Chongqing- An attractive privately owned art museum reopened at a busier place in Chongqing, becoming a new hotspot of local entertainment.

Qian in Chinese means "shallow." Arts can be shallow, which means easy (accessible) for the public to get into. This is the founding motto of the Qian Art Museum.

"People think that arts are hard to understand. It's not because arts intuitively reflect human's living status and emotion, so an ordinary (untrained) mind should understand them if you intuitively look into them," said Chen Zhenwei, owner of the Qian Art Museum. "I would like to be a guide for people on appreciating arts and gaining spiritual enjoyment."

This museum has been holding art displays since 2020, including a photographic exhibition with Sweden, Denmark, and Norway's embassy in China. This November, the museum will display 100 works of Salvador Dalí, one of the most famous Spanish modern artists, alongside Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró.

Chen loved to share his thoughts on some works with the visitors around. Communication is important as it shallows the depth between the artwork and visitors' minds to strengthen the people's involvement. Chen thinks the ultimate goal is cultivating people's ability to appreciate the arts themselves.

Though not with a professional art background, Chen didn't lack experience in the art field. Before he founded the museum, he worked in an education agency. Since then, he has liked reading art books for pleasure and has attended art events in the city, knowing a lot of friends with artistic talents.

He is a self-educated art fan. While helping his friends make art displays, he found he had talent in this field. Even better, he had an enthusiasm for planning art exhibitions, thus making curator an ideal profession for him instead of an artist.

Hu Chaoxiang, an artist living in Yubei, displayed his work Just A Dark Cloud on the museum's opening day. 

"I've displayed several times of my works here. I think the good thing about Chen and his museum is that his and the museum's style is always simple, straightforward, and free," said Hu.

Being the curator of almost all displays in the museum, Chen said that he carefully picked every work on exhibition.

"Curator is not only a program manager. It should have artistic appreciation in its unique way. People think that only paintings on the wall are art," he said. "I believe every display I did is also artwork."

Qian Art Museum was founded in 2020 at Jinshan Ecool, a cultural park transformed from an industrial processing base in Chongqing. The museum's old location was an inconspicuous corner inside one of the buildings. On Oct 1, 2022, the museum's new site opened at the center square, the busiest area in the park.