In January 2006, Galerie Urs Meile has inaugurated a new location in Beijing's quarter of Cao Changdi. The gallery's showrooms and residential complex include a living and working area for visiting artists.

 

Within the rapid multiplication in China of exhibitions, biennials, triennials and public spaces, Galerie Urs Meile sees its role to sustainably provide working conditions for contemporary artists which includes the support of artists in various media, experimental approaches, and their ideas.

 

The artist-in-residence program offers visiting artists a special opportunity to live and work in Beijing. The cultural environment stimulates new experiential horizons, perceptions, and creative processes. It offers thus conditions for the development of new artistic concepts and ideas. As a direct reaction to the unprecedented freedom and economic rewards Galerie Urs Meile is especially fostering critical discussions and developments of contemporary art by offering artists the opportunity to come up with new and interpretative concepts.

 

Galerie Urs Meile's branch exists in an Ai Weiwei-designed modern cloister in the quarter of Cao Changdi in Eastern Beijing. Its architecture is featuring sharp angles and cantilevers in the signature gray brick for which the architect and artist Ai Weiwei is best known.

 

Completed in 2005, it houses three main exhibition spaces as well as a studio and residential space for visiting artists.

 

In Cao Changdi you find the National Film Museum, galleries, exhibition spaces, and the studios of other artists. The art district "798" is located in the nearby quarter of Dashanzi with galleries, book stores, cafés, and restaurants.

 

Cao Changdi can be reached by taxi on Beijing's airport expressway in 25 minutes. To Beijing's city center it takes 25 minutes by car.

The artist's residential and working space measures approx. 200 m2. The living area meets modern standards.

Residency: March 11 - June 30, 2008

Lang/Baumann, Switzerland

 

 

Real Work

 

In the past 10 years we have developed several works that we call "real work". On the one side this is about the fact that our installations or objects can be "used" as furniture, as libraries or even as a hotel room as, for example, in the work "Hotel Everland". On the other hand "real work" means that it is often connected with building things, renovating a space before it becomes an artwork - or planning a work and have it constructed by others. This process of producing a work is real like in the "real world", following the same mechanisms as you find them in architecture or design. We try to enlarge the team, to add discussion partners and to be obliged to find arguments why something has to look like it does. As artists we do not see ourselves as the best persons to make our art. Even if our ideas are quite clear about what we want to do, we enjoy integrating factors from outside that help us to define the borderlines of what is possible. The discussion is important and forms the base of collaboration. In such a way making art is a social process for us. We are curious to go on with this process and be inspired in China.

 

L/B

 

 

http://www.langbaumann.com

 

 

 

 

Past Artists-in-Residence:

Jan Anüll (CH), 2008

Tea Mäkipää (FIN), 2007/08

Rémy Markowitsch (CH), 2007

Anatoly Shuravlev (RU), 2007

Bachmann/Banz (CH), 2006/07