Centre Pompidou acquired 21 works by 15 Chinese contemporary artists with backing from French luxury fashion house Chanel, the Paris institution’s largest single purchase of works from the country that boosts its museum’s collection of contemporary Chinese art by nearly 20 percent.

Centre Pompidou began collecting contemporary Chinese art in 1976 and has assembled 150 works by 58 artists. The purchase of 21 works marks a significant addition to the institution’s collection.

The acquisition, divided in two batches, is tied with the exhibition “目Chine, une nouvelle génération d’artistes,” a survey on contemporary Chinese art that opened at Centre Pompidou on October 9 ahead of this week’s Art Basel Paris. The exhibition, featuring 53 works by 21 artists born from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, is the largest of its kind at the institution since 2003. It is the fruit of the Paris institution’s partnership with West Bund Museum in Shanghai, which was renewed for another five years in 2023. The exhibition also marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between France and China.

Alice Chen, Fill in the blanks (2005). Courtesy of the Artist.

The show, which runs through February 3, 2025, presents works by artists who are among a generation that grew up with China’s economic boom. It charts a transformative era of the country as well as how the reality is perceived and a future envisioned by this young generation, as reflected in the exhibition’s title (the Chinese character 目 means eye).

Chanel backs both the exhibition and the acquisition for an undisclosed amount. The first batch of the acquisition includes 11 pieces by nine artists, all of which are featured in the current exhibition, including Alice Chen’s conceptual work Fill in the blanks (2005), Lu Yang’s digital work Doku-Hungry Ghost (2022), and Cui Jie’s canvas work Sculpture Park (2023). Other artists featured in this batch of acquisition included Chen Wei, Hu Xiaoyuan, Qiu Xiaofei, Shen Xin, Wan Yang, and Yu Ji.

The second batch, which will consist of 10 works, will be unveiled towards the end of the exhibition, according to a Chanel spokesperson. This batch will include works by artists featured in the show as well as those who are not featured in the show but have created works that echo the theme of the exhibition. Among the 15 artists featured in this acquisition, seven are women artists.

Chen Wei, New Gate (2021). Photogaphie © Chen Wei. Courtesy of the
Artist and Centre Pompidou.

Chanel has backed Pompidou’s acquisition of artworks previously, focusing on women artists including Asian artists. But this was the first time for the fashion house to support the purchase of art by Chinese artists on this scale and place the works in the permanent collection of a Western institution.

Laurent Le Bon, president of the Centre Pompidou, noted in a statement support from the fashion house has enabled the institution to “deepen our engagement with the vibrant contemporary Chinese art scene twenty years after the ‘Alors la Chine?’ exhibition, which provided the first insight in a French institution into the vitality and diversity of contemporary Chinese creation at the beginning of the century.”

The French couture house, a popular brand across many countries in Asia, has been actively supporting arts and culture initiatives in the region in recent years. It has partnered with institutions including the Power Station of Art and the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, M+ in Hong Kong, and Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul.