The Mu Xin Art Museum, which opened November 15, 2015 in Wuzhen, China. (Shen Zhonghai)

The late artist, writer, and poet Mu Xin was once jailed by Chinese authorities for his role as an intellectual, but he’s now being celebrated in China with the opening of a new museum dedicated solely to his life’s work.

The new Mu Xin Art Museum held its grand opening on November 15 in the artist’s hometown of Wuzhen, a 1,300-year-old canal town an hour outside Shanghai that now attracts large numbers of tourists thanks to its preserved traditional architecture. With a structure designed by U.S. firm OLI Architecture and inspired by Mu Xin’s work, the new museum is overseen by founding director and artist Chen Danqing, who studied with Mu Xin in New York.

The 72,118-square-foot structure was designed by OLI’s founders Bing Lin and Hiroshi Okamoto (who has worked on projects with I.M. Pei), with interior design by Fabian Servagnat. With eight galleries, the building is composed of a series of floating rooms that are intended to reflect the creation of space in the landscape paintings for which Mu Xin is known. The architects chose concrete for the exterior, with a pattern meant to imitate Mu Xin’s ink brush in the watercolor landscapes.

While the setting of the new building at the edge of the town’s Yuanbao Lake appears tranquil, the tumultuous period of history Mu Xin lived through was anything but. Born in 1927 to a wealthy family, he studied at the Shanghai Fine Art School and pursued both painting and writing, eventually being named the president of the Hangzhou Painting Studies Society. But as an intellectual during the Cultural Revolution, his works were destroyed by the authorities and he was imprisoned three times, including once in an air-raid shelter in solitary confinement from 1971 to 1972. He continued to produce work in secretive conditions, including his famous Prison Notes, and was eventually exonerated in 1979 and named the Secretary General of the China Arts and Crafts Association before moving to New York in 1982.

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(Source:jingdaily.com,  Author:Liz Flora)