On Friday, the Beijing-based UCCA Center for Contemporary Art opened a hotly anticipated Shanghai outpost. Titled the UCCA Edge, the new museum—designed by SO–IL, the same Brooklyn-based architecture firm behind the K11 Art and Cultural Centre in Hong Kong and New York’s soon-to-open Amant arts center —contains nearly 60,000 square feet of gallery space and is sited in the city’s Jing’An district.
The museum has the potential to significantly expand the presence of the UCCA, which is already one of China’s most important museums. This is the third space to be opened by the UCCA. The second, known as the UCCA Dune, opened in the northeastern coastal resort town of Beidaihe in 2018.
In a statement, UCCA director Philip Tinari said, “With the opening of UCCA Edge, we will be able to deliver top-quality programming to audiences in China’s two largest metropolitan areas, moving us one significant step closer to becoming a truly national institution. We look forward to deepening our relationships with artists and publics in this great city.”
With the UCCA Edge now open to the public, below is a look inside the museum, whose inaugural offerings include a survey of artists’ responses to Shanghai as a city at the dawn of the new millennium and a series of commission by new artists.
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Image Credit: Courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art The UCCA Edge’s first exhibition is “City on the Edge: Art and Shanghai at the Turn of the Millennium,” a survey of how art reflected a radically changing city during the early 2000s. The show, organized by UCCA director Philip Tinari, includes work by 26 artists, most of whom are Chinese.
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Xu Zhen’s video Shouting (1998/2005/2021), projected in the UCCA Edge’s lobby, shows stunned crowds reacting to the artist screaming in public spaces. As he shouts, some turn their heads.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Shen Yuan and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art/Guanyi Art Archive, Beijing Huang Yong Ping’s classic sculpture Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank (2000) is a sand replica of Shanghai’s HSBC bank. Huang once said that, when the 20-ton work was exhibited at the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, he intended the piece as a statement about the connection between colonialism and capitalism.
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Image Credit: Courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art Concurrent with the 2000 Shanghai Biennale ran the now-legendary exhibition “Fuck Off.” Orgnaized by curator Feng Boyi and artist Ai Weiwei, it conveyed an anti-establishment attitude. “City on the Edge” refers to the influence of “Fuck Off” by including work by artists who were included in that show, such as Ding Yi, represented here by examples from his “Appearances of Crosses” series from 2000.
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Image Credit: Courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art Hu Jieming’s The Fiction Between 1999 & 2000 (2000) reflects the era’s anxiety by collecting an array of screencaptures the artist took during a 24-hour period, attesting to the overpowering amount of information available online.
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Image Credit: Courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art As part of “City on the Edge,” archival materials related to the artworks on view are displayed in a gallery.
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Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery/Image courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art The UCCA commissioned Cao Fei and Wong Ping to create new works for the museum’s opening. Wong’s work, Shifty Eyes Exercise (2021), contains two giant eyes, which move around with the wind and are intended to mimic the darting glances of strangers in urban spaces.
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Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Vitamin Creative Space/Image courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art Cao Fei’s commission, Re-enchantment: The Birth of RMB City (2021), refers to a similarly titled work by the artist in which she envisioned a fantastical version of China using the website Second Life. In the new work, viewers can look through the binoculars to see a virtual version of Shanghai.
[Read an interview with Cao Fei about RMB City and other works.]