Miró
in China.
Three consecutive public exhibitions, across five years, that brought a private collection of Joan Miró prints — acquired in Japan and held by Shanghai World Trade Holdings — into mainland Chinese view at three different scales: a national art museum, a department-store concourse, and an industrial-conversion museum on a Zhejiang river.
A private holding of more than two hundred Joan Miró prints — lithographs, etchings, and original print series spanning the bulk of the artist's working life — acquired in 2012 from a Japanese private collector, held since by Shanghai World Trade Holdings. Between 2012 and 2016 the collection was brought before mainland Chinese audiences three times, in three different kinds of room.
The first showing, January 2012 at Shanghai Art Museum, was the museum-grade frame: a roughly three-month run with full curatorial apparatus, registering the collection in mainland China as a museum event rather than a commercial display. The second, October 2015 to January 2016 at Réel Department Store on Jing'an, Shanghai, opened the collection to a non-museum public — over a hundred prints in the building's central concourse, sound and light staging around the work. The third, the National Day window of October 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taizhou — Atelier Deshaus's poured-concrete vaults inside a 1950s grain depot — was the tightest curatorial cut, staged as the museum's pre-opening event under the reading Miró · Desire · The Person. One private body of Miró's printed work, three different Chinese publics.
"I work like a gardener … things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen."— Joan Miró, 1958
Three Exhibitions
2012, 2015, 2016 — three rooms, one collection.
i · 2012 · Shanghai Art Museum
Illusion of Reality.
Illusion of Reality — 2012 Joan Miró Print Exhibition. The collection's first systematic public showing in mainland China. The exhibition opened at Shanghai Art Museum on 15 January 2012 and ran approximately three months. A museum-grade frame: dedicated galleries, full curatorial apparatus, the kind of showing that lets a major modernist register in the Chinese press as a museum event rather than a commercial display. By all available reports it was the first time the bulk of the collection — recently brought in from Japan — was presented to a mainland audience.
ii · 2015–16 · Réel Department Store, Shanghai
Mirophone — A Print Experience.
Mirophone — A Print Experience. October 2015 to early January 2016, in the public concourse of Réel Department Store, Jing'an, Shanghai. Over a hundred prints spanning more than fifty years of Miró's working life. The show was experiential rather than scholarly — sound, light, and interactive zones around the prints, designed to introduce a non-museum audience to the work and to let visitors encounter Miró's originals at zero distance without leaving the country. Lead organiser: Shanghai FTZ International Cultural Investment & Development. Co-organisers: Shanghai Dasitian Cultural Development; Réel Department Store (Shanghai). Supporters: Shanghai World Trade Holdings; Shanghai Shihua Art Foundation.
iii · 2016 · Museum of Contemporary Art Taizhou
Miró · Desire · The Person.
Miró · Desire · The Person. Ten days during the 2016 National Day window — 28 September to 8 October — at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taizhou, the new building by Atelier Deshaus on the Haimen River. The show was staged as the museum's opening warm-up event, ahead of its formal launch.
Curatorially, the works were grouped into three reading zones — Miró and the Person, Women, and The Desirer — drawing out desire as a recurring motif across Miró's figure work. Co-organisers: Jiaojiang District Committee Propaganda Department; Jiaojiang Bureau of Culture, Radio, Television and Press; Jiaojiang Federation of Literary and Art Circles; and Shanghai World Trade Holdings. (The host venue is documented separately as an architectural edition.)
The Source
A Japanese collector's holding, brought to China.
The collection itself is a body of Miró's printed work — lithographs, etchings, and series sheets that span the bulk of the artist's working life. It was acquired in 2012 from a Japanese private collector, previously one of the principal Asian custodians of Miró prints. Since acquisition the collection has been held by Shanghai World Trade Holdings. It is held privately and is not on permanent display; the three exhibitions described above are the principal occasions on which it has been opened to the public.
Why Miró
The painter the three shows were making the case for.
Joan Miró (1893–1983) is held alongside Picasso, Matisse, and Paul Klee as one of the principal painters of the European twentieth century. Born in Barcelona, working between Mont-roig, Paris, and Mallorca, he developed a private vocabulary of stars, women, birds, suns, and moons that defined one of the most coherent oeuvres of the period. The standard reference points are the major retrospectives — Centre Pompidou (1980), MoMA (1993–94, on the artist's centenary), Tate Modern (2011) — and his own foundation, the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, opened 1975. In mainland China, museum-grade Miró shows have remained relatively rare; the Museum of Art Pudong's Joan Miró: Women, Birds, Stars in Shanghai (2023, with Fundació Joan Miró) is the largest to date, and sits a decade after the 2012 Shanghai Art Museum show described above.
Public references · the three shows, the painter, the host venue
- i. Miró · Desire · The Person — 2016 Taizhou opening — Sina Collection, 2 October 2016 report on the Taizhou opening, naming the three reading zones, the dates, and all co-organisers. collection.sina.com.cn
- ii. Mirophone · Réel Mall preview — Sina Collection, 13 August 2015. Announces the Réel Mall print-experience show with full organiser list and the "zero-distance" framing. collection.sina.com.cn
- iii. Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona — the artist's official foundation, established 1975, the principal scholarly reference for Miró's work and exhibition history. fmirobcn.org
- iv. Joan Miró: Women, Birds, Stars — Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, 2023; the largest mainland Chinese Miró exhibition to date, in partnership with Fundació Joan Miró. fmirobcn.org press release
- v. Joan Miró 1893–1983 at Tate — collection page and the 2011 retrospective The Ladder of Escape. tate.org.uk
— Studio archive
Request the Miró collection materials.
200+ Joan Miró prints, acquired 2012 from a Japanese private collector. Three public exhibitions: Shanghai Art Museum (2012, co-presented), Réel (2015–16), Taizhou Old Grain Museum (2016). Catalogue and provenance documentation by introduction.
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