M Woods Museum is an independent, not-for-profit art museum founded in 2014 by collectors Lin Han and Wanwan Lei, which opened to the public in the autumn of 2014, and is located in Beijing's 798 Art Zone. The M WOODS 798 site is housed in a former munitions factory in Beijing's 798 art district, and in 2019 M WOODS opened its second museum space, M WOODS Art Community, located in the city's historic Dongcheng district. [1] Regarding the origin of the museum's name, Lin Han told Asian Art in a 2016 interview that “M is the initial of my mother’s given name, Miao. Woods is a play on the English translation of the Mandarin character for Lin which means wood or forest.” [2]
In addition to exhibitions of the M Woods permanent collection, the museum presents a year-round program of exhibitions, performances, music, education, live events and talks that situate contemporary art at the heart of the city and beyond. M Woods was granted official non-profit status by the Chinese government in 2015. Also in 2015, art collector Michael Xufu Huang joined as co-founder at the age of 22. [3]
In September 2019, Michael Xufu Huang announced his resignation and withdrawal of his collection from M WOODS Museum. Huang will open a separate museum (X Museum) in March 2020. [4]
In 2019 Victor Wang was appointed the museum's first Artistic Director and Chief Curator. [5]
According to an interview with Vogue, the M Woods permanent collection contains over 300 works of classic and contemporary art that include Tang dynasty statues, tantric paintings, works by Firenze Lai, Ouyang Chun, Raoul De Keyser, Giorgio Morandi, Guido van der Werve, and Olafur Eliasson. [6]
798 Art Zone, or Dashanzi Art District, is a complex of 50-year-old decommissioned military factory buildings boasting a unique architectural style that houses a thriving artistic community in Dashanzi, Chaoyang District, Beijing. The area is often called the 798 Art District or Factory 798 although technically, Factory #798 is only one of several structures inside the complex formerly known as 718 Joint Factory. The buildings are within alleys number 2 and 4 on Jiǔxiānqiáo Lù (酒仙桥路), south of the Dàshānziqiáo flyover (大山子桥). The area is anchored by the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, the largest and most visited venue in the area. In recent years, it has been the main venue for the annual Beijing Queer Film Festival and Beijing Design Week.
Sui Jianguo, professor and ex-chairman of the Department of Sculpture in Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, is a contemporary Chinese artist.
Fuck Off was a contemporary art exhibition which ran alongside the Third Shanghai Biennale (2000) in Shanghai, China. The exhibition's title translates as "Uncooperative Attitude" in Chinese, but the blunter English language sentiment was deemed preferable. The exhibition encompassed conceptual, performance, and protest art.
Shu Yang is a Chinese painter, performance artist, photographer and curator who was born in Xi'an, China. He studied at the Xi’an Academy of Fine Art, where he received his BA in art in 1993 and his master's degree in 1996. He initially taught fine art at the Tianjin Institute of Urban Construction, before becoming an independent curator in 1999.
Li Songsong is a Chinese artist working in Beijing.
Tang Contemporary Art Gallery is a commercial art gallery with branches in China, Hong Kong and Thailand.
Pékin Fine Arts, is a contemporary art gallery in Beijing established in 2005, with a Hong Kong branch gallery opened in 2012. It was listed by The New York Times as one of the "top museums and galleries" in Beijing, and listed by Forbes as one of the ten galleries in Beijing from which to buy Chinese art.
Jean-Marc Decrop is a specialist of Chinese contemporary art. He is one among the art collectors who have contributed to the discovery, the recognition and the influence of Chinese contemporary art abroad.
Wu Zhengyan is a contemporary Chinese painter based in Beijing. She graduated from Shanxi University in the Department of Art in 2004 and later taught in Beijing Agriculture college. It was in 2006 that she became a professional artist. As a member of the "post-80s" generation of artists in China, Wu has been involved in several group shows since 2003.
Huang Rui is a Chinese artist known for his social and cultural criticism.
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art or UCCA is a leading Chinese independent institution of contemporary art. Founded in 2007 and located at the heart of the 798 Art District in Beijing, China, it welcomes more than one million visitors a year. Originally known as the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, UCCA underwent a major restructuring in 2017 and now operates as the UCCA Group, comprising two distinct entities: UCCA Foundation, a registered non-profit that organizes exhibitions and research, stages public programs, and undertakes community outreach; and UCCA Enterprises, a family of art-driven retail and educational ventures. In 2018, UCCA opened an additional museum, UCCA Dune, in Beidaihe, a seaside resort town close to Beijing. In 2021, a third site in Shanghai was opened, UCCA Edge. The museum had 385,295 visitors in 2020, and ranked 55th in the List of most-visited art museums in the world.
Yuan Gong, is a Chinese contemporary artist. He has obtained a PhD degree in theory of art at the Chinese National Academy of Arts in 2012, but has immersed himself in different aspects of Chinese contemporary art since the 1990s. Being both creator and researcher, designer and planner, Yuan is a multiple facets artist playing at the interface of conceptual art, performance and fine arts. Using a large variety of media, his artworks address many philosophical questions, reflecting his concerns about the Chinese society and impugning the art system, the exhibition format and the status of the artwork.
Wang Jianwei is a new media, performance, and installation artist based in Beijing, China.
Mao Lizi is the pseudonym of Zhang Zhunli (张准立), a Chinese artist born in Shanghai. He was one of the founding members of China's pioneer contemporary art groups known as the Stars, of which Ai Weiwei and Wang Keping were also members.
The Stars Art Group or simply "The Stars" was a Chinese avant-garde group of non-professional artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was founded by Ma Desheng and Huang Rui and included Wang Keping (王克平), Qu Leilei, Ah Cheng, Ai Weiwei, and Li Shuang (artist) as the only female member. A historically significant exhibition, now called the Star Art Exhibition, took place in late 1979 in Beihai Park, Beijing, outside the China Art Gallery. After the exhibition was closed by officials, the group staged a protest for cultural openness. They succeeded in reopening the exhibition. The exhibition took place between 23 November and 2 December, in which around 200,000 people attended the event. The group organized another exhibition the next year. Around and after 1983, the group disbanded, partly due to their members going into exile under political pressure, especially the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983.
Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World is an exhibition that took place at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York between October 6, 2017 – January 7, 2018. The exhibition presents works by seventy-one artists and artist collectives across China and worldwide, who define contemporary experience in and of China. Looking at a period between the Tiananmen Square Protests, which also coincides with the end of the Cold War, and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the exhibition explores a time when "anything seemed possible" and artists from China sought visibility in the global art world. The curators of the exhibition write that the works in this exhibition respond to how China went through a radical transformation between 1989 and 2008, which had an unmatchable impact at the global level. The exhibition has been considered as "an invaluable window" onto the intersection of contemporary art, politics, and history, and as an opportunity to ask questions about the role of museums as sites of learning how one could be a global citizen today. It also traveled to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
The artistic heritage of Taiwan is extremely diverse with multiple major influences and periods. Art was first formalized under the Japanese but did not flourish until the democratic period. Today Taiwan is one of the world's most significant art markets.
Inside/Out: New Chinese Art was an exhibition held 15 September 1998 to 3 January 1999 held in association with Asia Society and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition was presented simultaneously at Asia Society in New York and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. It was curated by Gao Minglu and featured artists from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong with artworks from the 1980s to 1990s.
Michael Xufu Huang is a Chinese art collector and socialite. Huang co-founded the M Woods Museum of Beijing's 798 Art Zone in 2015 and the X Museum in the Chaoyang district of Beijing in 2020. His art collecting activities have led The New York Times to profile him in 2017 as "something of a next-generation Jeffrey Deitch of China."
Wang Chunchen is a Chinese curator, critic, and art historian. He has been described as "one of China's most distinguished curators, art critics and historians".