Joining the ever-growing list of new museums opening across the People’s Republic of China, the Mu Xin Art Museum is just as astounding on the outside as it is on the inside.
Opening to great fanfare and anticipation on November 15 was the mesmerizing Mu Xin Art Museum at the historical scenic water town of Wuzhen in the Zhejiang Province. Designed by OLI Architecture PLLC. in New York City, the 72,000-plus-square-foot museum is an artwork in itself. Named after Mu Xin — a jailed Chinese intellectual who passed away in 2011 — the museum will “feature a combination of permanent and temporary exhibitions aimed at documenting the life and work of Mu Xin, as well as other artists’ and thinkers’ influence on his work,” the Jing Daily reports. “The current exhibits feature around 100 paintings and 50 manuscripts that were created throughout his life, selected from more than 600 paintings and 1,000 manuscripts left by him. The first two temporary exhibits explore the impacts of Friedrich Nietzsche and Chinese artist Lin Fengmian on his writings and paintings, bringing Nietzsche’s manuscripts to China for the first time.
“Mu Xin held a great reverence for the Chinese landscape painting tradition, and believed that ‘Northern Song Chinese painting reached a peak that resembles the great achievement of symphonic music in the West,’ says Toming Jun Liu, a professor in the Department of English at California State University who published a collection of English translations of Mu Xin’s “Prison Notes.” ‘His landscape painting has very naturally merged Eastern and Western modernist styles.’”
To learn more, visit ArtNet or OLI Architecture.
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