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.
