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Four exhibitions celebrate opening of the country's largest art museum
By Xu Wenwen |
August 26, 2009, Wednesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
AT 138 Nanshan Road, Zhejiang Art Museum has the poetic West Lake in front and Mt Yuhuang (Jade Emperor) behind.
The museum opened in Hangzhou last week and visitors can appreciate the collections with free entry until September 26.
Designed by Cheng Taining, one of China's master architects, the museum is in the style of a local ethnic building.
"The key question I considered was the environment. I hope it looks like it is growing in the environment more than being an abrupt thing," Cheng told a local newspaper.
Cheng has made the profile of the museum's sloping roofs to echo a range of mountains and utilized glass to give a translucent impression like a Chinese ink-wash painting. "The sloping ceiling can be seen as a sculpture of glass, steel and stone," he told the newspaper.
With a total area of more than 35,000 square meters, the building is the biggest art museum in China. The 14 exhibition halls will take visitors roughly three hours to stroll around.
The first four exhibitions - "Parade of Obsessions," an exhibition of Joan Miro's artworks, "Looking Back to the History in Zhejiang Province," "National Glamor in China - Arts of Huang Binhong" and "Arts of Chakwan Lu (Lu Xiaguang)" - are underway until September 26.
Already there's a waiting list of future exhibitions which will keep the museum busy until next June.
The museum is highlighting two of Miro's works - "Woman and Birds" and "Woman by the Moon."
Miro (1893-1983), a master painter of the 20th century, is one of the great geniuses of surrealism. His art does not lie in his portraiture, painting or structure, but in the humorous fantasy expressed in his works.
Miro created his own vivid fantasy world, in which the organisms, wild animals and even inanimate objects under his brush all have a dynamic passion, seemingly making us feel more than we can see in the real world.
As said on the museum's poster - "Woman and Birds" is a representative work of Miro's: thick lines crossing and entangling; red, yellow, blue, white and green colors interweaving; a large block of black color lying at the bottom, all of which exert a tremendous visual impact.
Museum official Yan Fei comments: "This is Miro's eternal topic. It seems all elements exist for the black. The black is a lovely woman's portrait, a scarf, and are affectionate eyes as well as some flying birds surrounding the woman.
"But everyone has a different Miro in his or her own eyes, therefore we didn't attach any explanation or comments on his works," says Yan.
"Woman by the Moon" depicts a green moon and an abstract female image.
"Miro thinks moonlight is green as it shines on trees," explains Yin Shula, a museum official and also an artist. "The image of woman is like a Chinese character and actually is written in Chinese ink, infusing the work with an Oriental feeling."
The wheat-colored paper of the artwork is wrinkled, full of fibers and with rough edges.
"The rough paper is like original paper from the Orient, while the paint is modern acrylic. The painting combines the modern and the ancient, West and East," says Yin.
"Usually we decorate the paper with smooth edges and surface after the painting's done, however this work enlightened us to wonder if we really need to act like this," Yin says.
The Huang Binhong exhibition displays his traditional Chinese paintings of mountains and waters, flowers and birds, and his calligraphy.
Chakwan Lu's exhibition shows his 178-piece personal collection that has been donated to the museum, including pottery, bronze works, lacquer work, calligraphy and paintings from home and abroad.
The painting series "Looking Back to the History in Zhejiang Province" is much bigger than any in the other collections, so some of them are put in the 8.5-meter-high exhibition hall which extends through the second and third floors, and will be used to exhibit larger works.
To protect those large artworks, Zhejiang Art Museum has put them in wooden frames fixed on the walls rather than hanging them in the usual manner.
The walls are composed of six layers of cork so that nails and screws can be removed easily and the hole on the wall return to its former state, according to the museum's vice director, Si Shunwei.
You may feel a bit cool when wandering around the museum - the temperature is kept below 25 degrees Celsius to protect certain delicate and sensitive artworks. The paper works of Miro, for example, require a temperature of between 18 and 22 degrees Celsius.
To ensure the safety of the works, the museum has spent more than 7 million yuan (US$1 million) on 27 Glasbau Hahn display cases which control temperature and humidity. The largest one is 55.5 meters long and 4 meters high and took eight German workers more than a month to make.
Such high-tech cases have been used to protect antiques, relics and even mummies in Egypt, but the Zhejiang Art Museum is the first to use them in China.
It was no wonder that when the representative from the Miro Foundation in Barcelona visited the Zhejiang Art Museum, he was amazed at the new building and thought highly of it as one of the top, even compared with European museums.
Zhejiang Art museum has about 10,000 square meters of public facility space which includes a bookstore, cafe, an art documentation center and children art world so that kids can paint under the instruction of professionals.
The museum opened in Hangzhou last week and visitors can appreciate the collections with free entry until September 26.
Designed by Cheng Taining, one of China's master architects, the museum is in the style of a local ethnic building.
"The key question I considered was the environment. I hope it looks like it is growing in the environment more than being an abrupt thing," Cheng told a local newspaper.
Cheng has made the profile of the museum's sloping roofs to echo a range of mountains and utilized glass to give a translucent impression like a Chinese ink-wash painting. "The sloping ceiling can be seen as a sculpture of glass, steel and stone," he told the newspaper.
With a total area of more than 35,000 square meters, the building is the biggest art museum in China. The 14 exhibition halls will take visitors roughly three hours to stroll around.
The first four exhibitions - "Parade of Obsessions," an exhibition of Joan Miro's artworks, "Looking Back to the History in Zhejiang Province," "National Glamor in China - Arts of Huang Binhong" and "Arts of Chakwan Lu (Lu Xiaguang)" - are underway until September 26.
Already there's a waiting list of future exhibitions which will keep the museum busy until next June.
The museum is highlighting two of Miro's works - "Woman and Birds" and "Woman by the Moon."
Miro (1893-1983), a master painter of the 20th century, is one of the great geniuses of surrealism. His art does not lie in his portraiture, painting or structure, but in the humorous fantasy expressed in his works.
Miro created his own vivid fantasy world, in which the organisms, wild animals and even inanimate objects under his brush all have a dynamic passion, seemingly making us feel more than we can see in the real world.
As said on the museum's poster - "Woman and Birds" is a representative work of Miro's: thick lines crossing and entangling; red, yellow, blue, white and green colors interweaving; a large block of black color lying at the bottom, all of which exert a tremendous visual impact.
Museum official Yan Fei comments: "This is Miro's eternal topic. It seems all elements exist for the black. The black is a lovely woman's portrait, a scarf, and are affectionate eyes as well as some flying birds surrounding the woman.
"But everyone has a different Miro in his or her own eyes, therefore we didn't attach any explanation or comments on his works," says Yan.
"Woman by the Moon" depicts a green moon and an abstract female image.
"Miro thinks moonlight is green as it shines on trees," explains Yin Shula, a museum official and also an artist. "The image of woman is like a Chinese character and actually is written in Chinese ink, infusing the work with an Oriental feeling."
The wheat-colored paper of the artwork is wrinkled, full of fibers and with rough edges.
"The rough paper is like original paper from the Orient, while the paint is modern acrylic. The painting combines the modern and the ancient, West and East," says Yin.
"Usually we decorate the paper with smooth edges and surface after the painting's done, however this work enlightened us to wonder if we really need to act like this," Yin says.
The Huang Binhong exhibition displays his traditional Chinese paintings of mountains and waters, flowers and birds, and his calligraphy.
Chakwan Lu's exhibition shows his 178-piece personal collection that has been donated to the museum, including pottery, bronze works, lacquer work, calligraphy and paintings from home and abroad.
The painting series "Looking Back to the History in Zhejiang Province" is much bigger than any in the other collections, so some of them are put in the 8.5-meter-high exhibition hall which extends through the second and third floors, and will be used to exhibit larger works.
To protect those large artworks, Zhejiang Art Museum has put them in wooden frames fixed on the walls rather than hanging them in the usual manner.
The walls are composed of six layers of cork so that nails and screws can be removed easily and the hole on the wall return to its former state, according to the museum's vice director, Si Shunwei.
You may feel a bit cool when wandering around the museum - the temperature is kept below 25 degrees Celsius to protect certain delicate and sensitive artworks. The paper works of Miro, for example, require a temperature of between 18 and 22 degrees Celsius.
To ensure the safety of the works, the museum has spent more than 7 million yuan (US$1 million) on 27 Glasbau Hahn display cases which control temperature and humidity. The largest one is 55.5 meters long and 4 meters high and took eight German workers more than a month to make.
Such high-tech cases have been used to protect antiques, relics and even mummies in Egypt, but the Zhejiang Art Museum is the first to use them in China.
It was no wonder that when the representative from the Miro Foundation in Barcelona visited the Zhejiang Art Museum, he was amazed at the new building and thought highly of it as one of the top, even compared with European museums.
Zhejiang Art museum has about 10,000 square meters of public facility space which includes a bookstore, cafe, an art documentation center and children art world so that kids can paint under the instruction of professionals.
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