My Museum - A Dialogue with Life

In science museums, we witness the achievements of civilization. In art museums, we touch the boundless imagination. But there had never been a museum built for ourselves until now.

Opened in May 2026 in Beijing, My Museum is China's first private-sector-initiated, corporate-funded immersive museum to integrate life science, philosophy, and art. Conceived with Sinovac Group and a medical history team led by Professor Cheng Zhen of Peking University's School of Health Humanities, it was designed in full by VAVE, who transformed an abstract academic concept into a space where every visitor can truly encounter, converse with, and reflect upon themselves.

A Dialogue with Life - My Museum

The premise is ancient. At the entrance of the Temple of Apollo in ancient Greece, an inscription reads: Know thyself. Life science can answer part of it — facts about evolution, genetics, disease, aging — but the more we learn about the "I" as a material object, the harder it becomes to put down the question inside: who is this "I" who is breathing, living, still asking? My Museum does not answer. It opens a dialogue.

That dialogue is structured as a double helix, exactly like DNA. One strand is popular science: human evolution, the genome, the body, medical history. The other, embedded within it, is philosophical: existence, meaning, time, death, what "I" truly is. Science is the visible skeleton; philosophy is the current flowing through it. Visitors read knowledge on the surface, and in the depths of every zone, hear a more intimate question echoing back.

Four sections, seven zones, twenty-three interactive installations, and seventy-four content points carry this narrative forward, with the person as its subject and life science as its material.

In Encountering "Me," language dissolves into disordered symbols, and each visitor meets a question about life that has long lingered in their mind.

The Reason Why I Become "Me" compresses 4.6 billion years of evolution into 365 days — humanity arrives only on December 31st — tracing fire, tools, writing, and civilization back to a single link in an ancient chain.

The Invisible "Me" is a mirror maze of shifting light simulating the first glimpse of a cell under a microscope, the first ultrasound through skin — the body as something observed and measured, yet rarely truly known.

The Imperfect "Me" abandons specimens for theatrical fragments: a childhood playroom, a strangely changed face in a bathroom mirror, solitude, old age looking back — life is never perfect, and we learn to coexist with it.

In Become Better "Me," visitors pick up a receiver to hear humanity's history of fighting disease — courage, failure, breakthrough — staged alongside the rhythm of the solar terms and the arc of smallpox's eradication, dramatizing our oldest instinct: to become better.

The Meaning of "Ego" is a "life archive" of suitcases, each holding one person's memories of life and love, carrying visitors from the biological body into conversation with consciousness itself.

And in the final zone, The Echo of "Ego," a towering figure appears and dissolves behind fogged glass depending on how close a visitor dares to stand — no answers here, only the sound of one's own inner voice.

Threading all seven zones together is a personalized wristband: visitors enter their name at the door, scan it to unlock each zone and activate every interactive point, and every pause and choice is quietly recorded. At the end, a unique "My Report" awaits — not an answer, but the imprint the conversation has left on them.

This logic extends into architecture itself. My Museum shares its building with an art gallery below, connected by Jing Xiaolei's monumental mirrored sculpture Prophecy, which runs through both floors, belonging fully to neither science nor art. Every exhibition zone opens a window toward it: visitors gaze at Prophecy, and Prophecy reflects them back — exactly the two-way dialogue Antony Gormley described as art's purpose, to communicate the experience of existence.

Within Storytelling & Culture, My Museum's innovation lies in refusing to simply transmit knowledge, instead staging an unrepeatable, self-authored encounter for every visitor — turning a 2,500-year-old philosophical inscription into a living, personal conversation with life itself.