A museum dedicated to the late Chinese writer and artist Mu Xin opened on 16 November in his hometown of Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, under the directorship of his protégé, the renowned painter Chen Danqing. The museum has been in the works since 2006, when Mu returned to Wuzhen after being imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution and then spending more than 20 years in the US.
The 72,118 sq. ft building, designed by Bing Lin and Hiroshi Okamoto of OLI Architecture, aims to illustrate Mu Xin’s role as a bridge between Chinese and Western cultures. Although Mu, who died in 2011, had US solo shows at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago and New York’s Asia Society Museum, he is better known in China as a writer. The opening of the museum in Wuzhen marks his first solo show in the country.
Born in 1927, Mu Xin (a pen name—his real name was Sun Pu) taught art and literature in Shanghai and Hangzhou in the tumultuous years leading up to and after China’s 1949 revolution. His first 20 volumes of writing were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. He was imprisoned three times before his exoneration in 1979. He and Chen both arrived in New York in 1982 and the two became close friends.
The Cultural Revolution, often a forbidden topic in China, was “not really an issue” for the museum, Chen says, despite the fact that Mu’s prison manuscripts are on show. At the end of Mu’s life, hostility towards art gave way to an official eagerness to cultivate and promote cultural projects. Smaller cities like Wuzhen also tend to face less scrutiny from government censors. “Mu Xin was always hiding the political,” Chen says. “He had his own opinions, but knew how to express them via art.”
Nevertheless, religion remains a sensitive subject. A temporary exhibition of bibles that was to explore Mu’s intellectual fascination with Christianity was removed ahead of the opening. (A spokeswoman for the museum says the display was not included due to “procedural issues”.)
The Mu Xin Museum, which the artist helped plan before his death, stands out among the raft of property developer-funded contemporary art institutions driving China’s museum boom. Such projects “are big, have money and energy, but don’t know what they’ll show. That is always the challenge in China,” Chen says.
By contrast, the Mu Xin Museum seeks to do more with less. Five galleries will display around 100 of the more than 600 paintings Mu left to the museum and 50 of his thousands of manuscripts. Two galleries will present rotating exhibitions about Mu’s influences, including the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Lin Fengmian, the founder of what is now the China Academy of Art.
Culture Wuzhen, a state-owned enterprise funding the museum for an undisclosed sum, is also behind the well-respected Wuzhen Theatre Festival and a citywide contemporary art exhibition due to launch in 2016. The local party member Chen Xianghong, who established Culture Wuzhen, “had a very simple idea,” Chen says. If “the silly people in Beijing and Shanghai [can] see good culture…why can’t country people?”