The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is near and dear to the heart of 86-year-old Anthony Yen because the institution houses one of the most distinguished Chinese art collections in the West.

"It's the best attraction in Cleveland. It's a perfect place to learn and appreciate Chinese culture. It means so much to me as a Chinese immigrant," said Yen, 86, a prominent entrepreneur and an inductee of the Cleveland International Hall of Fame.

Located about 5 miles (8km) east of downtown Cleveland, Ohio, The CMA, which has nearly 45,000 pieces of artwork spanning 6,000 years, consistently ranks as one of the best comprehensive art museums in the United States and one of the most-visited in the world.

The museum, which marked its centennial in 2016, was founded as an institution dedicated to "the benefit of all the people forever," William Griswold, director, and president of the museum told Xinhua in a recent interview at the new galleries for Chinese art.

"We offer free general admission and our collection is encyclopedic in scope and so it spans all periods from the Neolithic to the present, it spans every corner of the globe," he said.

The Chinese art collection is the CMA's special strength, said Griswold. "We have, from the outset, from even before we opened our door to the public, had works of Chinese art in our collection... We continue to add to that collection and we are extremely proud of the representation of Chinese art."

The CMA's Chinese art collection spans more than 5,000 years and embraces a diverse array of art forms including jade, bronze, lacquer, sculpture, paintings, calligraphy, furniture, bamboo carvings, and more.

"This museum is one of the few museums in the West that gives the Asian collections an equal standing among other collections, and in particular Chinese collections are known worldwide in quality in comparison to other museum collections," said the muesum's Chinese art curator, Clarissa von Spee.

Sherman Lee, the CMA's director from 1958 to 1983, established the core of the institution's Chinese painting collection, which includes roughly 500 objects, roughly 10 percent of the museum's entire Asian collection.

The collection might be dwarfed numerically by the over two million objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, yet it is outstanding in terms of the quality on show, as well as the breadth of the material, said von Spee, who joined the CMA in 2016 after eight years as curator of the Chinese and Central Asian collections at the British Museum.

The most outstanding sections of the Chinese collection are paintings from the Song to Qing dynasty, or from the 10th to the 19th century, which represent the highest level of Chinese artistic accomplishment, she said.

A best example, von Spee said, is an 11-foot-three-inch (3.42 meter) long scroll created by Wen Zhengming (1470-1559), a leading Ming Dynasty painter, calligrapher, and scholar.

It is a poem written by Wen to express his gratitude to the Jiajing Emperor, who ruled from 1521 to 1567, for a gift of embroidered silk, she said.

The work is one of the masterpieces of 16th century Chinese calligraphy, executed in the cursive style of writing, which is also known as the "running style" as which individual stroke runs together in a whirlwind of arcs, slashes, squiggles, dots, and dashes.

"China is playing a more important role in the world, and it is important that we learn more Chinese, we understand China better, through its history, through its culture and through its works of art," von Spee said. "China's enormous importance now is actually reflected in the magnificence of art China produced."

(Top Photo: Visitors look at an interactive device at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) in Cleveland, Ohio, the United States, August 23, 2018. /Photo via Xinhua News Agency)