China Art Museum

The museum's strength is a documented, roomed-out account of Chinese painting's own passage into modernity: the late Qing Shanghai School through to Republican-era and post-1949 art, with the Noted Painters gallery giving individual space to the artists most credited with either continuing that school (He Tianjian, Xie Zhiliu, Cheng Shifa) or breaking from it by fusing it with European modernism (Lin Fengmian, Guan Liang, Wu Guanzhong), plus the sculptor Hua Tianyou. It is a museum of modern and contemporary Chinese art specifically, not of Chinese antiquities (that is the Shanghai Museum, a different institution on People's Square) and not of purely contemporary art without the historical throughline (that is the Power Station of Art). Its single best-known holding is not, in the ordinary sense, an original object at all, but a large multimedia animation of a canonical Song-dynasty scroll, built for the building's earlier life as a world's fair pavilion.

The building that now holds the China Art Museum was not built to be a museum. It was raised as the China Pavilion of Expo 2010, the Shanghai World's Fair that ran from May to October 2010, and it was designed to be the largest national pavilion on the site and, by cost, the most expensive: construction ran from 18 December 2007 to inauguration on 8 February 2010, at an estimated cost of about 220 million US dollars. When the fair closed, the pavilion did not close with it. It reopened for a further six months from December 2010, and then, on 1 October 2012, China's National Day, it reopened permanently as the China Art Museum, with the collection of the former Shanghai Art Museum installed inside it. Nothing about the building was altered to disguise its origin: the plaza in front of it, the scale of its halls and the crowds it was built to move all still read as a fairground pavilion, because that is what it is.

The architect was He Jingtang, then director of the Architectural Academy at South China University of Technology, whose design was chosen from more than 300 entries submitted by Chinese architects for the pavilion commission. He Jingtang has described the building as an attempt at 'an abstract expression of China's 5,000 years of history and the culture of 56 ethnic groups', built from two much older forms: the dougong, the interlocking wooden roof bracket used in Chinese timber architecture for close to two thousand years, and the ding, the three- or four-legged bronze ceremonial vessel used by ancient rulers. The result is an inverted, stepped pyramid in seven distinct shades of red, cantilevered out over a lower base so that the building appears to widen as it rises; at 63 metres it was the tallest structure at the Expo, with a roof measuring 139.8 by 139.8 metres, and it earned the nickname 'the Crown of the East' or 'Oriental Crown' for its resemblance to an ancient ceremonial headdress. The whole structure has a gross floor area of 160,126 square metres, of which 43,904 square metres sit above ground and 2,553 square metres below it. Visitors reliably name the building itself, rather than any single object inside it, as the most memorable part of a visit.

The institution now housed in the former China Pavilion traces its own history back much further than the building does, to 1956, when it was founded as the Shanghai Art Museum, one of the first museums of any kind established in the People's Republic. Its first home was a converted restaurant, the 'Kang Le' establishment on Nanjing Xi Road, rebuilt as an exhibition hall on the same site in 1986. In 2000 the museum moved into a very different building at 325 Nanjing Xi Road: a former racecourse clubhouse designed in 1926 and completed in 1933 in an English classical style with eclectic touches, by the British firm Moorhead and Halse, and built by the Yu Hongji construction company. That building had already served, after 1949, as the premises of the Shanghai Museum and then the Shanghai Library before the art museum took it over in 2000, more than doubling its exhibition space to over 5,800 square metres. The museum stayed there for twelve years. Its move to the former China Pavilion in October 2012 was, by its own account, a move of a different order of magnitude: exhibition space grew again, by more than ten times, and the museum took a new name, China Art Museum, to go with its new building, while continuing to describe itself in Chinese as 'Shanghai Art Museum (China Art Museum)', the older and newer names run together.

The museum's core exhibition, The Bright Moon Rises from the Sea - Origin of Chinese Modern and Contemporary Art, occupies the 41-metre and 49-metre floors and runs to roughly 1,200 works across ten thematic units, organised into three historical periods: the late Qing dynasty and the rise of the Shanghai School of painting, the Republican era, and the People's Republic. Alongside it, a dedicated Exhibition for Noted Painters on the ground floor gives a room each to seven artists chosen to represent two strands of twentieth-century Chinese art: He Tianjian, Xie Zhiliu and Cheng Shifa for the continuation of the Shanghai School, Lin Fengmian, Guan Liang and Wu Guanzhong for the generation that deliberately fused Chinese ink painting with European modernism, and the sculptor Hua Tianyou as the collection's sole representative of modern Chinese sculpture. A further set of halls on the 33-metre floor is set aside for scroll and paper-based work, some of it the museum's own holdings and some of it loan exhibitions surveying named schools and generations of Chinese painting; what hangs there changes on its own schedule. The museum states its overall holdings at around 14,000 works, weighted toward Chinese art of the modern period; it does not hold, and does not present itself as holding, the antiquities collection of the unrelated Shanghai Museum across town, or the strictly contemporary programme of the Power Station of Art, a different institution again, on the opposite bank of the Huangpu.

The single work visitors mention most is not, strictly, a historical object at all. Hall 5 of the 49-metre floor houses a large-scale animated and lit adaptation of Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival, the Song-dynasty handscroll traditionally attributed to Zhang Zeduan depicting a day in the life of the Song capital, Kaifeng. The moving version was commissioned for the China Pavilion during Expo 2010, where it was one of the fair's most visited single exhibits, and it was kept in place when the building became a museum. Visitors describe watching the full day-to-night cycle, which can run close to two hours, as the centrepiece of a visit; unlike the museum's general collection, this installation typically carries its own separate ticket.

The museum's own account of a visit is blunt about its own size: a brisk pass through all 27 exhibition halls takes about two hours, and seeing the collection properly takes considerably longer. Visitor accounts bear this out and add two consistent complaints of their own. First, most wall text, object labels and gallery introductions are in Chinese only; some recent visitors note that QR codes at individual works link to translated text, but this is not universal. Second, while the permanent collection is free to enter, several of the museum's most talked-about attractions, including the digital Qingming scroll and major touring or loan exhibitions, are ticketed separately, which a number of visitors say was not made clear before they arrived expecting a fully free museum. Weekends are repeatedly described as very crowded, and more than one visitor recommends arriving on a weekday or securing tickets to popular temporary shows in advance.

Visitors are consistently struck by the building itself: even reviewers who found the art underwhelming call the red, cantilevered Oriental Crown one of the most memorable structures they saw in Shanghai. The animated Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival is named again and again as the one thing not to miss. Against that, the same visitors repeatedly flag that most labels and wall text are in Chinese only, that the building's real showpieces often carry a separate paid ticket even though general admission is free, that the museum is large enough to be genuinely tiring to cover in one visit, and that weekends bring crowds the museum's own reviewers call overwhelming.