About Long Museum

Long Museum

The Long Museum, in Chinese Long Meishuguan, literally the Dragon Art Museum, is a private art museum in Shanghai founded by the collector Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei, who serves as its director. It exists to house and share the couple's systematic collection, which spans traditional Chinese art, modern and contemporary Chinese art, “red classics” revolutionary art, and contemporary art from Asia, Europe and the United States. The museum has two Shanghai locations — the Long Museum Pudong, which opened on 18 December 2012, and the Long Museum West Bund, which opened on 28 March 2014 and was at the time China's largest private museum — and a third location opened in Chongqing in 2016. By its tenth anniversary in 2022 the museum had presented nearly 200 major exhibitions and drawn tens of millions of visitors. Its official website is thelongmuseum.org. Among China's new private museums, the Long Museum is the defining example of a collection built by two individuals becoming a public institution.

The Founders and Their Collection

Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei are among China's best-known art collectors, and their collecting divides, in their own accounts, by temperament: Liu is passionate about classical Chinese art, while Wang focuses more on modern and contemporary art from across the globe. Wang Wei has explained that the museum's purpose was simple — artwork kept in a storage room becomes nothing but objects, and only display lets people understand the works' cultural significance and charm; after her revolutionary paintings were exhibited at the Shanghai Art Museum, the couple concluded they needed a museum of their own. The resulting collection was assembled systematically rather than as a trophy cabinet, across four strands: traditional Chinese art, modern and contemporary Chinese art, the revolutionary “red classics” in which Wang had specialised, and international contemporary art. That breadth, unusual in a private collection, is what allows the museum to programme ancient and contemporary exhibitions from its own holdings.

Long Museum Pudong Opens in 2012

The Long Museum Pudong opened to the public on 18 December 2012 in Shanghai's Pudong New Area, on the eastern side of the Huangpu River. Its first exhibition brought together more than three hundred pieces of artwork from the founders' collection. In the museum's own division of labour, the Pudong museum focuses on classics, academic study and cultural exchange: traditional Chinese art and the revolutionary classics are its foreground, and it was named a patriotism education centre by Pudong New Area. Opening a private museum of this scale in 2012 placed the Long Museum at the front of a wave — the years that followed saw a series of high-profile private museums open in Shanghai, including the Yuz Museum, Tank Shanghai, Rockbund Art Museum, Fosun Foundation and the Shanghai Center of Photography — but the Long Museum was among the first and remains among the largest of them.

The West Bund Building

The Long Museum West Bund opened on 28 March 2014 in Xuhui District, after the district's leadership invited Wang Wei to build within the West Bund Cultural Corridor, an 8.4-kilometre tract along the Huangpu designated for cultural projects, on land the government offered with a generous discount. Designed by Liu Yichun of Atelier Deshaus, the building has about 33,000 square metres of building area and 16,000 square metres of exhibition space. It is organised around the site's preserved industrial relic: a 110-metre-long concrete coal-hopper unloading bridge dating from the 1950s, on the former coal wharf, which the new building envelops; old railway tracks and the traces of the coal dock remain legible in the finished museum. The design took two and a half years and won its architect the AR Award for Emerging Architecture and an AIA China Honor Award for Architecture. At its opening, West Bund was China's largest private museum, and its wide first-floor hall was conceived for large-scale modern exhibitions.

Two Museums, One Programme

The two Shanghai museums work as complements across the river. Pudong, in Wang Wei's description, focuses on ancient and modern art, mainly the “red” revolutionary classics, and continues to exhibit traditional Chinese art; West Bund is more contemporary and international. Individual exhibitions are decided by a curatorial team led by Wang Wei, with an East-meets-West theme characterising much of the programme. The model has been compared by its founders to the ambition of a Chinese answer to the Guggenheim: a private institution affording its public a global art education while strengthening local cultural roots. Running the museum, Wang Wei has said, required finding their own way — the couple learned that the methods of state-owned institutions did not work for a private museum, and eventually established a corporate-style system to serve the public interest and fulfil social responsibilities.

Exhibitions: From the Chicken Cup to James Turrell

The museum's exhibition record shows the collection's range in action. In winter 2014–15 the West Bund museum presented The World of Zhu Jianshen: The Life and Era of a Chinese Emperor — the Chenghua “chicken cup” exhibition, built around the Chenghua-period porcelain of which Liu Yiqian's collection holds a celebrated example. International contemporary programming included Olafur Eliasson's Nothingness Is Not Nothing At All in spring 2016 and James Turrell: Immersive Light in 2017, a retrospective spanning half a century of Turrell's work with new site-specific installations designed for the museum's dimensions. Antony Gormley and a presentation of Rembrandt's oil paintings also featured in the West Bund programme, while retrospectives such as the largest to date of Yuan Yunsheng's career, with his mural Water Sprinkling Festival – Hymn of Life, represented modern Chinese painting. Artists shown across the museum's first decade ranged from Wang Xizhi and Zhang Daqian to Pat Steir, Natsuyuki Nakanishi and Liang Ying.

Expansion to Chongqing and Beyond

Two years after West Bund, in 2016, a third Long Museum opened in Chongqing in south-western China, taking the institution beyond Shanghai for the first time; a Wuhan branch was also planned, reported at the time as scheduled for 2018 and intended to be even larger than the West Bund building. The expansion followed the logic of the collection itself: with holdings spanning so many periods and regions, a single city could not exhaust the programme the founders wanted to show. Whether in Shanghai or Chongqing, the branches share the museum's founding proposition — that a private collection of this scale carries a public obligation, and that the obligation is met by building museums, not warehouses.

The Tenth Anniversary

The Long Museum marked a decade in business in November and December 2022 with two exhibitions at the West Bund: Being in the World, featuring portraits, and Multiple Sights, focusing on abstract art, together showcasing more than 260 sets of artworks presenting an overview of modern and contemporary art around the world and a dialogue between Chinese and Western cultures. The museum's own anniversary accounting recorded about 200 large-scale exhibitions over the decade and more than 30 million visitors from home and abroad across its sites. It also listed honours including designation as a lifelong learning experience centre by Xuhui District, volunteer-training recognition, and “museum of the year” and most-popular-location distinctions. The anniversary coverage in Shanghai's official press framed the decade as one of transformation for the city's whole museum landscape, with the Long Museum as its prime private example.

The Long Museum and Shanghai's Museum Boom

The Long Museum's history is inseparable from the West Bund's reinvention. The riverfront it occupies once formed part of Shanghai's industrial core, with shipping wharves, Longhua Airport and hangars of China's early commercial aircraft industry; from 2014 the West Bund Art and Design Fair, inaugurated the same year the Long and Yuz museums opened, announced the district's emergence as the city's new art hub. Distinguished visitors recorded at the museum have included Prince William and the actress Angelina Jolie during visits to Shanghai — a measure of how completely a collectors' museum had entered the city's public itinerary within a few years of opening. A decade after two collectors decided their storage rooms were not enough, the Long Museum stands as the largest and most programmatically ambitious of China's private art museums, and the clearest case for the private museum as a form of public institution.