Lei Wanwan and Lin Han are
poster children for Beijing’s
cosmopolitan ambitions
in the 21st century. The young
couple, both born in 1987, were
named among ‘China’s New Power
Collectors’ in a 2014
Forbes article
published one month after they
opened M Woods, a museum in
798 designed to showcase their
private collection. After a renovation,
M Woods launched its fifth exhibition
this past March, an inchoate
but captivating cluster of works
traversing 1,500 years of history
and geographical points from South
America to the North Pole.
The show, its patrons hope,
attests to the universality of art,
prizing abstract concepts of ‘spirit’
over fluctuations in hype and market
value. But to understand the show,
and the building housing it, one must
first understand the architects.
Lin Han’s parents are wealthy
investors with ties to elite Beijing
political, business and cultural
circles. He has said in several
interviews that he’s been financially
independent since age 18, when
he was finishing high school in
Singapore. From there, he went on
to study animation in England. ‘I’ve
been interested in creative pursuits
ever since I was a kid’, he says, adding that his school peers saw
him as ‘alternative’ since he would
draw posters and tinker with music
production in his free time.
Upon returning to Beijing, Lin
Han rolled his personal network
and design acumen into a PR firm
promoting luxury brands in China.
Helming the firm remains his day job,
but his passion for art seems to drive
his business ambitions. He began
collecting in 2012 with a 1 million
USD purchase
at Sotheby’s.
He’s accumulated
auction coups at
a steady clip ever
since, funding his
sideline with profits
from his company
and the support of
his parents, who’ve
given Lin a fund for
art investment.
Lei Wanwan
was born in Hong
Kong and holds a British passport,
but she has a deep connection
to Beijing. She’s a descendant of
Zhang Zizhong, the celebrated Sino-Japanese
War general who has a
Beijing street named after him. Like
Lin, she was attracted to the arts as a
child: ‘I studied drawing, violin, piano,
ballet… I was always doing things with a creative approach. I really like
to be within that atmosphere, but
I knew that I wasn’t born to be an
artist myself.’
Lei – known to her over 680,000
Sina Weibo followers simply as
Wanwan – earned her undergraduate
degree in art history at Beijing’s
Central Academy of Fine Art, at the
same time posing as a model for
painter Liu Ye and gaining an online
fanbase through canny social media
management.
She continued
her studies with a
Master’s degree in
art administration
from Columbia
University, which
led to a string of
assistantships with
influential New York
gallerists, including
David Zwirner. She
founded Wanwan Lei
Projects in 2012, a
floating platform through which she
curated pop-up exhibits for emerging
artists in New York’s SoHo and
Beijing’s DRC.
Wanwan and Lin, who were married in January, have consolidated their shared passion into M Woods. At the beginning of 2016, they temporarily closed for renovations, adding an outdoor space, hanging curved sheets of chain mail in front of the building’s otherwise hardedged, red brick facade and proudly reopening with All Means Are Sacred.

One hears M Woods’ current
exhibition before seeing it. Plaintive
classical music wafts through
the entire space of the museum,
soundtracking the experience.
It emanates from a projection on
the first floor, a time-lapse video of
Dutch artist Guido van der Werve
spinning against the earth’s rotation
on the North Pole for a full 24 hours.
Van der Werve, known for his works
of physical endurance as well as his
multiple talents as videographer
and composer, had a solo show at
M Woods last year. ‘He’s been very
influential to us,’ says Wanwan. ‘We
don’t just adore him; he’s had a huge
impact on our lives,’ Lin adds, saying
that he plans to collect more work by
van der Werve in the future.
Moving around M Woods’
labyrinthine second-floor gallery
spaces, the exhibition unfurls in a
seemingly random progression.
Old, partially destroyed Chinese
statues stand next to stark
contemporary sculptures and
abstract drawings from anonymous
Rajasthani artists. In one side
chamber, a meteor collected by Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson in
South America dances in air, held
in place by a magnet attached to
the roof. Adjacent, a granite block
covered in bas-relief carvings from
the Northern Qi Dynasty (550 AD) is lit
in high contrast within a small room.
‘You can see that a lot of damage
has been done to it,’ says Lin Han
of this anomalous piece of antiquity
within a show otherwise focused on
contemporary work. ‘It’s been buried
underground, flooded with water,
drilled hollow. At one point it was used
to store pig food. The Buddha statue
that would have been on top of it is
long gone. This artifact has endured
all kinds of destruction.’
Rehabilitating ancient art that
was neglected or outright destroyed
in China’s recent past is another
part of the M Woods mission. This
piece in particular also has a meta
significance, as it depicts wealthy
art patrons from 1,500 years ago.
‘We’ve been referring to it that way,’
laughs Wanwan. ‘We explain, “Oh,
that’s a donor wall!”’
Despite such historical
connections, Wanwan and Lin insist
that their collecting philosophy is
agnostic with regard to time and
place. Indeed, they discuss art in
almost mystical terms, speaking
of pursuing ‘truth, universality
and spirit’. Lately, they’ve been
riffing on the philosophy of Russian
abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky,
whose writings provide the current
exhibition’s title. ‘It’s a space
independent from the past, present
and future’, says Lin. ‘Time doesn’t
exist here.’

Lin and Wanwan view the nonprofit
as a public service to the city. For
her part, Wanwan wants to culturally
bridge established global art centers
like New York with the relatively
‘unformed, shaping’ Beijing art
world. ‘Huge changes are happening
to Beijing, but not to New York’, Lin
interjects, the business side of his
personality suddenly perking up.
‘People’s lives here are completely
different than ten years ago. In a city
undergoing such transformation, people have massive needs for
culture. It means that the city is facing
more challenges and opportunities.
Culturally, people need a place
like this.’
M Woods’ ahistorical agitprop
stands in stark contrast to the
smartphone culture permeating
Beijing’s youth culture. ‘In this
environment, it seems like museums
could be challenged by the internet’,
says Lin. ‘But no app can replace
the function of a museum. It’s like
trying to replace a painting with a
photograph. Our development is
about playing a more important
role in the city, being a social glue
between people. Putting pieces
that have been broken apart by the
internet back together.’
Saint Christopher carrying the Christ Child through a sinful world, ca 1525
As for the future of the collection,
M Woods’ founders are content to let
their instincts guide them. Though
Wanwan has a predilection for
Flemish Old Masters – one highlight
of Sacred is a phantasmagoric
16th-century oil painting by a
follower of Hieronymus Bosch –
she’s reluctant to single out archive
highlights. ‘A collection can only
represent the collector after it hits
a certain quantity’, she notes,
portraying the M Woods collection
as an evolving whole. So far, they’re
amassed over 200 works.
Wanwan also admits to a passion
for the cave art of Dunhuang, a
historical Silk Road stop that holds
over a millennium of grotto carvings,
paintings and sculptures. Though
the in situ art of Dunhuang is unlikely
to pass into private hands, its
enduring legacy is an inspiration to
Wanwan, guiding her ambition as
an arbiter of art culture in Beijing.
The central conceit at M Woods is
that contemporary art always draws
from the past, and ancient art with
enduring spiritual value automatically
translates into authentic experiences
in the present. Wanwan puts it more
succinctly: ‘To look backward is to
better look forward.’
All Means Are Sacred is at
M Woods until July 24. 15RMB.