Located in the Xuhui District in Shanghai, West Bund has been a center of transportation, logistics, and production in China for over 100 years. West Bund oversees the Huangpu River and is positioned to provide world-class urban waterfront public space. The area has many venues, including the West Bund Museum, the Culture and Art Pilot Zone, the Shanghai Center of Photography, and the YUZU Museum.
Design
Sir David Chipperfield and his team designed the West Bund Museum. The museum is considered to have improved both sides of the Huangpu River. It is a core venue of Art Museum Avenue. Its main objective is to create an open and cozy interdisciplinary cultural center that allows the public to participate in it.
David Chipperfield is an English architect who established David Chipperfield Architects in 1985. He has worked on the design of various museums worldwide. Including the Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri, the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, Germany, and many others. This architectural practice has offices in London, Berlin, Milan, and Shanghai.
The West Bund Museum covers an area of 20,000 square meters, and it took six years to complete its construction. The art museum consists of three main gallery buildings placed in a pinwheel formation around a double-height atrium lobby, which has three different entrances. Inside the building, visitors can go to a sunken courtyard at a lower level. If you choose to climb the stairs in the lobby, you will arrive in the central hall. It gives access to the main gallery spaces. There is also a book shop and café in the beautifully designed building.
Pompidou
The Centre Pompidou Paris and West Bund Group have agreed on a cultural partnership. The Centre Pompidou is a cultural center that opened its door in 1977. It houses the Public Information Library, a modern art museum, and a center for music and acoustic research. Pompidou was named after the president who envisioned it. In the five years following the opening of the art museum, the Parisian cultural center is showing several exhibitions in the new museum as part of this collaboration between France and China.
The art museum has featured a wide variety of exhibits. One of the most recent ones, Architectures of Greater Paris, was in celebration of the partnership between West Bund Museum and Centre Pompidou. The exhibition presented a selection of Parisian architecture constructed between 1948 and 2020. Its layout highlighted Paris’s as imagined by a new generation of architects after World War II. It is an inspiring way to see how the city’s architecture over the years.
The museum also hosted exhibits featuring the local emerging Chinese artistic scene with Chen Wei: Make me illusory. The Voice of Things was an exhibition that brought together a collection of emblematic works from the avant-gardes to the early 20th century. Additionally, the art museum hosts workshops on varying subjects and even a summer camp.
