Ullens Center Opens in Beijing with ’85 New Wave
News / Beijing
By Michael Hatch

On November 2, the new Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA, see AAP 50) officially opened in Beijing’s hotbed 798 Arts District. The inaugural show, “‘85 New Wave – The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art,” aims to establish a reputation for the institution based on historically significant contemporary Chinese art and art scholarship, with 136 works of art and 1,000 supplementary documents. It includes textbook works such as Xiao Lu’s Dialogue (1989), the artist’s seminal gun-shooting performance at the “China Avant-Garde” exhibition.

Funded by Belgian collectors Guy and Miriam Ullens, who sought to build an eventual home for their collection of Chinese contemporary art, the Ullens Center includes a 3,000 square-meter exhibition space and 2,000 square meters of library, exhibition and auditorium space. It is the largest single venue in the 798 Arts District and dwarfs its closest Beijing competitor, the Today Art Museum (2500 square meters). Further signaling the Ullens Center’s commitment to its host country, the contract to redesign the former Bauhaus-style factory in northeastern Beijing went to MADA spam, the Shanghai architecture firm led by University of Southern California architecture dean Qingyun Ma.

The center’s staff will have access to the Ullens’ collection of approximately 1,700 pieces of Chinese art, including 200 works of classical calligraphy, but curatorial discretion will be given to artistic director Fei Dawei and chief curator and deputy director Colin Chinnery. Fei and Chinnery are behind the inaugural “‘85 New Wave” exhibition, which highlights the dynamic surge in Chinese contemporary arts of the late 1980s. The center has also added Jan Debbaut, former director of the Tate Modern collections, as an artistic advisor. An upcoming show by German artist Rebecca Horn illustrates the staff’s intentions to create an international arts platform in a city poor in such venues.

Chinnery notes the inaugural exhibition represents a symbolic convergence of the “birth” of Chinese contemporary art in the 1980s, the birth of the Ullens collection shortly thereafter—at a time when few collectors were looking at China—and now the birth of the new center. But he also stressed to ArtAsiaPacific that, “the exhibition is not about nostalgia, it's looking at what's happening now. It’s telling that in a society so obsessed with the future, young people are displaying a resurgent interest in 1980s culture. The amount of creative energy, passion and idealism that existed then contrasts sharply with the self-absorbed individualism prevalent today. So the 1980s provide fertile grounds for inspiration for the future.”

Far from a glamour project, one of the center’s mandates will be counteracting the prevalence of market influences in China, with Chinnery commenting, “Galleries and auction houses turn huge profits and yet until now there’s hardly been a single library for research. That lack of balance has a very bad effect on the environment here so it’s important for us to develop an independent stance from the market, one that is research, content and experiment driven.”

Local colleagues are excited about the arrival of the Ullens Center. Lu Jie, director of the Long March Space (see P. 150), located nearby in 798, told AAP that he welcomes the Ullens’ commitment to providing historical context and depth to the current Chinese art boom. Zoe Butt, international coordinator at Long March, added, “We look forward to the new chapter in artistic dialogue and discourse that the Ullens Center brings. It’s a tremendous coup for 798 to have them here and we like to think we can work with them in the future.”

The Ullens made waves at Sotheby’s in London earlier this summer with a landmark sale of 19th-century Turner watercolors that grossed GBP 10.67 million (USD 21.74 million). The money was reportedly earmarked for the Ullens Center as well as other philanthropic activities, including the Happy House Foundation for children in Nepal. The Ullens have previously sponsored Chinese pavilions at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2005. Assuaging concerns about a private, internationally-funded institution attaining so much influence in China, Chinnery contends that, “It doesn't matter where the money comes from as long as principles and ethics are in place and there is enough freedom for the center to develop without promotional strings attached. People have the feeling that this is really going to change a lot of things here. I don't know if we can sustain that level of enthusiasm but we feel we are meeting a great necessity.”