Emerging Chinese contemporary artists the focus of X Museum, new Beijing museum whose millennial founders want to change perceptions
- Museum’s inaugural exhibition sets out to explore the millennial zeitgeist and will feature artists including Miao Ying, Cui Jie and Jes Fan
- A new award to be announced at the show’s opening will go to the artist who best defines the future of Chinese contemporary art
Whether state-owned or private, new museums spring up in China all the time – there are, according to the country’s National Cultural Heritage Administration, currently more than 5,100 of them across the country.
X Museum in Beijing, though, stands out for being one founded by a pair of millennials: 26-year-old Michael Xufu Huang and former classmate Teresa Tse, who is a year younger. The museum’s opening on Saturday comes at a time when the art scene in Beijing is only just beginning to recover from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Huang is no stranger to China’s cultural scene – as a student at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States he co-founded the M Woods Museum in Beijing with collectors Lin Han and Wanwan Lei. Now, he and Tse want to change the way Chinese contemporary art is understood and presented, with X Museum focusing on exhibiting works by emerging Chinese artists.
X Museum’s inaugural exhibition, “X Museum Triennial – How Do We Begin?”, sets out to explore the millennial zeitgeist, or “spirit of the age”, and is intended to be the first in a series of three-year reviews of Chinese contemporary art.
One of the main themes running through their art is how digitisation has changed our lives and the ways we consume and produce information.
To add to the fanfare, a new award – the X Museum Triennial Award – will be announced at the show’s opening. The award will go to the artist who best defines the future of Chinese contemporary art.
The star-studded jury that will decide the winner features influential curators from eminent institutions around the world. These include Zhang Zikang, the director of the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum in China; Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the creative director of Serpentine Galleries (London) and artistic adviser of The Shed (New York); Kate Fowle, the director of MoMA PS1 in the US; and Diana Campbell Betancourt, the chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh and artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation.
Although many museums have been closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, a digital version of X Museum has been open for months already. In October, alongside their goal of nurturing young Chinese art collectors and consumers, Huang and Tse came up with the idea of an X Virtual Museum, which was launched in March.
The online platform was designed and “built” by artist and architect Pete Jiadong Qiang – who is also one of the artists taking part in the triennial – and offers visitors a game-like interactive experience.
“X Virtual Museum is not just an online copy of the physical museum, nor is it a simple documentation and archive of exhibitions and events that happened in the museum,” says Poppy Dongxue Wu, chief curator of X Museum. “It’s an extension of the physical space and museum programmes. The idea is to disrupt and intervene in the way people use museum [websites] today.”
