The Art Newspaper

New contemporary museum for Beijing

By Chris Gill | From Frieze daily edition, 15 Oct 08
Published online 15 Oct 08

The major national gallery will be next to the Bird’s Nest stadium

The National Art Museum of China is to construct a major new building next to the famous Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing, The Art Newspaper has learned. According to Fan Di’An, the director of the museum, the government has approved plans for the 80,000 sq. m building, which will be built over the next three years. The project has not yet been officially announced. “We will keep our existing building [founded in 1958 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China],” Fan says. “But the government’s leaders want a new art museum, and they want it done quickly.” The new museum has an initial budget of Rmb 1.2bn (£100m).

It will be used to house the museum’s growing collection of Chinese modern and contemporary art, as well as exhibitions developed in collaboration with international partners.

While Fan could not confirm how the museum’s collection will be divided across the two sites, it is possible that the museum’s socialist realist collection will be housed in the existing museum while contemporary Chinese and international works could be displayed in the new building.

The leading Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who co-designed the Bird’s Nest stadium with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and is showing at Albion Gallery in London during Frieze, gave the news a qualified welcome. “It shows that the Chinese government recognises the need for contemporary culture,” he says. “But it all depends on the programme, as a new building means nothing without a good programme which could, after all, be censored.”

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