The Shanghai Exhibition Center should be transformed into an art museum to rival the Louvre in Paris, nine members of the city's advisory body said yesterday.

The delegates to the Shanghai Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference put forward the idea in a proposal to the plenary session of the conference.

"Shanghai needs its own art museum to match its metropolitan status," they said.

The center was built in 1955 and has a floor area of 540,000 square meters.

At present, the building is mainly used for business exhibitions, important banquets and political events.

The delegates suggested the government turn the Shanghai Exhibition Center into the Shanghai Art Museum.

They said the Shanghai Museum at People's Square only had a floor area of 40,000 square meters, a quarter of the size of the Louvre in Paris, and could only exhibit "a small portion" of the more than 100,000 exhibits it had.

(Shanghai Daily January 29, 2008)