A Closer Look at Liang Yi Museum

In the 1980s, we were purchasing a lot of pieces from Hollywood Road, so as I'm sure you know, Hollywood Road has always been this antiques mecca, ever since it was first paved in the late 1800s, and it was really this sort of like East meets West kind of place where a lot of sailors or missionaries are coming out of China and going back to Europe, and they're taking, they want to buy a lot of souvenirs of their time in the East and bring it with them, and so it's always been sort of this kind of very dynamic neighbourhood. What was more challenging for us as a museum were some of the restrictions. For example, all of these 1960s buildings had very low ceilings, so that's something that we really couldn't change. You could sort of make the most out of, for example, we have a mezzanine area where we basically sacrificed quite a large amount of space upstairs so that we have a double ceiling height room, which can showcase some of our larger pieces such as double-storey cabinets. And then another thing that we had to really work around was that this type of building really had a lot of structural pillars, which you can't knock down, and obviously for a museum it can be a little bit difficult because you really want to give that idea of space, so instead what we had to do was really use these pillars to create rooms that would then convert it into galleries. And I think it's interesting because then it really kind of dictates how we design each show and I think because of that a lot of our shows are quite thematic, so for example currently we have the scholarly objects which are categorised by function, so you have an incense gallery, or a brush pot gallery, or upstairs for the evening bags, they're all organised by decade. Given that we occupy such a huge amount of space on Hollywood Road, we felt like it really was part of our duty to try to conserve the heritage of this neighbourhood, so one of the things that we actively do is on the ground floor, the street level, you might have noticed when you come in, the reception is actually quite small, and we really wanted it to be that way. What we could have done was that we could have used the whole of the, I guess the length of the street that we do have, and made this huge reception, but instead we've decided to keep it as storefronts for the traditional antique dealers, so that we decide who to rent to, so hopefully at least for one block of Hollywood Road you'll never see a Starbucks or something that doesn't actually fit in so well in our opinion. We decided quite early on internally the colour palette that we wanted the place to have, and I mean on the one hand it was quite simple because a main part of our collection is wooden furniture, so all of these Huanghua, Lian, and Zitan woods, which are just in various shades of brown, and then so it was quite obvious that if you really wanted these pieces to shine, you couldn't have very colourful backgrounds, and black and white again fits in very well with the whole 1960s look of the era, so outside of the building is black and white, so it made sense as well for the inside for it to be. And then the other thing that we really wanted to make that was a little bit different was how brightly lit the museum is. I think for a lot of museums they tend to be quite dark, which is very dramatic, but for our purposes, which is that we want people to really get quite close to the wood and see them as these sort of living functional objects, dark spaces wouldn't work so well for us. So again, we wanted to keep it very brightly lit, so white works very well. There are some considerations, for example, these pieces, they are very durable, which we're very lucky in terms of humidity, lighting, all of that, they're pretty kind of easy. You do have to keep them out of direct sunlight, so one of the design features of the museum is all the shuttered windows, which is kind of something that we had to do because otherwise these pieces would start to fade if they're placed too long in, sort of right next to the window.