National Art Museum of China

National Art Museum of China
中国美术馆

Address: 1 Wusi Street, Dongcheng district, Beijing
Hours: 9:00-17:00(no entry after 16:00)
Closed Mondays
General admission: Free (passport required for entry)
Tel: (+86-10) 84033500

The National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) is the only national museum of the plastic arts in China. It was opened to the public in 1963, and soon became a national cultural landmark. The museum building is a six-story loft pavilion with two wings imitating traditional Chinese architectural style. It has yellow glazed tiles on the roof and is enclosed with a roofed corridor around the exterior of the ground floor. A wide flight of stairs leads to the entrance, where a horizontal name board inscribed by the founding father of New China, Mao Zedong (1893-1976), hangs. The building is 18,000 square meters in floor area and houses 21 galleries. A 3,000-square-meter sculpture garden lies next to the building.

The museum is home to over 110,000 works of art in different categories spanning from antiquity to modern times. Apart from fine art masterpieces by acclaimed Chinese artists active in every period of history, the museum's permanent collection also includes lively folk arts that still thrive across the country, such as clay figurines, paper cuts, and new year woodblock prints. They constitute a complete landscape of the history of fine art in China.

Among the many donors to NAMOC were the German art collector couple Peter (1925-96) and Irene Ludwig (1927-2010), who generously donated 117 works (in 89 sets) by artists from Europe and the United States, including Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter. Exhibitions featuring their donations are mounted now and then in homage to them.