‘The year 2012 was a very busy and exciting one for the Ashmolean,” said the museum’s director, Professor Christopher Brown. The museum had almost 900,000visitors, half of them schoolchildren on school visits – and to put those figures into perspective, Oxford city itself has just under 165,000 inhabitants. Oxford’s university museum, the oldest public museum in the UK, has become a magnet for visitors, as much for its temporary exhibitions, latterly the hugely popular Edward Lear and Japanese Meiji textiles, as for the breadth and depth of its permanent collections. Add in headline-making acquisitions such as Manet’s portrait of Fanny Claus saved from export last year by a £7.83m appeal, including a “remarkable” public response — and it is clear the Ashmolean has made for itself a hard act to follow.

So, what have they in store for 2013? The year starts with an unusual exhibition: Xu Bing: Landscape Landscript, open on February 28 until May 19. Unusual because it’s the first major exhibition the Ashmolean has dedicated to contemporary art, and because Xu Bing, one of China’s most renowned artists, has never before put together an exhibition of his landscapes. Born in 1955, growing up in Beijing, Xu Bing is known for works that exploit the pictorial character of Chinese script. He made his name with Tianshu or Book From The Sky, 1991, a four-volume a classical printed text. In that seminal work and in certain landscapes Xu Bing plays with words, with Chinese characters, real or invented; he employs Chinese characters to create landscape features, for example, those for ‘stone’ make up an image of rocks, ‘tree’ makes up trees, and so on.