Shedding light on storehouse secrets

China Plum Blossom Art Center will open to public

It has become a tradition for the National Art Museum of China to celebrate Spring Festival, or the Lunar New Year, by exhibiting part of its immense collection.

This year, it has expanded the scale to fill nine exhibition halls with artworks from not only its storehouse but also from nine other fine art museums around the country.

Selected Collections from 10 Art Museums demonstrates these museums' efforts to enrich and study their collections, so they are better presented to the public.

It particularly marks the Beijing debut of many paintings with a wide range of styles and motifs from seven provincial and city museums. It offers a glimpse of different regions' art heritage, which have developed unique characteristics based on consistent academic reviews.

"Our collections tell how Chinese artists pursued modernism in the first half of the 20th century, and it shows Guangdong province's cultural landscape about 50 years ago," Guangdong Fine Arts Museum's director Luo Yiping says.

The museum brings Realistic oil paintings by those who first introduced Western artistic language to describe their native land and people, and spearheaded modern Chinese art's enlightenment by founding independent art groups. It also displays representative works of the Lingnan Painting School, which injected innovation into Chinese painting.

The Hubei Museum of Arts, the youngest of all participating museums at 5 years old, narrates a different chapter of history. Its selection of 60 prints record New China's industrial construction and factory workers' daily lives.