Private Art Museum Rising

An art museum in Shanghai just got highlighted in a fashion award show, while the founder was awarded as the Cultural People of Public Welfare. His Himalayas Art Museum maybe haven’t been popular with the public, but the fair-style museum created a new definition of Chinese art market, although he doesn’t want to be called as businessman..


“When museum was a national concept, build by the government, burdened with a heavy educational and cultural representing mission, it was not lovely to Chinese public life. Because it was similar as a media department, aimed to teach the public as the country throat and tongue.” said atheistic researcher Shuwan QIU.

As she assumed, the private art museums like Himalayas would not stop growing, it will seek out more and more market space in Shanghai and other tier one cities. Reasons are complicated, but the main factors can be the strong financial support from private entrepreneurs and the customers’ cultural consuming demand based on the inflexible state-owned museums social background

The Himalayas foundation was from the mother company, a real estate group, which provides an opportunity to set up a commercial-wised free art museum in Shanghai. But still, the art museum is just one part of a comprehensive commercial project, the Himalayas Centre. The centre comprises shopping mall, hotel, stage leasing and art museum. Under this mutual-support from each segment, the art museum can completely be independent compare to the traditional self-running museums.


The market should have potential customers, which is the basic power of the founding. Nowadays, private art museums are mostly operating modern arts, which sounds far away from common life, but exactly the focus in current art market. This was also the start and insisting of these private art museums. But modern arts was overcoming a huge challenge in China in the 80s, when Chinese were still respecting and immersing into the traditional Chinese or classical western arts. The typical debate was about a nude picture on a public wall in Beijing, which even drove out the government to criticise the art was wrong in the ideology, could lead a wrong direction of Chinese art atheistic. But this issue can’t be a problem in recent China any more.

After years’ market cultivation, more and more Chinese artists with international fame raised the whole modern art market in China, and they also became wealthy by the market prosperity.

Spiritual satisfaction decides the market location; those who are pursuing spiritual life after having a fulfilled material life are the main target group. This locating sense also presents the current luxury consumption trend, which is combining commodities with arts to guide customer to taste the intangible value but not only the productive level. At this point, Ms.Qiu believes this kind of private art museums will be more and more absorbed into other commercial modals, the only risk is how to prevent atheistic fatigue, which seems not concerned seriously so far.
But just for its free entrance and not bad collections so far, we shall already take an optimistic eye on it.

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