The principal state museum of modern and contemporary Chinese art, known by its initials NAMOC, occupies a grand 1962 building topped with a yellow-tiled traditional roof, a short walk north of the Wangfujing shopping street. Its collection runs to more than a hundred thousand works — twentieth-century ink painting, oil, prints, folk art, and sculpture — and it hosts large temporary exhibitions of both Chinese and visiting international art.
The galleries are spacious and rarely crowded, and admission is free with a passport. It is the natural cultural counterweight to a day of shopping on Wangfujing, and one of the better places in the city to get a sense of how Chinese art developed across the upheavals of the past century.