Museum, Art: the National Art Museum of China

Described as the largest gallery of art in China, the National Art Museum has no permanent collection, it seems. Instead, what they do is host rotating temporary exhibits. So, if what you are looking for is a comprehensive collection that chronicles the history and breadth of Chinese art, you would be in the wrong place. That's what you will find at the gargantuan China National Museum (next post – History) on Tian’an Men square. No, this museum is content to supply a few slices of Chinese art with no pretension of being complete.

I think that is why I liked it so much. I am not the world's biggest art lover. I think art can be interesting if it has something to say about a people, a time or a place - but for me, a little bit goes a long way. When we were in Shanghai we visited our first museum of Chinese art. Six floors in a building about the size of a football field. There was a lot to see including 6000 year old pottery. Amazing - but they have more pots than I needed to see. This museum was more my speed.

They had galleries on three floors, but the best I could tell just two exhibits (signage was pretty much exclusively Chinese - it was not uncommon anywhere we went - Germany, Turkey, Italy, China - to find temporary exhibits in just the local language)  The ground floor exhibit was a collection of the work of landscape artist Long Rui. A master the genre, the galleries were filled with a style of art already familiar to us - what you might call typical Chinese art. And then the artist travels. It was fun to see this style applied to the Italian village or the American Southwest.

In the upstairs galleries they had

a collection that seemed to focus on country life. It was here that I saw the first examples of something that could even remotely be described as political art. The interesting thing was that the politics were evident in what was NOT in the paintings, as much as what was there.  A painting of a PLA (Peoples Liberation Army) unit. No red flag, no communist iconography, just soldiers ready to go. Another favorite was the peasant farmers with their Nike and their cell phones. Things are changing out in the countryside.