China Extends Reach Into International Art

SHANGHAI — China’s drive to achieve world status in more than just economic power has now turned to art museums, a push that is also resulting in the showing of more Chinese art in the United States.

Here, in the nation’s financial center, the city government recently gave its blessing to a museum of contemporary art to be called an “art palace” — actually an expansion of the China Pavilion of the 2010 World Expo — that will bring the space to some 2.1 million square feet. The project will make it the largest art museum in China and will put it among the largest in the world when it opens on Oct. 1, said Li Lei, the executive director of the Shanghai Art Museum, which will move into the new art palace.

Not to be outdone, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing is holding an international competition to choose the architect for a structure of almost 1.4 million square feet to be built next to one of the capital’s new landmarks, the National Olympic Stadium. The three finalists are the American architect Frank Gehry, the Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid and the French architect Jean Nouvel.

This lineup points to a world-class design, eventually, even if it is a bit smaller than Shanghai’s, Fan Di’an, the director of the National Art Museum, said in an interview. “I would like a design that grows out of the Beijing soil,” said Mr. Fan, who is on the 11-member judging panel. The winner will be announced in several months.

The boom in museum construction, which some Chinese art experts liken to the expansion of museums in the United States at the end of the 19th century, has much to do with national pride. It comes with the full support of the national government as part of a cultural strategy known as “Going Out, Inviting In,” under which the government is giving its blessing to museums’ taking the initiative in offering an array of modern Chinese art for show abroad, including in the United States.

At the same time, the tone has changed from what used to be fairly blatant use of Chinese culture as state propaganda to a more sophisticated approach, Chinese and American museum directors say. In this spirit, individual museums in China, particularly art museums, are exerting more of their own leadership and relying less on central authorities to approve what they can send and show abroad.

Thus a collaboration between the Shanghai Art Museum and Asia Society in New York is behind a show of 54 ink-on-paper works by Wu Guanzhong that opens in New York on Tuesday. A Chinese artist who trained in Paris after World War II, Wu then turned to using ancient techniques of brush and ink on a large scale and in a contemporary manner.

The genesis for the exhibition came in 2008, when the director of Asia Society Museum, Melissa Chiu, visited a retrospective of Wu’s work at the Shanghai Art Museum. The idea evolved with the cooperation of Mr. Li, the museum’s director, and the artist, whom Ms. Chiu visited at his studio in Beijing; he died in June 2010 at 90.

Wu, whose works are among the top earners in the rarefied auction world of modern Chinese art, gave a large number of works to the museum for the 2008 retrospective show and for its permanent collection. One of his Yangtze River landscapes from the early 1970s fetched $23.5 million at auction in Beijing last year.

Wu’s art appeals to Chinese collectors partly because, in contrast to some of the high-selling avant-garde artists who went to the West after the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and adapted Western trends, Wu returned to Chinese tradition. Mr. Li said he hoped Wu could be a bridge between the two cultures for American art lovers.

The choice of works for Asia Society was a joint effort between her and Mr. Li, Ms. Chiu said. The two museums shared the costs, with the Chinese paying for all framing, packing and shipping, a welcome contribution in an era of austere budgets, she said.

“I haven’t heard of the Chinese government paying those costs before, so this is a new chapter in the China-U.S. art relationship,” she added.

Another partnership, between the Nanjing Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art brought the works of Fu Baoshi, a 20th-century master ink painter, to American audiences. The show was expanded for display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it closed this month.

Last year 395 museums were built across China, according to Chen Jianming, a vice chairman of the Chinese Society of Museums and the director of the Hunan Provincial Museum. Many of these new museums were devoted to history, but in the years ahead, many more art museums are planned, he said.

But the new urgency for more and bigger museums may be coming too fast, Mr. Chen added. There are not enough trained personnel to build collections and oversee educational programs, and some new museums will not have sufficiently high-standard collections, he said.

Above, the China Pavilion during the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai; it is being expanded to create a giant new “art palace.”

“I have a conservative viewpoint — a museum is not just a fancy big building,” Mr. Chen said, as lines of people waited outside his museum in the provincial capital, Changsha, to see 2,100-year-old antiquities, including the well-preserved mummified body of a Han dynasty noblewoman. “Museums are for the collections, and it takes a long time to build them.”

Mr. Chen said it was possible that a new Changsha Art Museum designed by Zaha Hadid would not be built because it was not clear whether enough support facilities were incorporated into the design.

As the number of art museums grows, Chinese curators are increasingly eager to show their art in the United States.

Last week, on his way to New York for the opening of the Wu Guanzhong show, Mr. Li flew first to Washington to talk to curators there about possible collaborations with the Shanghai Art Museum.

Last year Mr. Fan of the National Art Museum of China suggested a show of 20th-century Chinese art that the Chinese would have paid for at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, said Maxwell K. Hearn, the Metropolitan’s chief curator of Asian art.

But the Metropolitan plans its shows years in advance and did not have space in the schedule for the early date Mr. Fan proposed. Moreover, Mr. Hearn said, he was not willing to accept a catalog that was entirely the work of Chinese curators.

Even so, Mr. Fan said he was heartened that the Wu Guanzhong and Fu Baoshi exhibitions had made their way to major New York museums.

“For the Western point of view, the 20th century is Western art, and the art of Modernism,” he said. “I don’t think that is fair. These days, when Western scholars discuss modernity, they should also discuss Chinese modernity.”