Anchor : Museums around the world have been celebrating International Museums Day, with free access and many special displays and exhibitions.

In Beijing alone 97 museums threw open their doors to celebrate the wealth of their collections.

The Beijing Auto Museum also chose the day to launch a photography exhibition entitled "Life on the Wheels" featuring auto culture in the US and China. The free show will run until September.

The exhibition shows 150 works from master photographers, presenting the relationship between cars and people from the 1950s' US, right up to today in China.

Wang Lei went along to take a look.

Reporter: There's no better place to spend an educational few hours than a museum.

And if you are a petrol head, or someone who loves anything and everything to do with cars, then the Beijing Auto Museum is the place to be right now.

Their latest offering examines the relationship between people, life and the motorcar.

Michael Furman is an American photographer who has pictures on display at the museum.

"A lot of history of the 20th century wraps around the history of automobile. The automobile greatly changed everyone's culture. Its impact to politics, wars and the oil needs and how important Middle East became because of oil and because of cars, so the impact of the automobile goes well beyond transportation."

Furman has about twenty works being shown in the exhibition, alongside images from five other US photo artists.

But the photography of car lovers in China has not been neglected.

Yang Rui is the Director of the Beijing Auto Museum.

"People's love of cars goes way beyond international borders. Today's event is aimed at strengthening ties between the two nations in auto culture, and also enable China to establish a dialogue on autos with the outside world."

Yang Rui believes the photography exhibition is a good reflection of the theme of International Museum Day 2016 – 'Museums and Cultural Landscapes,' through a full display of the development of American automobile culture all the way through to modern auto life in China.

Divided into five parts, visitors to the exhibition are especially attracted to the section named "the old miracle".

This fills American photographer Michael Furman with a sense of pride and joy.

"The photographs we are showing in this exhibition, I think, present a side of American culture that Chinese people have never seen before. In my case, that cars are from all around the world, but they are very unusual, many of them are from the 1930s. And I'm sure most of people have never seen them. And when people see them, they get very excited. We think of them works of art. These cars themselves are museums, and they are very expressive of artistic trends of the time."

What adds the significance to this event launched on Museum Day is that it also provides China with a reference as to how to involve, share and give full play to all the factors of auto society to achieve the green, coordinated and innovative development of people, car, life and society.

The International Council of Museums created International Museum Day in 1977.

Every year since then, museums worldwide have been invited to participate to promote the role of museums around in the world, by organizing enjoyable and free activities based around a theme for the year.

For Studio Plus, I'm Wang Lei.