Collector Michael Xufu Huang Is Launching His New Museum With a Triennial That Aims to Capture China’s ‘Millennial Zeitgeist’

The list of people who have
founded not one, but two, museums is small. The list of people who
have done so before the age of 26 might be nonexistent. That is,
until this March, when Michael Xufu Huang opens his new private
nonprofit, the X Museum, in Beijing. 

Huang announced last September
that he would be leaving M WOODS,
the Beijing museum he cofounded in 2014, to start a new space with
business partner Theresa Tse that is dedicated to charting the next
generation of Chinese artists. And, as if that wasn’t ambitious
enough, the 25-year-old art Chinese collector is seeking to define
the “zeitgeist of the millennial” with the new institution’s first
exhibition, a triennial.

“The X Museum we want to build
is a unique art museum in China that is devoted to creating
opportunities for young talents,” Huang tells Artnet News. “The
inaugural exhibition will set an academic tone for the
museum.”

The show, titled “How Do We
Begin,” is billed as the first edition of a “three-year rhythmic
review of Chinese contemporary art and its development with a focus
on emerging artists.” Organized by curator Poppy Dongxue Wu, it
will feature 33 emerging
Chinese artists under the age of 40, from Cui Jie, best known for
her futuristic cityscapes, to Guan Xiao, who makes humorous
installations inhabited by quirky bronze
sculptures. 

“The first edition of the
triennial reviews the development of technologies, how
they impact means of
production from multidisciplinary viewpoints,” Wu says. “It
speculates…what our relationship with media and technology would be
like in the 2020s.”

Huang and his team have also
convened an impressive four-person jury—Diana Campbell Betancourt,
artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation; Kate Fowle, the
director of MoMA PS1; Zhang Zikang, the director of the Central
Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing; and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the
creative director of London’s Serpentine Galleries—who will hand
out the first X Museum Triennial Award to one of the artists in the
show. (The monetary purse accompanying the award has not yet been
announced.)

The international flavor of the
jury reflects the
museum’s goal of dissolving the lines between Chinese and Western
art. “When contemporary
Chinese art was first brought to the stage of international art,
there was a conclusion that it carries a certain ‘Chinese-ness’
that cannot be simply translated into other languages,” Wu says.
“Millennial artists were born in the digital age, they grow up in
the context of
globalization and such trace of ‘Chinese-ness’ is not visible in
their practice.”

Huang has been collecting art
since he was 16, when his parents bought him a lithograph by Helen
Frankenthaler for his birthday. Since then, he’s amassed a
world-class collection of of-the-moment work, including pieces by
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ryan Gander, and Amalia Ulman. He was just a
sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania when he founded M WOODS
with husband-and-wife collectors Lin Han and Wanwan Lei. In just
six years, it has emerged as one of China’s more prominent private
art museums. 

Given that success, Huang’s
decision to transfer his collection away from M WOODS and form a
new nonprofit with Tse—whom he met at Penn—surprised some
onlookers. Although it did square with the flashy, confident
persona Huang has cultivated, the collector is quick to dispel the notion
that X Museum is a vanity project. 

“For a long time, I received a
lot of international attention, not only because of my role as a
collector but also because international artists I promoted were
brought in focus in China,” he says. “X Museum is an art space that
encourages innovation and inspires possibilities, not a place to
show off my collections.”

The first edition of the X
Museum Triennial, “How Do We Begin?” opens March 17 at the X Museum
in Beijing and will be on view through July 5, 2020.

The post Collector Michael Xufu Huang Is Launching His New
Museum With a Triennial That Aims to Capture China’s ‘Millennial
Zeitgeist’ appeared first on artnet News.