Art in Public

The gold standard of art gallery design is the white box, a pristine space removed from worldly concerns, outside both place and time. It’s an important statement about the works that hang inside the gallery: art, it says, is universal and timeless. This is why it’s valued. But in its designs for Shenzhen’s newest art galleries, Urbanus Architecture is challenging these basic assumptions, producing art spaces that engage with local urban culture.

Shenzhen, it must be said, hardly looks like the site of China’s great cultural awakening. Only thirty years ago, it was a tiny fishing village, home to 20 000 inhabitants working in a small-scale local industry. Then in 1980, this unlikely village was nominated as China’s first Special Economic Zone. Its economy and its population boomed. Today, with a population of almost 10 million and one of mainland China’s most successful economies, the fishing village of old is unrecognisable as the thriving metropolis of contemporary Shenzhen.

The city that has resulted from this economic explosion has no history, or no visible history. Everyone is an immigrant, and the city’s governing ethos is splendidly commercial. Its star tourist attractions are Las Vegas-tacky theme parks full of miniature replicas of tourist attractions and famous buildings from China and around the world. Its real attractions, here as in Hong Kong, might well just be shopping and strolling, taking the pulse of a city in the throes of unimaginable economic growth.

Such places are often accused of fostering an especially acute form of philistinism, a preference for money over art, for profit over culture. But Shenzhen, in many ways the epitome of rapacious wealth, is proving such assumptions dramatically wrong. Shenzhen’s art scene is booming. Fuelled by influxes of immigration, an openness to the international community and high disposable incomes, Shenzhen’s population is embracing the arts, and particularly the visual arts. Every year, its various galleries hold more than 200 exhibitions, behind only Shanghai and Beijing. Reports are filtering out that the citizens of Shenzhen are embracing art as multifaceted and multifunctional: a commercial investment, a way of raising the value of real estate, and a fashionable leisure time activity.

Late last year, in a clear sign of the city’s love affair with the arts, the Shenzhen Municipality announced that Coop Himmelb(l)au had won a hotly-contested international competition to design a new Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art. The gallery, expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, joins the city’s existing three major art galleries: the He Xiangnin Art Gallery, the Guan Shanyue Art Musuem and the Shenzhen Art Museum. Such an investment in the sector - and the high profile Western architects selected as the winner - is a remarkable sign of the premium of the city is placing on its cultural development.

The most interesting art galleries and museums, though - the ones that engage with Shenzhen in all its multifaceted glory, and are intent on taking art to its citizens - are the product of a local firm. Urbanus, based in Shenzhen and Beijing, is one of the big names in local Chinese architecture, competing with big international firms for recognition of local design. Remarkably, they’ve produced no less than three art spaces in Shenzhen in the last five years, contributing significantly to the growth of art as a genuinely public activity.

The first fruit of this endeavour was the OCT Contemporary Art Teminal, more commonly known as OCAT, a former warehouse in Shenzhen’s Overseas China Town that has been transformed into a cutting-edge contemporary art centre linked to the He Xiangning Art Gallery. The project is at the heart of an urban renewal plan for the former industrial area, which today is littered with abandoned factories, warehouses and dormitory buildings. Situated alongside Shenzhen’s Disneyland-style theme parks and middle-class residential neighbourhoods, the area combines tourism with an educated local population, making it ideal for an arts-driven renewal. The art gallery is the lightning rod at the centre of a renovation of ten abandoned industrial buildings, designed to spur on the entire development: a plan that points to the centrality of the arts in Shenzhen’s booming real estate economy.

OCAT capitalises on the industrial aesthetic of the existing building, preserving the original façade while transforming it into an “archetype” of the form by wrapping it in a framed metal mesh. The mesh blurs the façade, making it appear as a hallucination or a memory of the building’s history. Recycled wood, rusted metal and weathered concrete are direct links to the industrial past, reconfigured as references to the Western arts community’s ongoing love affair with industrial chic. In one of Shenzhen’s most international zones, an area funded by the Chinese diaspora and aimed at tourism, OCAT has become an industrial-trendy vision of Shenzhen’s 1980s, a home for some of the city’s most important contemporary art exhibitions, and a site for a thriving international art residency program.

This combination of local character and community engagement with an attentiveness to the specific demands of art as such has become the trademark of Urbanus’ designs for Shenzhen art galleries. They’ve followed on from the initial success of OCAT with the Dafen Art Museum, a quirky building that responds eccentrically to the oddities of its location. The extremely unusual Dafen Village is famous for its replica oil painting industry; its four square kilometres produce an estimated 60% of the world’s oil paintings, destined to hang in lounge rooms and cheap hotels the world over.

The Dafen Art Museum doesn’t try to deny the existence, or even undermine the validity, of this huge commercial art enterprise taking place around it. Instead, its walls are a skewed map of the village’s street plan, its shallow recesses earmarked for decoration by local commercial painters. When this project is complete, the museum will display the local artistic industry as proudly as - and more publicly than - it displays the more “legitimate” work within its white box galleries. Indeed, these galleries are interspersed with oil painting shops, commercial spaces and rental workshops, in a plan that explicitly seeks to bring the local community inside its walls.

Using these same principles of community participation, Urbanus has taken a former parking lot in downtown Shenzhen and transformed it into a Public Art Plaza. Retaining the parking spaces in the form of a partially underground parking garage, it incorporates galleries, studios, and outdoor display areas, along with a café, bookshop and lecture hall. The multi-use structure encourages public involvement, acknowledging the design’s function within the urban fabric. By providing beautifully landscaped and rather rare open public space, it incorporates art into an area used for congregating, socialising and promenading, thereby making culture a public event rather than an elite pastime.

What all these projects share is an awareness of the ways that art can be embroidered into the urban fabric. Their success lies in their acknowledgement that, in some ways, Shenzhen is everything art snobs fear: from OCT to Dafen to the CBD, it is money-driven and profit-focused, treating art as a means to an end rather than a privileged zone above all worldly concerns. The revelation is that this isn’t mutually exclusive with producing fascinating, cutting-edge art - to the contrary, with careful and conscious architecture directed at local needs, it can expose art to a much broader public and make it seem relevant in ways that traditional art spaces often fail to do.

1 The quirky design of the Dafen Art useum reflects the local character. The haphazard design of the roof reflects the top floor's mix of outdoor community spaces and enclosed indoor workshops, combined with skylights used to bring light to the second-floor art galleries. 2 Recesses in the walls of the Dafen Art Museum are earmarked for decoration by local artists. The plan will eventuall allow the museum to reflect the artistic and cultural eccentricities of Dafen Village. 3 Coop Himmelb(l)au's winning design for the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art is a space-aged gallery intended to become a local landmark. 4 OCAT's interior takes advantage of the existing warehouse space, tranforming it into a gallery by the addition of stark white walls that constrast with the exposed ceiling trusses. 5 OCAT transforms the warehouse into an art space through a series of simple gestures: the edgy OCAT logo is painted over the exposed concrete wall on one side; on another, the existing facade is wrapped in metal mesh, exposing both the older facade and the building's mechanical devices. 6 The Public Art Plaza makes use of complex landscaping, with a gallery to the north, a series of walls and ponds to the west, and underground parking garage to the east and a white box gallery (out of shot) to the south-east. The plaza's surgace weaves these different programs together in a continous landscaped interplay of reinforced concrete and natural elements. 7 This open structure offers shade to passers-by. its wooden construction references the trees that dot the plaza's landscape. 8 The main gallery space opens onto the street on one side and the plaza on the other. Its open structure, with several entrances and concrete giving way unexpectedly to windows, openings, glass and entires, encourages passers-by to enter and blurs the distinction between inside and outside. 9 A lecture hall combines the stark beauty of reinforced concrete with the humanising warmth of a wooden floor. The clean geometry references the simplicity of white box galleries.

IMAGES courtesy and copyright of Urbanus, yang Chaoying, Chen Jiu and COOP HIMMELB(L)AU