He Art Museum

He Art Museum, located in Shunde, Guangdong, China, is a privately funded, non-profit art museum designed by Pritzker Prize winner Tadao Ando. It focuses on modern and contemporary art with an international scope, aiming to establish a hub for cross-cultural exchange.

Planning your visit

He Art Museum opened in 2020 in Shunde, and it is Tadao Ando working with a Chinese architectural idea rather than importing a Japanese one. The building is circular — four stacked discs of decreasing diameter, referencing the traditional cosmology of a round heaven over a square earth and the round houses of southern China — set in a shallow reflecting pool, with a double-helix staircase spiralling up through the central atrium beneath a circular skylight. It is characteristic Ando in its concrete and its manipulation of daylight.

The collection, privately funded by the He family of the Midea appliance group, focuses on modern and contemporary art with a deliberately international scope, combining Chinese artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with Western work, and mounting substantial temporary exhibitions.

Shunde is part of Foshan in the Pearl River Delta, around an hour from Guangzhou and accessible from Hong Kong and Macau, and the district is separately famous as one of the best places to eat in Cantonese China.

Allow two hours. The main booking is an entry ticket. Current availability is shown below.