New art museums open in Shanghai
Seeking to enhance its status as a global arts centre, the city of Shanghai has opened two new art museums on the former site of the 2010 World Expo.
The China Art Museum, intended to be Shanghai's premier showplace for modern art, opend open its doors in the former China pavilion - the signature building for the world's fair.
Shanghai World Expo Coordination Bureau Deputy Director Hu Jinjun explained "the scale and configuration is matchless in Asia. It is close to America's Metropolitan Museum of Art, France's Musee d'Orsay and other internationally famous art museums."
Hu added that the government-backed museum has an exhibition space alone of 64,000 metres2.
A new contemporary art museum has also opened, exhibiting works from the 1980s onwards and giving a permanent home to Shanghai's annual art festival.
Called the Power Station of Art, the 40,000 metre2 museum takes its name from the former power station building which was converted for the Expo.
However, critics have raised questions over how Shanghai will fill the massive spaces with meaningful exhibitions. Shanghai-based artist and arts writer Chris Gill explained to the AFP "they're basically modelling themselves on New York or London
"China tends to build these huge art museums. The problem is what they're going to put in it. The content side is always compromised by the political situation."
China censors art that it considers politically sensitive or pornographic, with local officials having the right to pull individual works or shut down shows.
Shanghai officials in September barred display of a photo work by artist Chi Peng, which shows a gorilla at Beijing's famed Tiananmen Square, according to his microblog.
In 2006, Shanghai shut down an exhibition by dozens of Chinese artists at a private art museum for showing 'pornographic' images, described as pictures of naked women.
The exhibitions in place for the opening of the China Art Museum are heavily weighted towards Chinese art, but one floor has foreign works including a painting by Rembrandt and another by Johannes Vermeer - on loan from the Netherlands' Rijksmuseum.
Shanghai has already tested the China Pavilion as a venue for art, spending US$1.4 million for China's biggest ever exhibition of the works of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso last year, but attendance was lower than expected.
The city has high hopes for attendance, distributing free tickets for 10,000 people a day to the China Art Museum and 6,000 daily for the Power Station of Art over its recent week-long National Day holiday.
Image: Shanghai's China Art Museum. Credit: China Global Television Network.
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