Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project Shanghai

The unprecedented five-year partnership between the Centre Pompidou and the Shanghai West Bund Development Group Co., Ltd is organized around several major lines of approach: 

• lending works from the Centre Pompidou collections; 
• designing exclusive exhibitions in resonance with the local cultural context; 
• implementing the cultural programme and mediation activities; 
• training museum professionals; 
• presenting projects and exhibitions by Chinese artists in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. 

The "Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project" was inaugurated in Shanghai on 6 November 2019, in the presence of Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic, and Franck Riester, Minister for Culture 

To date, it is the most significant project for cultural exchange and cooperation between the two countries. 

The building designed by British architect David Chipperfield stands on the banks of the Huangpu River in the heart of the "Xuhui Waterfront", which is destined to become one of the largest cultural districts in Shanghai and Asia. 

"The Shape of Time" (curator: Marcella Lista) is the first of the semi-permanent tours introducing the history of art in the 20^th and 21^st centuries that are due to be rolled out successively over the next five years.

Presented until May 2021, this first tour proposes to showcase major artists from the collection of the Musée national d'art moderne with the help of one hundred works and documents. Extending from the beginnings of modernity at the turn of the 20^th century, which overturned the canons governing the aesthetics and even the very concept of art works, to contemporary artists' visions of the globalized world, it illustrates an intense dissemination of forms and ideas. 

The second semi-permanent tour, "The Voice of Things", is on display from July 2021 to February 2023. 
It brings together a collection of emblematic works, ranging from the avant-gardes of the early 20^th century testifying to the revolution in aesthetic norms and the very status of the work of art, to the most recent artist creations that question our globalised world, and illustrates the importance of the object in the history of modernity.