START Museum, on Shanghai’s West Bund, has been open for nearly two years since 2022. Of the four inaugural exhibition installments originally planned, it has now reached the third. From “START” to “Narrating the Instant” to the current “Boundaries,” each exhibition has featured an exceptionally strong selection of works.

“I have always felt that our inaugural exhibition series would hold up anywhere in the world,” the museum director He Juxing said.

“Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. The third installment, on view from September through November 2024, presented works by thirty-one important Chinese and international artists, including Luc Tuymans, Cai Guo-Qiang, Nam June Paik, Tracey Emin, Gordon Matta-Clark, Wu Shanzhuan, Liu Xiaodong, Matthew Barney, Yu Hong, Li Yongbin, Seth Price, Xu Zhen, Tomás Saraceno, Duan Jianyu, and Na Buqi, spanning the 1970s to the present. Together, the works took up a shared subject: the boundaries of art and the injuries those boundaries can inflict.

We visited START Museum and spoke with He Juxing, who had returned from a business trip only the day before and still looked road-weary. Meeting him again, he was much as before: dressed in a plain T-shirt, a shell jacket, and Converse sneakers, genial and talkative. Once he began discussing exhibitions and the works he loves, he seemed to have no end of opinions, insight, enthusiasm, or sense of social responsibility about making art more accessible to a broader public.

“I really do want more people to come see our exhibitions. I don’t just mean the so-called high-net-worth crowd, coming in on complimentary tickets from banks or institutions and taking a quick look for the spectacle of it. I want to attract more young people who truly care about art, students, for example, or people just starting work. So we lowered the ticket price again and again. When we first opened it was 100; later it was 80; now it is 50.” He told us that only after the price dropped to 50 yuan did he gradually notice a change in the audience: younger people, more ardent ones, who lingered again and again before the works and studied the exhibition booklet closely.

Geng Jianyi, Home-Exhibition Document, 2000. “Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. The current exhibition includes thirty-two works in total, with one work or group of works by each artist. When we asked about the curatorial logic behind the installation and the ideal route through the show, He said there was, in fact, no prescribed route; he hoped viewers would feel free to interpret each work on their own terms.

“A lot of people can arrive at a lot of different conclusions in my exhibitions. Some people come in with a calculator and still may not be able to calculate the total value of the whole show, because they are working from market experience. But many more people see artworks here that they have never seen before,” He said with a laugh.

“Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. Wang Youshen, Portrait Series: Birthday Banquet, 1990. At the entrance to the exhibition, the first thing we saw was a group of “portraits” made of wooden boards and set atop a row of enormous metal racks. It makes a fitting opening image: a crowd within the artwork facing another crowd, the exhibition’s visitors, who come from every walk of life and every sort of professional and social background.

“This work is by the Chinese artist Wang Youshen, from the 1980s and 1990s. Using wooden boards as his material, he renders people of different temperaments and social identities as flattened facial portraits. There is no specific subject; it is simply a kind of feeling on the artist’s part,” He told us. Zhang Peili, Children’s Playground, 1992. Yang Shaobin, X-Rear Blind Spot No. 2, 2008. “Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. Passing through Zhang Peili’s video installation, we encountered a very rare work: a lung, long since blackened, suspended in formaldehyde.

“It is the lung of an injured coal miner. The artist took the actual object from a certain research institute and made it the subject of the work. On the surface, it looks like the tragedy of a coal miner’s life coming to an end, but underneath it is really an indictment of the way modernization exacts the price of human life.” Tomás Saraceno, Flying Garden / Airport City / 32SW, 2007. “Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. In the exhibition’s first gallery, the most conspicuous and physically largest work is this one by Saraceno, who trained as an architect.

Transparent spheres are wrapped and bound in lines like a spiderweb, their force extending in every direction. In the daylight leaking through the floor-to-ceiling windows on one side, you can observe the relation between the clear balloons and the surrounding air, while also sensing in their swollen forms a charge of potential energy, as if something were about to happen.

“Spiderwebs carry traces of life. Formally, these bubbles have tension, but also risk, because they are made of air. It is a highly symbolic method of construction.” He told us that the artist’s experience raising spiders was intimately bound up with the making of the work. Luc Tuymans, Tree, 2019. “Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. To its right hangs Tuymans’s very characteristic Tree. By a happy stroke, the afternoon sun falls directly on that wall, and the natural daylight forms a subtle afternoon “symphony” with the unnatural, fluorescent-purple tree in the painting, produced by the reflection of a surveillance camera.

“Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. Zhang Huan, Rubens, 2001. “Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. If Saraceno’s work, by virtue of its scale, shape, and movement between the tangible and the intangible, happens to serve as a threshold between the first gallery and the next, then in that next space the object that most immediately draws the eye is this gleaming golden sculpture.

It derives, in fact, from a performance Zhang Huan made in New York. After completing the action, he cast the work from his own body, turning it into a sculpture that can be touched and that possesses a fuller spatial presence.

“When he made that performance, he imagined that fifty hands had touched his body, and those fifty hands all had different identities: bankers, beggars, kings, saints. What Zhang Huan was discussing was the relationship, in a particular setting, between his body and these different cultures and identities.” He told us that many of the “hands” on site belonged to volunteers, while many others may have belonged to people no one knew, perhaps passersby who simply happened upon the performance and stopped to watch.

Wang Yin, Four Seasons: Summer, 2007. Calvin Marcus, Stretched Sturgeon, 2019. START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. Looking across the exhibition as a whole, it is not hard to see that He also has a fondness for artists who may not be especially famous, or who are very young. He told us with a smile, “When I see a young artist and the courage with which he or she pushes a personal idea into being, I find that deeply moving.”

Na Buqi, Landscape Beyond Space No. 4, 2015. Left: Kati Heck, Drinking Song of Earth’s Suffering, 2017. Right: Li Shan, Reading, 2005. “Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. The juxtaposition of Kati Heck’s small theatrical scene with Li Shan’s tiger painting creates another layer of visual and thematic impact. Heck is both an artist and a playwright, and dramatic conflict and contradiction recur throughout her work.

“The identities symbolized by each figure in the painting have nothing to do with one another, yet they are connected. Every time I look at the work I feel torn; it seems contradictory, yet harmonious,” He said.

“Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. Left: Shin Meekyoung, Translation-Bronze Age, 2009. Right: Translation-Vase, 2013. “Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. The only artist in the exhibition represented by two works is the Korean woman artist Shin Meekyoung. At first glance, we took them for some new ceramic firing technique; only later did we realize that both works were made on a soap base polished to a nearly deceptive likeness.

“The plinths underneath are not actually part of the works. They are the crates the works traveled in, and we kept them exactly as they were and used them for display. I think that is rather interesting too,” He said. Urs Fischer, Two Nails, 2012. Liu Xiaodong, Yi Ma Tu, 2008. “Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. Since the museum opened, He has been seriously involved in every exhibition, each one part of the museum’s broader arrangement.

As for what that arrangement is, he sees it more as a way of opening things up than of closing them down: “Every exhibition at START Museum first raises a substantial question about art, but that kind of question cannot be exhausted by an exhibition. We only want to use the question to spark something and give more people inspiration. I have always felt that among ten thousand viewers, there will be ten thousand views of contemporary art.”

“Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. In the second-floor gallery, the work that makes viewers crane their necks and tilt their heads upward is Yu Hong’s Sky Canopy, which has an intriguing connection to the theatrical quality in Kati Heck’s work. For something so contemporary, it somehow takes on a faintly sacred air here. Tracey Emin, Every Part of Me’s Bleeding, 1999. “Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. We had grown so used to seeing Tracey Emin’s neon works at exhibitions and art fairs that we scarcely paid attention, until He told us, “What you may not know is that this is actually the first work in what became Tracey Emin’s signature sexual-neon series.”

When we widened our eyes in surprise that no wall label explained this, He laughed and said, “The truth is, we really do have a great many good things here. We just do not want to make a special point of them. We only hope viewers will see them and feel them for themselves.”

“Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. “I have always believed that the work only becomes itself when you see it. That is also why I hope more people will walk into START Museum.” He said he does not much care whether others approve of this mode of installation or this way of drawing connections.

“Some people come in with textbooks and cannot find a historical conclusion anywhere in my exhibition, because it is not using what is in art-history textbooks to discuss standards of artistic value. Nor can they get from me some ready-made conclusion to hand to the audience.” Left: Wu Shanzhuan, Paradise, 1993. Right: Qin Qi, Awkward Pine and Crane, 2006. “Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. He feels that a museum should not impose too many restrictions, definitions, methods, or formats.

“You have to understand that once an artwork leaves the artist’s studio, it is not a sacred object. It is simply an ordinary thing, an object that carries the artist’s creative thought.” It is the surrounding environment, the other objects, and the people around it that give it a different “life cycle.” That environment may be an art museum or a museum, but it may also be a home, the natural world, or any place under heaven that an object can reach.

“Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. Liam Gillick, Revised Zone, 2012. “Boundaries,” installation view, START Museum inaugural exhibition, Season 3, 2024. When we asked what advice, as a veteran collector who began working with museums and building a collection in the 1990s, he would give to younger collectors, he smiled and said, “You have to understand art, because only then will you know which work to make a move on, which work to hold, and how long to hold it.”

And how does one come to understand art? In He’s view, for a collector, reading books and seeing exhibitions are far from enough.

“Once you start spending money, the matter becomes important in your life. If all you do is look at exhibitions, you will never become a collector, because exhibitions have already satisfied your aesthetic needs.”

“Experience, lessons, and judgment all have to be bought.” Image courtesy of START Museum.