Michael Xufu Huang

Michael Xufu Huang (; born 1994) is a Chinese art collector and socialite. Huang co-founded the M Woods Museum of Beijing's 798 Art Zone in 2015 and the X Museum in the Chaoyang district of Beijing in 2020. His art collecting activities have led The New York Times to profile him in 2017 as "something of a next-generation Jeffrey Deitch of China." Huang was born in Chongqing, China in 1994, and grew up in Beijing. His mother works in the pharmaceutical industry and his father is a finance lawyer. As a teenager, Huang became interested in art while attending boarding school in the United Kingdom. He recalled an exhibition on the beach paintings of Alex Katz at Tate St Ives, where he "really felt connected with the work" and "grew [his] passion for art." After finishing his education at Dulwich College and completing his A Levels in art history, Huang moved to the United States to study at the University of Pennsylvania. In university, Huang studied art history and marketing and was active in the Zeta Psi fraternity. He graduated in 2017. Huang developed his interests in art at the age of 16. His parents gifted him his first work of art, a lithograph by Helen Frankenthaler, for his sixteenth birthday in 2010. He started slowly collecting in 2013, after moving to Philadelphia to attend university. While a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015, Huang joined the contemporary art museum M Woods as a co-founder alongside art collectors Lin Han and Wanwan Lei. Located in Beijing's 798 Art Zone, the museum focuses on "internet-minded" works of artists such as He Xiangyu and Olafur Eliasson. Its debut exhibition on Andy Warhol in 2016 received international recognition. Later that year, Huang joined the board of the New Museum in New York City as its youngest member. In the summer of 2017, Huang curated his first major exhibition, Heart of the Tin Man, a survey of artists influenced by post-Internet culture. Huang announced his resignation and the withdrawal of his collection from the museum in 2019.