China's largest private museum opens in Shanghai

The Art Newspaper reports on the opening of the Long Museum's second space in Shanghai last month, now China's largest private museum, occuping 33,000 square metres. It houses a collection of top contemporary and classic art works and has been founded by collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei.

A last-minute rush of construction is common to new Chinese museums, but at the opening of the Long Museum’s second space in Shanghai, the final touches ahead of the launch on 28 March were only belied by a faint whiff of paint. The who's who of the Chinese art world turned out to see the collection of top contemporary and classic works, particularly a scroll of Song Dynasty calligraphy whose authenticity has been brought into question.

The branch in West Bund joins the original Long Museum in Pudong, which opened in December 2012; both are founded by the super-collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei. “My wife’s balls are bigger than mine—to get this done on time is a victory,” a happy Liu said at a press conference ahead of the opening.

The 33,000 sq. m building took just over a year to complete, and with 16,000 sq. m of exhibition space, it is now the largest private museum in China. It is part of the Xuhui Riverside development in the Puxi area, which already has the Chinese-Indonesian collector Budi Tek’s Yuz Museum and will soon house the Asian headquarters for the US film studio DreamWorks.

Wang Wei said that both branches of the Long Museum will host four shows each year, with Puxi being “more international and more focused on the future and possibilities”. Though initially envisioned as a Modern art museum in contrast to the mix of Chinese antiquities, Communist and contemporary art on display in the space in Pudong, the scope of the West Bund space has been adjusted to also include Western and Chinese classical art.

[.... read full article by Lisa Movius in The Art Newspaper... ]

Image: The Long Museum West Bund. Photo: 吴俊泽