The story
On the west bank of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, a 1950s coal-unloading bridge still stands beside a museum of pale concrete vaults. This was a wharf where coal came off the river barges. In 2014 the architect Liu Yichun of Atelier Deshaus built the Long Museum West Bund here and kept the old hopper bridge, about 110 metres long, as part of the site. Inside, the concrete walls curve overhead like half-opened umbrellas.
The museum belongs to Liu Yiqian, a former taxi driver who made his fortune in finance, and his wife Wang Wei, two of China's best-known private collectors. They opened their first branch in Pudong in 2012 and later added museums in Chongqing and Wuhan. Wang Wei has concentrated on traditional Chinese painting and the so-called red classics, the revolutionary art of the Mao years, while the couple also buy ancient Chinese objects and Western art.
The purchase that made the museum known abroad came in November 2015 at Christie's in New York. Liu and Wang paid 170.4 million dollars for Amedeo Modigliani's Nu couché, a reclining nude painted in 1917 or 1918, at the time the second-highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. Liu is known for charging such purchases to his American Express card and collecting the points.
