Artist: OLI Architecture PLLC
Location: East and Southeast Asia
Year of Completion: 2015
Researcher: Zhang Shangzhi
Since childhood, Mu Xin loved painting, literature, playing piano, and composing music. In 1946, Mr. Xin entered the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1949, he became the president of Hangzhou Painting Research Institute.
Later, he became a middle school teacher and an arts and crafts designer in Shanghai. He wrote privately and accumulated 20 works.He was imprisoned and upon his releasein 1979, he served as Secretary-General of the Arts and Crafts Association. In 1982, Mr. Xin moved to New York. He resumed painting and writing, and published more than thirty poems and anthologies on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. In the 2000s, Muxin was invited to Wuzhen, his home town, where he settled in 2006. Mr. Xin passed away in 2011. That same year, Wuzhen built the “Muxin Art Museum" in his honor.
The Muxin Museum is located on the north side of Wuzhen Xizha and above the Yuanbao Lake and is adjacent to the Wuzhen Grand Theatre. The museum not only provides a complete literature for the study of wooden hearts, but also an academic space between the past and the future.
In the architectural design, the museum becomes a space that blends in with the local landscape. Each facade is connected to the "water" and "street" through different texture patterns and colors built by concrete to echo the water town of Wuzhen. The urban texture has become a three-dimensional Chinese painting in the overall artistic conception.
In the interior space design of the building, each volume space is intertwined, and the “street” interspersed with each space is like a bridge between the museum and the visitors.
OLI Architecture PLLC is not only the art museum owned by Mu Xin but also the common space in Wuzhen. The choice of the color and material of this building represents not only the reading of Mr. Mu Xin but also the return to Wuzhen. As for the spatial design, on the basis of satisfying the needs of the display function, the museum not only completely represents the living conditions of Mr. Muxin during his lifetime in the spatial atmosphere rendered by lighting and space but also holds a spatial conversation with him through the motion sense of the facial features in the process of the public spatial participation.
That is to say, the whole building constructs the connection between the public and space through the spatial experience. The public participate in the conversation with Mr. Muxin through the integration between time and space and art also bridges it and the participation the public.
The Muxin Art Museum is managed by Ieoh Ming Pei and OLI’s Fabian Servagnat and is designed and constructed under the supervision of Hiroshi Okamoto and Bing Lin. In addition, it is funded by the Cultural Wuzhen Limited., Co and constructed by Jujiang Construction Group.
All copyright belongs to Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, Shanghai University.
