Mu Xin (1927-2011), a native of Wuzhen, loved painting and literature since childhood, practicing piano and composing music. He wrote poems at the age of 12 and published essays in local newspapers at the age of 16. In 1946, he entered Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1949, he served as the president of Hangzhou Painting Research Society.

After the 1950s, he served as a middle school teacher and a Shanghai arts and crafts designer, writing privately and accumulating 20 types of works, which were confiscated during the early Cultural Revolution. He was imprisoned three times before and after, writing the manuscript of 66 pages in prison. In 1979, he was rehabilitated and served as secretary general of the Arts and Crafts Association, and moved to New York in 1982. He restarted painting and writing, and published more than 30 kinds of poems and collections on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. In the same period, he kept painting. In 2001, Yale University Art Museum held a large-scale solo exhibition for him, and toured the Chicago Art Museum, the Hawaiian Art Museum and the Asia Society Art Museum in New York, publishing a hardcover album with the exhibition. In the new century, Mu Xin was invited by his hometown Wuzhen wholeheartedly and settled in his hometown in 2006, and died in 2011. In the same year, Wuzhen built the Mu Xin Art Museum for him.

In 2011, the first English-translated collection of novels - Vacant Rooms was published in the United States, which was well received by book review institutions such as American Publishers Weekly. At the end of 2012, Mu Xin's lecture notes "Memoirs of Literature", which taught Chinese artists in New York for five years, was published and won five annual book awards from both sides of the Taiwan Strait. In 2014, the poem Once Slow was set to music by young composers, and in 2015, it was sung by Liu Huan in the Spring Festival Evening.

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  木心故居纪念馆
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  Muxin Art Museum