Wuzhen’s new art museum blends local culture with modern design
Small town outside Shanghai has become a favoured tourist destination thanks to its blend of old and new
A small town in the countryside outside Shanghai has unexpectedly emerged as one of the country’s favourite leisure destinations thanks to its beguiling blend of old and new cultures.
“Even I’m not quite sure what is real and what is fake,” muses one Chinese journalist while strolling through Wuzhen, a 1,300-year-old canal town on the southern edge of the Yangtze River.
The “water-town” is a low-rise maze of traditional stone lanes, shop houses and courtyards nicknamed “Venice of the East” thanks to its arched bridges and canal landscape. Part restoration, part recreation, it has been so successful in attracting tourists from across China that other towns are turning to the state-owned Wuzhen Tourism Company, which led its revival, for advice on how to do the same.
The secret to Wuzhen’s success is about celebrating what makes it unique, says the company’s senior planning consultant, Shao Yun. “It also has to feel authentic otherwise we would be just like any other town.”
The town’s new art museum, dedicated to the late painter, scholar, poet and writer Mu Xin (1927-2011), offers a good example of how the company has successfully highlighted local culture. The artist was born in the town and although he moved to the United States after the Cultural Revolution – during which he was imprisoned three times for being an intellectual – he returned home for the last five years of his life, sparking a renewed appreciation for his philosophical writings and ethereal landscape paintings.
The 6,700 square metre building comprises a series of concrete-form modernist cubes “floating” above Yuanbao Lake, and was designed by the New York-based architect Hiroshi Okamoto. Before co-founding his own firm OLI Architecture in 2010, the designer worked with I.M. Pei on the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the Miho Institute of Aesthetics in Japan.
