Inaugurated in November 2017 in Guangding, China, the Lianzhou Museum of Photography was designed by a young Guangzhou architectural firm, O-office, and is the first state-funded museum of photography in China. In addition to beautiful exhibition spaces, an amphitheatre and a library, it houses a core collection developed over the last ten years by Duan Yuting, the organizer of the Lianzhou Foto Festival, founded in 2005, which takes place every year in November.
The museum has host nearly 30 exhibitions so far, including young European photographers like Baptiste Rabichon, Rubén Martín de Lucas and Denis Darzacq, and American photographers like Albert Watson and Halley Morris-Cafiero. Of course Chinese photographers were also exhibited in the museum, like Zhuang Hui, Zhan Hai’er, Peng Ke and Birdhead (Song Tao and Ji Weiyu). In 2019 the Lianzhou Museum of Photography exhibited the collection of Jean-Marie Donat, in an show called “Lost and Found Transfigured” curated by François Cheval and Audrey Hoareau.
Local photographers were honoured in the beautiful collective exhibition “The Image Memory of Lianzhou Archive Photographs 1965 to 1985”, where the mostly black and white pictures of Wang Dongfu, Du Jixi, Pan Renshi, Pan Wei, Huang Zhaiyu and Wang Guowei, depicted an history of the city of Lianzhou in images.
Curated links for Lianzhou Museum of Photography
http://www.relations-media.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/1.-DP-lianzhou2019.pdf
http://topmuseum.jp/contents/images/info/journal/kiyou_16/09.pdf
http://lmop.org.cn/en/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHwxtIykIrY