Published: November 9 2007 16:01 | Last updated: November 9 2007 16:01
W eapons are an important part of war,” said Mao Zedong, “but not the decisive one; it is men and not materials that count.” But he also famously said: “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” So, just to be doubly sure, he settled for an unprecedented population explosion and a tidal wave of arms production.
During the 1950s, the Chinese government imported first Russian and then East German engineers to build a vast complex of armaments factories on the edge of Beijing. When arms production was moved further out of the city in the 1990s, the complex (known as Dashanzi or 798) was squatted by artists. The buildings, with their lofty spaces, abundant north light and slightly off-the-radar location, proved perfect studios. Constantly under threat from eviction (in favour of new development on the increasingly valuable land), the artists clung on tenaciously and the resulting complex, now acknowledged by the government as a legitimate arts quarter, has just been given the final stamp of approval by the opening last week of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art.
The UCCA is a not-for-profit public gallery that aims to showcase the work of established and emerging artists. Guy Ullens, a Belgian businessman whose wealth was built on a sugar empire and his subsequent, and rather ironic, acquisition and turnround of Weightwatchers, sold his collection of Turner watercolours earlier this year for £10m to finance the gallery. Ullens’ family had diplomatic connections with Beijing and he had been building up a substantial collection of Chinese art, at first historical and subsequently contemporary. The Guggenheim had been sniffing around the site of the largest factory in Dashanzi, the 798, but Ullens beat them to it, securing the best building, after which the district has become known.
He brought in the French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte to convert the buildings. Wilmotte has a solid reputation as a builder of cultural institutions; he is working on an important scheme at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and was acclaimed for his restoration of the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon. But it is one of his earlier, and, to my eye, finest, buildings that seems to have foreshadowed his designs for the UCCA. His Chiado Museum in Lisbon, built as part of the quarter’s regeneration after a fire ravaged it in 1994, is sited in a former biscuit bakery and the old brick ovens have been left clearly on view as a visual marker, a device to assist orientation in an otherwise stripped-down and minimal structure.
At 798 too, Wilmotte exposes the slender brick tower of the factory chimney, which bursts through the roof and becomes an urban signpost, much as Tate Modern’s does. Wilmotte was assisted by the Shanghai-based architect Qingyun Ma, the most respected and promising of the new wave of Chinese architects.
A stroll around the art district reveals innumerable new galleries, sculpture courts and studios, each executed in a stripped, industrial manner, all concrete and rusting metal. The designs are surprisingly sophisticated, as sleek and chic as anything in New York’s Chelsea or London’s Shoreditch. By the time you’ve finished your stroll, the place you set off from will have a new gallery and an overpriced coffee shop. Galleries are appearing faster than skyscrapers.
The East German engineers, it transpires, certainly knew how to build. I was told the survivors had been invited back for the 50th anniversary of their complex, and had wept tears of joy to see their work. The 798 buildings are based on a spare and surprisingly elegant structure, with squared columns supporting curving concrete vaults; these are broken by slanting north lights and have a distinctive wavy roof profile. At the time of their inception, the buildings were generously planted with trees, now mature and providing delightful relief, colour and shade.
The trouble with the endless concrete-and-rust-design of the area’s galleries is ennui. Big chunks of machinery, sections of gantries and huge, mysterious meters and boilers litter the spaces, raw concrete is ubiquitous and becomes invisible. The relics of industry compete with the art and, although fine for big installations, canvases and smaller works get swamped by the detritus.
Wilmotte’s building turns its back on industrial cliché and instead returns to the white cube. Surfaces are smoothed off and painted, steel structure is painted black (as opposed to the more usual rusty finish). Furniture, much of which is to the architect’s own design, is sleek, white and unobtrusive. A few chunks of machinery have been left at either end of the interior, blackened and slightly forlorn, but that is all, just the faintest of notes from history. The art is left to shine.
The gallery space is generous and flexible. Partitions and screens can be erected and dismantled as needed, tailored to each new show. There is also, of course, the obligatory shop – caged in behind chicken wire (surely not signifying the containment of consumerism?), a (French) restaurant and an auditorium.
The opening exhibition, ’85 New Wave: The Birth of Contemporary Chinese Art, looks at the period just before the awakening of western intellectual and financial interest in Chinese art. While there may be criticisms of the naivety of much of the work itself, the show is impeccably mounted by a blend of local and international curators, including two from Tate Modern and Fei Dawei, who, based in Paris, was instrumental in bringing Chinese art to the west in the 1980s.
The chimney may be a landmark but the building is not. The architects have created a structure that sits comfortably among the low-slung factories and the rapidly changing landscape. It is both confident and un-self-conscious, but it always defers to the art. It is a delight to see a building so obviously eschewing the monumental and the frivolous.
The 798 district (Chinese arms factories only ever had numbers, and they all began with a lucky seven) is at a fascinating juncture. It seems to have segued seamlessly from the manufacture of arms to the manufacture of art. Full of westerners visibly smug in their belief that they have caught on to the next big thing, and filled with teeming workshops and galleries, 798 is a place where the commercial has far outstripped the avant-garde, and indeed rents are booming and many artists are already moving elsewhere. The presence of the Ullens Centre at once ensures the future of its surroundings and brings the prestige and rising costs that will be its downfall. It is also not as unique as its PR would have you believe: the fine Today Gallery, built in a huge converted brewery a short ride away, is also being run as a not-for-profit gallery and its current exhibition, a serious survey of contemporary Chinese art, is just as good.
China’s homegrown architecture has yet to attain the international success of its art and, for the moment, from the Olympics buildings to the CCTV skyscraper, it is being left to westerners to make the big waves. At the Ullens Centre, Wilmotte has resisted the pull of the icon and instead produced a subtle, intelligent building that creates a heart for one of the world’s fastest-growing and most feted arts districts. Next year the joyful cacophony of the supersized architecture of the Olympics, OMA’s monstrous CCTV towers and Lord Foster’s new Beijing Airport will be revealed. For the moment, Beijing is lucky to have the Ullens as the contemplative quiet before the storm.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
