In the summer of 2025, the special exhibition entitled "Forging Modernity: Artistic Treasures from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris" brought about a stunning embrace across the vast distance between two cultural landmarks.
The exhibition design by French designer Cécile Dégor is a stroke of genius. She disassembled and reassembled the cast-iron vault elements of the Musée d'Orsay, creating a wonderful rhythm through their collision with the minimalist spaces of the Pudong Art Museum. Natural light pours through the glass dome, casting flowing light spots on Van Gogh's self-portrait, as if the sunlight from 130 years ago has traveled through time, still gilding this lonely artist.
With "the birth of modernity" as its narrative core, the exhibition serves as a patient guide, helping visitors understand how 19th-century art broke free from the constraints of classicism. From the rigorous compositions of academic painting to the earthy allure of realism, from the fleeting light and shadow captured by Impressionism to the wild expressions of the inner world in Post-Impressionism, each work is an upheaval of ideas.
The river breeze drifts through the exhibition hall, engaging in a quiet conversation with the 19th-century Parisian street scenes in the paintings. Those artistic stars that once shone under the dome of the Musée d'Orsay are now following the course of the Huangpu River, continuing to write stories about "modernity" in the new-era East.