Budi Tek’s Yuz Museum Launches New Shanghai Space
Yuz Museum Panlong opens a pop-up exhibition this week in anticipation of its grand opening. The new museum arrives as OCAT pauses its operations at several locations around China.
Genesis Tramaine, Last to Get My Hair Done (2020) (detail). Acrylic, oil sticks, Yeshua, oil pastels, prayer on canvas. 182.88 × 121.92 cm. Collection of Yuz Foundation.
The Yuz Museum Panlong will hold its first exhibition at Panlong Tiandi, a real estate development near Hongqiao Airport, from 27 April to 7 October.
The exhibition will take place at the timber courtyard building Xue Zhu Bower (or 'snow-covered bamboo') while the final touches are put on the Yuz Museum Panlong's own building nearby. The 1,300 square metre museum, which is being renovated by HBA architecture, will open in May.
Entitled Next Door, the exhibition at Xue Zhu Bower will feature 14 artists whose works engage with questions of identity, including Genesis Tramaine, Tomoo Gokita, Camille Henrot, and Chris Huen Sin Kan.
The Yuz Museum has been one of the strongest contemporary art institutions in China since it opened in former aircraft hangars in Shanghai's West Bund in May 2014.
It was founded by Indonesian art collector Budi Tek, who prided himself on collecting difficult, often gargantuan works including: Adel Abdessemed's three tangled aeroplanes Telle mère tel fils (2008); Xu Bing's Tobacco Project (2000/2004), a tiger-skin pelt made of 600,000 cigarettes; and Sun Yuan + Peng Yu's thrashing metal hose Freedom (2009).
Tek died in March 2022, with his daughter, Justine Alexandria Tek, stepping in as director of the museum.
While the Yuz Museum is expanding, another major institution is reportedly pausing its operations in Shanghai, Xi'an, and Beijing.
State owned enterprise OCT Group opened the OCAT art museum in Shenzhen in 2005. They added OCAT Shanghai—dedicated to new media art and led by Zhang Peili—in 2012, and expanded to Xi'an in 2013 and Beijing in 2015.
OCAT Shenzhen's Deputy Director Fang Lihua declined to say why the locations had stopped organising exhibitions, and whether the Shenzhen location might soon cease operations.
'We are not in a hurry to answer these questions, but we need to give OCAT and the team time. We need time to do what we can and continue to promote some core work of the institution,' he said.
He did, however, point out that OCAT's 18th anniversary exhibition in Shenzhen was entitled Off the Beaten Track.
He said OCAT 'needs to continue to explore new possibilities, so that this track can be extended instead of being cut off.' —[O]
