China Art Museum, Shanghai

The China Art Museum (中华艺术宫, Zhōnghuá Yìshùgōng) at 205 Shangnan Road is Shanghai’s municipal art museum, housed in the former China Pavilion of Expo 2010 in Pudong. It is worth a visit for modern and contemporary Chinese art and for the building. Wikipedia says permanent exhibitions are free and special exhibitions cost 20 yuan, and that it is closed on Mondays except national holidays. No official page was reached, so check before you go.

The building was made for the Shanghai World Expo. Chinese Wikipedia says construction began on 18 December 2007 and finished on 8 February 2010, and records its nickname, the Crown of the East (东方之冠). English Wikipedia says a team led by He Jingtang (何镜堂) designed it, drawing on the dougong bracket and the ding bronze cauldron, and that at 63 metres it was the tallest structure at the Expo. The designer attribution rests on that one source.

After the Expo the pavilion reopened for six more months because of its popularity. In November 2011 the city government announced that it would become the museum’s new home. Chinese Wikipedia notes that the decision drew debate among some cultural figures. The museum opened on 1 October 2012, the same day as the Power Station of Art, which was converted from the former Expo urban-future pavilion. The earlier Shanghai Art Museum, which had occupied the former Shanghai Race Club building on People’s Square, closed on 31 December 2012, and the museum took the name China Art Museum, Shanghai when it moved here.

The scale is large. English Wikipedia gives the floor area as 64,000 square metres, more than ten times the earlier museum’s. Chinese Wikipedia gives a total building area of about 160,000 square metres, of which about 64,000 is exhibition space, divided into 27 galleries. The two figures appear to measure different things, though neither page explains the gap.

The collection is more than 14,000 works according to Chinese Wikipedia, mostly modern and contemporary Chinese art. English Wikipedia gives the same figure and the same emphasis.

For getting in, Chinese Wikipedia gives hours of 9:00 to 18:00, with last entry at 17:00. One visitor listing seen in a search gave a 10:00 opening, so the opening time in particular is unsettled. Show the Chinese address on this page to a taxi driver.