The Urban Future Pavilion will soon reopen as a contemporary art museum

Heading back over to Shanghai, two new art museums are set to open to the public at the site of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai’s Pudong New Area on October 1st, featuring works of art that have thus far stayed in storage at the city’s other museum spaces. The China Art Museum, Shanghai, which focuses on works of Chinese modern art from the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) to 1980, will find a new home in the China Pavilion while the Power Station of Art, dedicated to post-1980 contemporary works, will open in the renovated Pavilion of the Future.

Standing at 64,000 square meters with 27 exhibition halls and 15,000 square meters with 12 exhibition halls, the China Art Museum and the Power Station of Art, respectively, are two of the largest museums of their kind in Asia. “As the home of Chinese modern art,” Zong Min, deputy head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee explains, “Shanghai has collected millions of works of art over the last two centuries. There are more than 30,000 boutique works of art kept in the city’s public museums and universities. [However,] because the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai and Shanghai Art Museum have a total of only 6,800 square meters of display space, many [artworks] have ended up locked up at a warehouse, out of…public view.”

With free admission, Hu expects the museums will receive 3 million visitors in their first year and “will continue to buy or accept donated works of boutique art from both home and abroad.”