The first contemporary art institution in north-west China opened last month inside a 2.5-hectare wetlands park in the capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Yinchuan, a complex covering 15,000 sq. m and designed by the Chinese firm We Architech Anonymous, is the country’s first museum to focus on Sino-Islamic art.
The museum, which opened on 8 August, hopes its unique mission will attract Ningxianese who might not otherwise visit a contemporary art institution. The region is home to many indigenous Muslim minorities, particularly the Hui, of whom there is a mainland population of around 10 million. Located along the ancient Silk Road, the area also has a long history of cultural exchange.
Local attraction “We chose that [approach] because people in China’s interior don’t understand Chinese contemporary art, and as Ningxia is the main concentration for Hui, it resonates with people here,” says Suchen Hsieh, the art supervisor for MoCA Yinchuan. The city also plays “a large role in global Islam”, she says. Yinchuan hosts the biennial China-Arab States Expo, which draws representatives from 60 countries.
The museum’s six inaugural exhibitions include presentations of contemporary folk art and Chinese and Middle Eastern contemporary art. Exhibitions of Western-style Chinese oil painting from the 18th and 19th centuries and ancient Western maps of China present work from the museum’s collection but are less typical of its programme, Hsieh says.
Educating Yinchuan’s population of around two million is the museum’s top priority. Next year’s exhibitions will have an “interactive focus, not just paintings and sculptures”, Hsieh says. The museum plans to present a landscape show organised by the National Art Museum of China and to install a group show of light art around downtown Yinchuan during the winter. Another exhibition will trace Islamic influences on Chinese calligraphy.
Countering Islamophobia MoCA Yinchuan hopes to collaborate with museums in Europe, but does not anticipate similar interest from China’s more established coastal institutions. “A lot of Chinese, they hear ‘Muslim’ and are afraid. In the years since 9/11, everyone feels this. They don’t do any research,” Hsieh says.
Three years in the making, MoCA Yinchuan is owned and operated by the Ningxia Minsheng Group, a regional property developer. The institution, which cost 300m yuan (£30m) to build, was developed under a new public-private partnership policy called BOT (build-operate-transfer). “The private sector moves more quickly, so the government uses it to develop [cultural institutions],” Hsieh says.
The state will provide the museum with several million yuan a year, but “that’s barely our power bill”, Hsieh says. The institution’s annual operating budget of 35m yuan (£3.5m) includes a staff of 130, plus an acquisitions budget of 10m yuan (£1m).
The museum will anchor Huaxia-Hetu Art Town, an 18.8 sq. km development that is expected to include a school, a theme park and an artist residency programme. Ningxia Minsheng Group plans to invest $5bn in the project over the next decade.