The Long Museum is the the last of the museums we visited during a recent trip to Shanghai. Established by collector Wang Wei and her billionaire husband Liu Yiquan, it is the largest privately-owned museum in China, spanning over 33,000 square metres with 16,000 square metres of exhibition space.
The museum has adopted a novel approach to programming. Rather than appointing curators, well-known domestic and foreign curators are invited to work with an in-house academic department to develop concepts into exhibitions. The concept for the current exhibition, About 1199 People (which was being installed while we were there), was developed by artist Xu Zhen with Hans Ulrich Obrist. Xu selected the works (all from the Long Museum collection) and he and Obrist will discuss the exhibition and related topics in conversations to be published in the exhibition catalogue.
While we didn't see About 1199 People, we did visit the galleries dedicated to museum's exceptional collection of traditional Chinese art, which along with the striking architecture and gigantic, vaulted spaces for contemporary art makes it one of Shanghai's must-see art museums.
Images: Long Museum (West Bund) interior; Lv Ji, Ming Dynasty, 168.6 x 97cm (detail); Song Huizong, Northern Song Dynasty, ink on paper, 27.5 x 525cm
