Real estate to canvas

The museum occupies a space of 23,000 square meters and has 10 exhibition halls. Except from the permanent displays, there is still a lot of space left to play with.

"Too spacious" is what many of the museum's first visitors seemed to say after its opening ceremony.

Li says the empty exhibition halls will be saved for curated exhibitions on the academic front and solo shows of noted artists, and there are also spaces for renting out.

Entrepreneurs and private companies have over the recent years dominated spaces for art collections in China. They won dozens of bidding wars in which artworks were sold for more than 10 million yuan, and which set auction records for artists or a category of antiquities.

This fueled a boom in private museums - motivated by a desire to show their cultural assets and their wealth.

A report on global private art museums in 2015 says Shanghai ranked after Beijing and Guangzhou in the number of private museums, and the three cities were home to more than 70 percent of China's private museums.

The report was jointly compiled by Larry's List, an art market monitor company based in Hong Kong, and Art Market Monitor of Artron in Beijing.

Xu is not the only private collector to enrich Shanghai's art landscape.

Hotelier Zheng Hao opened his own gallery in September. On Saturday, Suning Group, one of the country's largest retailers, unveiled its museum and many of the artworks on display were bought at auctions both at home and abroad.