Guangzhou Museum of Art Opens Its New Building by the Pearl River

The Guangzhou Museum of Art opened its new building on 30 November 2023 in Haizhu district, on the south bank of the Pearl River, a short distance from the Canton Tower. With nearly 80,000 square metres of floor area, it is one of the largest art museums in southern China and the first of a group of cultural buildings planned along this stretch of the river.

The building

The design was produced jointly by a German practice, Herzog & Partner, with the South China University of Technology and the Guangdong provincial design institute. Its theme is the kapok, the red-flowered tree that is the emblem of Guangzhou: the building rises from a base surrounded by water in forms compared to an opening flower. Photovoltaic panels are integrated into the roof and all four facades, which the museum presents as a first for a public building in China.

The galleries are arranged around a central hall, and the upper terraces look across the river to the towers of Zhujiang New Town.

The collection

The museum holds more than 33,000 works. Its strength is the art of Lingnan, the region south of the mountains that corresponds to Guangdong and its neighbours. The Lingnan School of painting emerged in Guangzhou in the early 20th century, when Gao Jianfu, Gao Qifeng and Chen Shuren, who had studied in Japan, set out to renew Chinese ink painting with Western and Japanese techniques of light, perspective and colour. Their work, and that of their successors Guan Shanyue and Li Xiongcai, is shown here in greater depth than anywhere else.

The museum also holds Ming and Qing painting and calligraphy from Guangdong, the gifts of the Hong Kong collector Au Ho-nien and others, and a large body of 20th-century prints and cartoons. The opening displays drew on more than 1,100 works from the collection, with some 200 loans from other museums.

Why visit

Guangzhou is usually visited for its food and its trade fairs. The new museum, along with the Guangdong Museum and the Opera House by Zaha Hadid across the river, gives it a cultural itinerary. For a visitor interested in Chinese painting, the Lingnan galleries fill a gap that the museums of Beijing and Shanghai leave open, and they explain much about the visual culture of Hong Kong, where many of the school’s painters later taught.

Visiting

Entry is free. Reservations are made through the museum’s WeChat account; visitors without a Chinese identity card are asked to book by telephone, and a hotel concierge can do this. The museum is closed on Mondays. It is ten minutes by taxi from Rosewood Guangzhou.