After the Centre Pompidou opened an outpost in Shanghai in 2019, it's now the Rodin Museum's turn to make its mark in the city. On September 27, Chinese collector Wu Jing will inaugurate a "Rodin Art Center" in partnership with the Parisian institution. "This is not a subsidiary, and the private center that will operate it does not report to the museum," explained Amélie Simier, the director of the Parisian establishment, which signed an agreement with the businesswoman in April 2023.
The long-gestating project was initially intended for Shenzhen, but local complexities led Wu, who was behind the first European art museum in Hangzhou, to relocate to Shanghai's booming Pudong district. She picked an iconic building: the former French pavilion at the 2010 World Expo, built by architect Jacques Ferrier, which subsequently housed the collection of Chinese bank Minsheng for several years.
The collection of some 40 pieces that will be exhibited comes partly from commissions for bronzes placed by Wu with the French museum for €20 million. The collector bought her first Rodins some 20 years ago, including Dosia and Suzon. Following Catherine Chevillot's advice, the former director of the Rodin Museum, this 19th-century sculpture lover immersed herself more deeply in the sculptor's abundant oeuvre.
Why open a venue to gather these artworks? "There is a growing number of temporary exhibitions in China, but young audiences and Chinese artists need longer exhibition times to learn and understand? And for that, you need an art institution," she explained to Le Monde, hoping to attract some 700,000 visitors a year.
Why should the Chinese be interested in France's most famous sculptor when they make up just 1% of the Paris museum's visitors? "It's a virtuous circle," Simier believes. Following the major Auguste Rodin exhibition organized in 2014 at Beijing's National Museum of China, visitor feedback proved "the importance of this outreach," she added. To make the museum an " artistic and cultural landmark in Shanghai" and attract local audiences, Wu is capitalizing on the French sculptor's collection of Chinese art on loan from the Paris museum, including a statue of Guanyin that Rodin cherished, terracotta figurines from the Tang and Sui dynasties and porcelain objects from the Ming and Qing dynasties.
The inaugural exhibition, which will remain open for two years, will also include some 30 sculptures by other artists associated with Rodin, including Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, his teacher, and Aristide Maillol and Antoine Bourdelle, his former students. To bring the site to life, its curator, Xianhe D. Kong, plans to initiate dialogues with contemporary artworks and organize regular forums to familiarize the Chinese with Rodin's work.
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