. The changes that have taken place in museum and cultural policies, art concepts, display practices, institutional structures, and contexts mean that the history of Chinese art museums has features that differ from what can be seen in the history of museums in the modern West. More importantly, they have been informed by a national and local need for creating public spaces to address the country's changing political, economic, and sociocultural conditions. In addition, Hong Kong, which was ceded to the British in 1841 before the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, offers another perspective to explore the disjuncture and differences found in the museum discourses of China; this is especially so after China resumed political sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997. It serves as a perfect test case for recontextualizing the complex relationship between national, local, and global, and for testifying how political, economic and social initiatives affect the cultural practices of a global city.