West Bund Museum Opens in Shanghai With the Centre Pompidou

The West Bund Museum opened to the public in Shanghai on 8 November 2019, three days after it was inaugurated by the French president, Emmanuel Macron. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects, it is the home of a partnership between the West Bund development group and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the most substantial agreement of its kind between a Chinese and a European museum.

The building stands at the tip of a triangular site on the Huangpu River, in the Xuhui district. It consists of three gallery blocks, each 17 metres high, arranged like the blades of a pinwheel around a central atrium, with terraces towards the river and the park. The walls are clad in panels of translucent recycled glass that give the building a pale, jade-like surface by day and let it glow at night. The galleries are tall and lit from above.

Under the agreement, initially for five years and since renewed, the Centre Pompidou lends works from its collection, the largest of modern and contemporary art in Europe, and organises exhibitions with the museum’s own team. The first, The Shape of Time, presented about a hundred works from the Paris collection as a history of 20th-century art, and was accompanied by an exhibition on the theme of observation, with Chinese and international artists.

The museum is the centrepiece of the West Bund, a stretch of former industrial land, once occupied by an airfield, coal wharves and cement works, that the district has turned over the past decade into a cultural quarter. The masterplan covers nine square kilometres and includes an 8.5-kilometre riverside promenade leading towards the Bund. Along it are the Long Museum, in a former coal-loading wharf, the Yuz Museum, in an aircraft hangar, Tank Shanghai, in a group of fuel tanks, and the West Bund Art & Design fair, held each November.

For visitors to Shanghai, the West Bund fills a day. It is twenty minutes by car from the Bund, and the promenade is best walked in the late afternoon. Across the river in Pudong, a second partnership of this type followed in 2021 with the opening of the Museum of Art Pudong.