A double celebration

The Long Museum marks a decade in business with not one but two exhibitions, featuring masterpieces from around the world, Zhang Kun reports.

The Long Museum in Shanghai is celebrating its 10th birthday with two exhibitions on the West Bund: Being in the World, which features portraits, and Multiple Sights, which focuses on abstract art.

The two exhibitions are showcasing more than 260 sets of artworks that present an overview of modern and contemporary art around the world and start a dialogue between Chinese and Western cultures.

On the opening of both shows on Nov 13, the founders of the private museum, Liu Yiqian and his wife, Wang Wei, spoke about their journey over the past 10 years.

The Long Museum first opened in Pudong New Area on Dec 18,2012, before expanding to the West Bund space in Xuhui district on March 28, 2014. Two years later, a third branch of the museum opened in Chongqing city in southwestern China. Over the past decade, the institution has held about 200 large-scale exhibitions that welcomed more than 30 million visitors from home and abroad.

"In all these exhibitions, the Long Museum has been dedicated to the advocacy of traditional Chinese culture, promotion of Chinese contemporary art, and furthering cultural communication between China and the West," Liu says at the opening.