The Phoenix Art Palace, the largest privately owned art museum in Jiangsu province, opened in Wuxi on July 1.

Its inaugural exhibition features more than 130 short-listed oil paintings by artists showing in the Jiangsu provincial biannual oil art exhibition.

With a floor space of more than 2,000 square meters on a peninsula of the Taihu Lake, the art museum specializes in collecting, researching and promoting oil paintings by contemporary Chinese artists.

There has been a surge in art museums across the country in the past five years, with the establishment of more than 300 art museums, art market researcher Zhao Li says.