Minsheng Art Museum

The Minsheng Art Museum is quaintly located in the depths of the Shanghai Sculpture Garden—just look past the legs and Albert Einstein. The exterior is sleek and the interior has vast ceilings and stark walls. Liu Wei’s exhibit, Trilogy, is divided into three parts: Golden Section, Merely a Mistake and Open the Door.
The Golden Section holds oversized wood furniture (think armoires, dressers, desks, etc) that has been taken apart and re-pieced back together. Merely a Mistake is an even larger room with both wooden sculptures and oil paintings, all titled “Meditation.” The wooden sculptures look like the bare frames to a house or any other structure, but they have been stacked together to create intricate, geometric shapes. Some of the frames are also painted pale green, goldenrod and a faint lilac, making some of the structures reminiscent of Saarinen. The third, and my favorite, exhibition is titled Open the Door. The room is fairly bare, compared to the other two rooms and is also the only one which does not have overwhelmingly large wooden structures. On opposite ends of the room, there are neon lights, and in the center, there is a cluster of old fashioned tvs. The tvs sporadically take turns in powering on/off, and each time there is a booming buzz from the tv. The neon lights are also reminiscent of Dream House, which is located in Tribeca.