SHANGHAI, April 1 — Located between the Huangpu River and Longteng Avenue, the West Bund Art Museum will form a key part of the West Bund Masterplan — which intends to turn this former industrial area into a new cultural district.

The strip of over nine square kilometres also includes privately run art galleries, such as an exhibition space run by the Chi She artists collective and Schmidt Hammer Lassen's Cloud Pavilion.

And earlier this month, contemporary art curator Qiao Zhibing inaugurated Tank Shanghai, a 60,000-square-metre space integrating multilevel exhibition spaces, plazas, gardens, a bookstore, an education center and restaurants.

And, set to open later this year, the West Bund Art Museum will further expand the West Bund's cultural hub. The 22,000-square-meter space — designed by British architect David Chipperfield, who spoke about his design recently with The Art Newspaper — features three main galleries, centred around a three-story lobby with a triple-height atrium.

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The pinwheel configuration of the galleries is highlighted by large windows at their outer ends offering panoramic views over the park, the river and the city.

A wing of the glass building will be home to a satellite location of Paris's Centre Pompidou for a renewable five-year period, an agreement confirmed this week during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to France.

More than 20 exhibitions and events are planned for the gallery's first five years, which will feature artworks from the Centre Pompidou's collections and works of Chinese contemporary art.

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“When we designed the building it wasn't for the Centre Pompidou,” Chipperfield told The Art Newspaper. “The building has a more generic feeling, because we didn't have an idea of what the content might be. You could argue that in the long term that might be useful, because it is a looser-fit idea of what a museum might be — three huge spaces which you can just play with.”

Meanwhile, the West Bund Art & Design fair, which had its inaugural edition in 2014, will this year take place in the area's West Bund Art Centre space, November 7-10. — AFP-Relaxnews