At 10 P.M., how do you slip, in an instant, from the noise of Nanjing’s commercial center into a quiet yet monumental world of floral art? The answer is Deji Art Museum, the only museum in the world open until midnight. On October 24, 2025, the museum’s signature long-term exhibition since its opening in August 2023, “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” returns in its first major reinstallation after more than two years, with nearly one-third of the works on view newly replaced.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. The exhibition presents 140 flower-themed works by 109 Chinese and international masters, from Impressionism to the present. Among them are canonical figures of modern art, including Monet, Renoir, Manet, Cezanne, Munch, Picasso, and Matisse, as well as major contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama, David Hockney, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, and Yoshitomo Nara. It also includes twentieth-century Chinese pioneers who studied abroad, among them Sanyu, Pan Yuliang, Wu Dayu, Wu Guanzhong, Zao Wou-Ki, and Chu Teh-Chun, alongside globally recognized contemporary Chinese artists such as Chen Yifei and Zhang Xiaogang.

Before the opening, we spoke not only with Shen Boliang, the artistic director of Deji Art Museum, about how “flowers” in the exhibition connect stories and social and cultural contexts across time and place, but also with Irene, the museum’s director, about how this private museum, rooted inside a commercial complex, has managed to move against the current, sustaining both scholarly rigor and public visibility, and making art part of lived experience. Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. The exhibition unfolds in four strongly narrative chapters, “Cross-Pollination,” “Avant-Gardening,” “Beyond Flowers,” and “Blooming Through,” together tracing a picture of mutual exchange among flowers and art, East and West, across more than a century.

“With this reinstallation, we not only added a great many works, but also strengthened the internal logic among the four chapters,” Shen Boliang told us on-site during installation. “The works form a chainlike narrative experience. Every two or three works can tell a moving story, creating an art environment with real meaning. You can see how each section is linked continuously, one work fastening onto the next.”

The first chapter, “Cross-Pollination,” is a sweeping metaphor for exchanges between Chinese and Western civilizations. The narrative begins with a wall gathering 12 works on the theme of the rose. Designed with inspiration from the nineteenth-century Paris Salon, it ranges from Aristide Maillol’s Bouquet of Roses, from 1941-1943, to Damien Hirst’s Dark Pink Rose, from 2019, each work suggesting a subtle relationship between art and flowers.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. “The modern rose we know today is actually the product of a hybrid between the classical European rose and the Chinese monthly rose,” Shen Boliang told us. This new species was born in 1867; with fuller petals, richer color, and a more delicate, complex structure, it was perfectly suited to the Impressionists’ obsessive pursuit of light and shadow.

“Impressionist artists at the time were deeply devoted to the modern rose. The works in this section, from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, Fauvism, and then to the exchanges and mutual influences between Western modern art and Chinese modern art, really form an interlocking narrative.”

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. One important work here is Picasso’s classic Blue Period painting Vase of Flowers, along with the newly added Vase of Flowers from 1904. Together, the two works witness his transition from the bleak austerity of the Blue Period to the warmth and romance of the Rose Period. The reason was the arrival of the first important muse of his life, Fernande Olivier.

The painting was made one month after the two met. Blue remains the dominant tone of the background and the vase, but the ocher tabletop already brings in warmth, while pink, orange, yellow, white, and purple flowers emerge in profusion, suffusing the picture with vitality, poetry, and a dreamlike texture.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. The work of Wu Dayu, known as “the father of Chinese abstract art,” is placed in direct dialogue with paintings by Picasso and Matisse.

“In Wu Dayu’s surviving manuscripts, we found that he states very clearly: ‘We should learn from Picasso, but Picasso cannot contain us. . . . I often go to museums, but I never copy. I want to remember the impression, not be controlled by them,’” Shen Boliang told us. “In Wu Dayu’s surviving manuscripts, we found that he states very clearly: We should learn from Picasso, but Picasso cannot contain us. . . . I often go to museums, but I never copy; copying emphasizes technique and often neglects feeling.”

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. Jeff Koons’s large classical pink marble installation Pink Ballerina stands out sharply in the same space as paintings steeped in a classical atmosphere. The work was inspired by a German porcelain ornament less than 5 inches tall. Taking the dancer’s model from the goddess of beauty and the goddess of love, Koons pays homage to Italian Renaissance sculpture, using hard marble to render the softness of fabric and the tension of deformation. It is among the most finely wrought sculptures by one of the most influential contemporary artists.

From up close, we noticed that every flower on the ballerina’s skirt was a fresh red carnation. The flowers in the gallery break open the space, creating the illusion that the blooms on the canvas have entered reality.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. The narrative of the second chapter, “Avant-Gardening,” begins with Monet’s Double Door with Flowers from 1883, one of the most important newly added works in the exhibition. Its elongated format is very rare in Monet’s painting.

“This work was made in the year Monet had just moved to Giverny. It was commissioned for the door panels of the living room of his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. What he depicts are several freshly cut flowers from the Giverny garden. The elongated shape gave Monet greater freedom to depict the flowers’ tall, swaying posture, so in a condition of constraint he actually gained more freedom of expression,” Shen Boliang said with a laugh. “The peak of Monet’s commissioned work was the Water Lilies cycle for the oval galleries of the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris. The work in this exhibition is his first decorative work made specifically for a particular space, which makes it especially rare.”

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. Shen Boliang also told us that this section speaks more broadly to the relationships between art and history, economics, society, science, and culture.

“When we talk about the Impressionists painting outdoors, why were they able to leave the studio at that moment? Because of the development of synthetic pigments, the invention of paint tubes, and the spread of the railways, artists were finally in a position to carry their paints to different places and work there.” It turns out that Monet, Caillebotte, Pissarro, and many other artists were passionate gardeners, and that the rise of the cut-flower market also made cut flowers a recurring element in many artists’ work.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. One of the most affecting “story chains” in this reinstallation is surely the first-ever pairing of Renoir’s Flowers in a Vase, from 1878, with the actual vase shown in the painting.

“When we were researching this Flowers in a Vase, we discovered that this magnificent vase appears in at least six of Renoir’s famous works, including the very well-known Young Girls at the Piano in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,” Shen Boliang told us.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. The Deji team then began a long search and ultimately found the majolica vase, preserved by Renoir’s great-grandson. When the painting and the vase are displayed side by side, the effect is strangely powerful. It feels almost possible to cross a century and see Renoir standing in his studio, carefully arranging the objects he loved, then making them permanent in paint.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. “By the twentieth century, flowers were no longer, in artists’ eyes, merely a species or an object of beauty. They had also become a medium for entering the inner world and the symbolic world.” That is how Shen Boliang defines the turn of the third chapter. Here, inspired by Freud, the Surrealist master Rene Magritte substitutes sky and wood grain for flowers, overturning the relationship between image and meaning.

In Wu Dayu’s late work Untitled 128, meanwhile, “the image of the flower gradually dissolves into abstract movement and saturated color,” Shen Boliang said. “We placed his work beside Magritte’s because both explored the vastness of the inner world in radical ways.”

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. Henri Rousseau’s Vase of Flowers with Ivy Branches, with its naive brushwork, carries complex meanings. He never left France and worked only as a minor customs clerk, painting in his spare time from what he observed in botanical gardens. The work appeared in Rousseau’s 1942 retrospective at MoMA and is one of the artist’s important works.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. In the exhibition’s final chapter, “Blooming Through,” the emphasis shifts more strongly to the cross-disciplinary and cross-media language of art under the theme of flowers. Here the Dadaist Picabia, in his work Catchfly, uses a verbal game in the title to fuse botany, Greek mythology, and film, touching with unusual foresight on the speculative horizon of today’s thinking about “cross-species” life.

“We can see moth wings appearing in the picture, merging with the edges of the catchfly,” Shen Boliang told us.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. The exhibition’s coda comes with the monumental work by the German contemporary master Anselm Kiefer, Whoever Has No House Now, Will Never Build One. The piece takes its inspiration from Rilke’s Autumn Day from 1902, filling the surface with withered leaves and spent flowers made from lead, shellac, rope, and other materials.

“Kiefer draws on alchemical thought. Lead is a dull substance, but it also contains the possibility of transformation and rebirth. So this work does not merely present decay; it also contains the hope of renewal and regeneration.” Shen Boliang said that placing the work at the end of the exhibition is also a way of thinking through, and responding to, the human condition now.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. The exhibition also makes visible the belated rehabilitation of women artists long neglected in art history, an important thread among its many lines of narrative. Shen Boliang told us that the point was not simply to increase the number of works by women artists, but to position them more centrally within each chapter. He cited, for instance, the dialogue created in the first chapter between the legendary French artist Suzanne Valadon and the Chinese artist Pan Yuliang.

Valadon had once worked as a circus performer and as a model for Renoir, Lautrec, and Morisot, among others, while Pan Yuliang, who studied in France, had once lived in a brothel.

“Neither came from an especially favorable background, but both retained a deeply independent spirit within a patriarchal society. In neither artist’s work do we see the conventional male gaze, the idea that women must be demure, gentle, pleasing, refined. What we see instead is an extraordinary vitality,” Shen Boliang said.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. In the second chapter, works by the Chinese modern artists Fang Junbi and He Muxun speak to their experiences of living in different countries around the world.

“Take Fang Junbi: she first went to France and later lived in the United States. He Muxun went from Shanghai to Taipei, then to Brazil, then Spain, then Paris, and in old age returned to Shanghai. The way an individual adapts to, and forms intimacy with, different kinds of ‘soil,’ and the complexity of those forms, gives us many different insights,” Shen Boliang said.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. In the third section, alongside major Western artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Yayoi Kusama, the exhibition also highlights the Chinese modern artists Zhang Liying and Qiu Di.

“Their works both show how an independent individual, in an era of upheaval, responds to the world, to the times, and to the circumstances of a life.” Shen Boliang also made special mention of Francoise Gilot, who opens the fourth chapter.

“People have long thought of her simply as Picasso’s girlfriend, but in fact she possessed great talent and a style all her own. We placed her here to break that label and show the force and durability of her creativity.”

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. Xie Jinglan, too, who moved among the identities of painter, musician, and dancer, is given an important place in the latter half of the exhibition.

“When people mention her, they always say she was Zao Wou-Ki’s ex-wife, but in fact she was an artist of great independence, and her cross-disciplinary practice perfectly echoes the theme of ‘Blooming Through.’” When we met Irene, the museum’s director, for an interview with Yitiao Art, she was dressed in a sharply tailored beige suit, discussing details of the installation with staff. For all the appearance of a formidable executive, her thinking proved notably open and supple.

What she spoke with us about went far beyond art. In recent years, amid the wave of private museums in China shutting their doors, Deji’s ability to move against the tide stands out all the more. The foundation lies in more than 30 years of systematic collecting. “Over all these years, we have gradually formed two major collection systems, one in Chinese antiquities and one in Chinese and international modern and contemporary art, ranging from the Neolithic period down through the Ming and Qing, and covering everything from Buddhist sculpture to Song ceramics to Ming furniture.”

That, Director Ai told us, was followed by more than 10 years of systematic research and development focused on the theme of flowers, resulting in what we now see as the museum’s “Flower World” collection series.

Opening scene of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. When we asked Director Ai how she balances the traffic of a commercial complex with the scholarly depth of a museum, her answer was unexpected: “We don’t actually need to ‘balance’ them.” She laughed. “Commercial amenities are a great advantage for a museum. Some visitors may have come to shop and simply wandered into the museum by accident. For us, that broadens the audience. Afterward, going to the museum may become part of their lives.”

For visitors who come expressly to see the exhibition, the commercial setting is an added benefit. “If one of my visitors gets hungry after seeing the show, there are excellent restaurants downstairs. In that sense, art has entered the setting of everyday life,” Irene said with a smile.

Opening scene of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. She believes that placing the museum in the city’s busiest district is precisely a way to break down the barriers around art.

“We hope to make the museum part of a way of life. That is also the original intention behind opening a ‘midnight museum.’”

“We found that from Monday to Friday, people have school and work, and by the time they get off, most museums are already closed. But visitors want culture and art to intersect with their lives.” So Deji shifted its closed day from Monday to Tuesday morning and extended daily opening hours until midnight.

“After work, everyone has the chance to enter the museum within a span of time that feels comfortable and generous.”

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. Speaking of teamwork, Irene reached for a vivid metaphor.

“Sometimes we say that when something moves you, makes your body jolt, even dilates your pupils and slightly flares your nostrils, and leaves you so stirred, you have to find your own way to share that feeling with colleagues in our other departments and, more important, with the audience.” She stressed that at Deji, the research team’s first audience is their colleagues across every role in the institution.

“Colleagues in education or marketing may not know art history, but they are the first ‘audience.’ The research team has to be able to convey the excitement of scholarship in language they can understand. Only then can we ultimately help the public understand it and feel it.”

“We really care about the audience,” Irene said jokingly. “Sometimes we even tease ourselves about the museum’s ‘not-quite-one-meter line.’” She explained that museums usually set a one-meter line to protect the works, but at Deji it has been compressed as much as possible, to 44 centimeters.

“Because we don’t want visitors craning their necks to look from afar. We want them a little closer, so they can better experience the pleasure of looking at art.”

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. Irene told us that she has always believed the way a museum is run determines how far it can go.

“First of all, the positioning has to be extremely clear. In this era, you cannot feel your way along. You have to know what you want to do and then play to your strengths. Will audiences want to come back several times to see the same exhibition? Will they be willing to spend money on the museum’s merchandise? Those are all things that need to be considered.” For Deji, that means conducting deep research on the basis of a collection of more than 10,000 works, continuing to bring in new acquisitions, and then building exhibitions from there. Its strength lies in the idea of “scholarship-driven collecting,” and in the ability to turn research into an experience the public can perceive. In the “Flower World” exhibition, for example, cross-disciplinary research spanning botany and art history appears in an interactive electronic botanical atlas that visitors can browse.

Installation view of “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” Deji Art Museum, 2025. “Compared with museums that do many exhibitions in a year, we may spend more and concentrate more intensely on deep curatorial work within a given period, then use two to three years to produce one major exhibition. But that exhibition is worth seeing again and again, over several years.” As Irene put it, “A museum exists so that visitors can carry away a kind of transformative power.”

That power may take the form of a question, a moment of illumination, or a new way of seeing the world.