National Art Museum of China (NAMOC)

China's premier museum of modern Chinese art. Free entry; rotating exhibitions of 20th- and 21st-century painting, calligraphy, sculpture.

The National Art Museum of China — known by its acronym NAMOC — was founded in 1963 and occupies a building completed in 1958, a distinctive example of the 'socialist classical' architectural style promoted in the early PRC period: a multi-storey pavilion with yellow-glazed-tile pagoda-style roofing over reinforced concrete construction, the Soviet Beaux-Arts influence domesticated into Chinese traditional forms. The building itself is considered a significant piece of 20th-century architectural history.

NAMOC holds the most extensive permanent collection of 20th-century Chinese art in the country — around 110,000 works across painting, calligraphy, printmaking, sculpture, photography, and craft. The names that anchored the collection were the major figures of Chinese modernism: Qi Baishi, who synthesised traditional literati painting with popular subject matter; Xu Beihong, trained in Paris and famous for horses; Zhang Daqian, a master forger turned original artist; and Lin Fengmian, who developed a synthesis of European Post-Impressionism and Chinese ink painting. The collection includes works from the Republican era, wartime propaganda posters, Cultural Revolution-period production, and contemporary practice from the reform era onwards.

The exhibition programme is mixed: alongside the permanent highlights, special exhibitions of variable quality rotate through the ground-floor galleries. Entry is free with a passport-linked online reservation. The museum is close to the Dongsi metro station and sits a short walk from the Confucius Temple and the Imperial College, which makes for a natural combined afternoon in the northeastern part of the old city. Allow two hours minimum.