Macau: Yue Minjun at the Macau Art Museum

Unfortunately the typical Macau itinerary does not include the Macau Art Museum, which is really a gem. It was designed by architect I.M Pei, probably most known for Pyramide du Louvre in Paris, and features exciting exhibitions.

Here’s a picture looking out from the museum, towards the Grand Lapa Hotel and the Sands Casino. You can see the beautiful cobble stone patterns in the grounds – that’s what I love about Macau. Just a shame that there are not cobble stones on every street. Anyway, back to the Art Museum.

The museum is spacious – the four floors provide room for a number of exhibitions and usually one always includes artwork from the Beijing Palace Museum. This time, when we visited, the exhibition on the fourth floor, which was about the history of tea featured beautiful historical teapots from the Palace Museum (unfortunately you can’t take pictures in there).

The special exhibition themed on ‘tea’ features an array of nearly 170 pieces/sets of tea culture relics from the collections of the Palace Museum and the National British Victoria and Albert Museum. It also includes silver tea culture relics from the collections of the National British Victoria and Albert Museum (the exhibition runs until March 9).

The third floor showcased watercolour paintings of Macau, prints of the 19th Century about China (taken by Westerners – until June 30) and also a photography exhibition featuring traditional shops in Macau.

Currently the highlight is the Yue Minjun show “Neo-idolatry” on the second floor. It runs until February 16 and showcases an eclectic mix of his works, 52 pieces/sets oils and sculptures created over this past two years.

Yue Minjun is known for his laughing bald-headed “idol”. Using a large amount of colour and often overdone, grotesque or even bloody figures Yue Minjun enjoys breaking taboos.

Yue Minjun even replicated a studio in the museum:

This is artwork created from magazines – Yue Minjun cut out advertisements and mounted all the products on top of each other, to show the abundance and critise consumerism.