Art history sits where the humanities and the arts meet. It asks us to understand the artist's sensibility and also to analyze it with the rational methods of humanistic inquiry. As a student of art history, I therefore have to answer the question of existence twice: why the humanities, and why art. Of the two, I find the case for the humanities easier to make. The humanities (philosophy, history including art history, literature, languages, religious studies and the like) de

The Hu Wensui Art Museum, located in Gucheng Park in Huangpu District, Shanghai, officially opened on February 24, 2021. The museum is housed in a historic building, the Qianye Guild Hall, which was originally built during the Qing dynasty's Guangxu era (1875–1908). Its founding stemmed from a 2019 donation by Hu Wensui's family to the Huangpu District government of nearly a thousand of his calligraphy works and manuscripts. Hu Wensui (July 24, 1918 – February 19, 1999), a na

The Shanghai Qingu Art Museum is in the Jiangshangqiao Cultural Park at 2888 Cao'an Highway, Jiading District. The main building is a classical Huizhou-style courtyard complex. It was built from traditional materials, including century-old wall bricks, reclaimed timber and old grey bricks. The new building opened in 2019, and since then the museum has made ceramics its specialty. It also shows calligraphy and painting, holds a porcelain collection, and runs classes in traditi

The Dunhuang Contemporary Art Museum is located in Changyang Creative Valley in Shanghai’s Yangpu District and officially opened on November 10, 2024. Inspired by the form of sand dunes, the building features a flowing exterior reminiscent of yunjin brocade, an architectural gesture that echoes the visual language of Dunhuang. Inside, it houses a 1,500-square-meter open exhibition hall, along with a bookstore, café, and other visitor facilities. Converted from a former parkin

Located at 302 Changjiang Road in Nanjing’s Xuanwu District, the Museum of the Six Dynasties is a highly distinctive museum devoted to a single historical and cultural theme. It is China’s most comprehensive site museum for artifacts from the Six Dynasties period, and also the most systematic local museum dedicated to interpreting Six Dynasties culture. It officially opened to the public on August 11, 2014, and has a floor area of more than 23,000 square meters. In Chinese hi

Located in the ancient town of Sijing in Shanghai’s Songjiang District, Xianhe Art Museum is a private art museum. Its main focus is the collection and display of artworks, while also engaging in the planning of cultural and artistic events, the design and development of art-related products, and various forms of research, exchange, and public outreach. Admission is free. The museum has two floors: the first includes a gallery space, an exhibition and hands-on experience area

Long Museum in Shanghai’s Baoshan District is a nonprofit private art museum funded and operated by a company under the Dongming Home Furnishings Group. It is set within a classical Jiangnan-style garden complex, a setting that already makes a visit worthwhile before one even steps inside. The main building encompasses 12,000 square meters over four floors: the first floor houses the exhibition galleries, while the second through fourth floors form the “Wenchang Pavilion.” Bo

Located at 201 Renmin Avenue in Huangpu District, Shanghai Museum has a total exhibition area of 12,000 square meters and opened to the public in 1996. According to the museum’s official introduction, the first floor originally housed the Gallery of Ancient Chinese Bronzes, the Gallery of Ancient Chinese Sculpture, and a temporary exhibition hall; the second floor featured the Gallery of Ancient Chinese Ceramics, the Zande Lou Collection of Ceramics, and another exhibition ha

Edited interview transcript 5 If, in tracing the path from the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, we saw Chinese painting continually recalibrating its spiritual center in response to different historical moments, then in the modern and contemporary period the question becomes even more complex. On the one hand, Chinese painting continues its own internal lineage; on the other, it must confront the reality of meeting Western art head-on within a globalized context. Followi

Edited Interview Transcript 4 If, in the previous section on the Ming, Professor Luo Yanzi and I discussed how Shen Zhou reassembled the traditions of the Song and Yuan and gave literati painting in the Ming a more rounded, more everyday, and more socially inclusive revival, then the next question arose naturally: by the Qing, why did literati painting once again assert “individuality” so forcefully? How did this shift take place? With that in mind, I invited Professor Luo to

Edited Interview Transcript 3 I then asked Professor Luo Yanzi to focus on how Ming painting changed in relation to the Yuan, and on the pivotal role Shen Zhou played in that transition. As the discussion unfolded, a clear line of development gradually emerged: if Song landscape painting was primarily concerned with constructing the form, structure, and order of nature, and Yuan landscape turned instead toward the inner life of the literati, then Shen Zhou, in a certain sense

Edited Interview Transcript 2 In the previous section of my conversation with Professor Luo Yanzi on Fan Kuan and Song landscape painting, we discussed how the great achievement of Song painting rested on a profound apprehension of the order of nature. Whether in the monumental, stele-like composition of Northern Song landscape or in the spatial ideal of landscapes “fit to be wandered through and inhabited,” Song painting was consistently addressing one central question: how

Edited Interview Transcript 1 This interview does not seek to turn Chinese art history into a dynastic survey unfolding in chronological order, nor is it meant to retreat into an overly sealed academic idiom. My point of departure is closer to a method of “seeing the large through the small”: moving from the Song dynasty to the modern period, selecting one representative painter from each era, and using his works, character, and fate as a way into the larger questions of how

Founded in 2008 at the initiative of China Minsheng Bank, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum was the first non-profit art museum in mainland China to emerge from a financial institution. It is currently located at No. 48 Weihai Road in Shanghai’s Huangpu District. From the outside, the building looks like an ordinary office block. Yet when I visited, it was hosting Sculpting This Life of Mine: A Major Giacometti Exhibition. Although the ticket desk was on the fifth floor and the ga

If you are visiting museums in Nanjing, the Jiangning Imperial Silk Manufacturing Museum is a wonderful choice. It does not win you over with a single “star object” right at the entrance. Instead, it excels at unfolding the cultural memory of a city slowly and gracefully: one end tied to the historical legacy of the Qing-era Jiangning Weaving Office, the other to the interwoven cultural threads of Dream of the Red Chamber, Yunjin brocade, classical gardens, and paper art. The

The Nanjing City Wall Museum is located at No. 1 Bianying, Laomendong, Qinhuai District, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, right next to the Zhonghua Gate barbican. It is a first-class national museum with a total floor area of 12,000 square meters. As a museum dedicated to the history and culture of ancient Chinese city walls, and as an exhibition venue supporting the application for World Cultural Heritage status, it is the largest specialized city wall museum in China. The museum

Jiangsu Art Museum, on Changjiang Road in Nanjing’s Xuanwu District, occupies a special place in the history of Chinese art. Built in 1936, it was the first national-level art museum in modern China, a milestone that marked the formal beginning of the country’s museum-based art development. Architect Xi Fuquan designed its original building, once known as the National Art Gallery. The façade of the main hall takes the shape of the Chinese character “山” (mountain), blending tr

Jinling Art Museum, located at No. 50 Jianzi Alley, Laomendong, Qinhuai District, Nanjing, is a comprehensive art institution devoted to exhibition, collection, and research. Its overall design was led by a renowned Chinese designer. The guiding concept was to preserve the original character of the industrial heritage site while making thoughtful adjustments to the interior structure and maximizing the use of space to meet the needs of modern exhibition practices. At the same

If you travel to Istanbul, what first rises in most people’s minds is probably the domes of its mosques, the wind off the Bosphorus, the legends of Topkapı Palace, or the particular kind of “imperial last splendor” embodied by Dolmabahçe Palace. But this time, what truly made me stop was neither a dome nor a chandelier. It was a group of paintings. I walked into the National Palaces Painting Museum, which operates under the Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye. What it holds

1. What makes Morandi exceptional in an age of outward art Among the major responses to the crises of the early twentieth century, Giorgio Morandi is unusual because he did not answer violence with visual violence. Much of European modernism moved outward: Futurism glorified speed and impact, Expressionism externalized psychic intensity, and Dada turned war into rupture, provocation, absurdity, and anti-art. Morandi chose the opposite direction. He reduced the world instead o