Manchester Museum Art Collection opens in China

A collection of over 83 paintings from across Greater Manchester has opened in China for the first time ever, thanks to a curator from Bury who came up with the idea of raising cash by arranging for the art collections to go ‘on tour’.

Funded by the British Arts Council, Tony Trehy from Bury travelled to Beijing and Shanghai and met with the Beijing World Art Museum who signed up to take the collection from September for £150,000. He said, “I had a feeling that the negotiations would go well when I arrived because there was a poster outside the gallery announcing the exhibition in November with a picture of our Turner and Bury Art Gallery!” 

Bury will get around £15,000 from the show which is called "Toward Modernity: 300 Years of British Art" and it will be on tour for 14 months, taking in six national museums. It will be one of the biggest events in China, exposing the artwork to a projected figure of four million people (the Beijing show alone will have a visitor figure of 600,000), by comparison the biggest annual visitor in the UK is one million for Tate Modern . The first show opens in Changsha and will be featured in the British Council's Cultural Olympiad Festival in China "UK Now". In an indication of the importance the British Council attach to this, they have decided to use the opening of the exhibition in Beijing in November as the closing ceremony of the Festival - which means it likely that the British Ambassador will officiate.

Beijing officials have already expressed an interest in future tours and Bury is working on new money-making tours to Japan and Taiwan.

The gallery launched the collection this month and was featured on China’s TV new channel CCTV, footage can be viewed here htpp://english.cntv.cn/program/cultureexpress/20121116/106557.shtml

 ENDS

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For further information please contact Peter Doherty or Ellie Langton in the council press office on 0161 253 6096 or 5394. Alternatively please email communications@bury.gov.uk