Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.“What is a gallery?” asks Chinese gallerist Zhang Wei as I follow her along a raised platform circling the lush garden and lily pond of a formerly abandoned park outside the city of Guangzhou. We survey her experimental art garden: a vista of palm trees opens up alongside an eclectic assortment of connected multicoloured buildings, some with cement façades embedded with shells designed by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. She and her partner Hu Fang opened Vitamin Creative Space – an international art space and gallery that explores contemporary art from a Chinese context and philosophy – in Guangzhou in 2002. Then, 10 years ago, when a real-estate developer friend offered them some semi-abandoned land in a former agricultural park outside the city, the idea emerged that a gallery could also be a garden. The resulting oasis is called Mirrored Gardens (although there are no mirrors in sight). The space is used to amplify the symbiotic relationship between art and nature, a concept at the heart of the work of the Vietnam-born Danish artist Danh Võ, with whom the pair have worked for more than a decade. Võ, a conceptual artist whose work deals with questions of identity, memory and belonging, is more recently known for art and installations that are often developed within the grounds of Güldenhof, his home on a former East German farm collective outside Berlin.As Wei and Fang were breaking ground on Mirrored Gardens in Guangzhou, Võ was transforming Güldenhof into an experiential outdoor art space with the help of local designers, builders and his gardener Christine Schulz. The estate is filled with flower gardens, greenhouses, Enzo Mari-influenced DIY furniture and Isamu Noguchi Play Sculptures. “Güldenhof was a lightbulb moment,” says Võ, of how the farm has galvanised his creative process. “It’s become a space for people to enter and collaborate. An organic platform for another form of creativity to grow.” Having visited Võ many times at his farm, Wei and Fang carried those ideas back to China to bloom in the Mirrored Gardens. “We learned from Danh that running a gallery is about an exchange of ideas and values,” says Wei, who was so inspired by Güldenhof that she and Fang chose to host a pavilion piece by Võ and then a second installation of a tree root and a bamboo birdcage in a semi-abandoned site near Mirrored Gardens. It was then that the concept of a longer-term project arose – to recreate a version of Güldenhof there, complete with Noguchi lamps, wooden pavilions and translucent roofs. They have called this Re-space, a small garden and nursery surrounded on three sides by a combination of new paths and platforms connecting the various “ruins” – the buildings once used as the offices of the agricultural park that formerly occupied the land. Võ himself saw Re-space for the first time in the spring of 2023, and was astounded by what Wei and Fang had done. “What kind of gallerist would make this kind of effort?” he says. He now returns to Re-space several times a year to add and change and plant new things. Võ is working in the garden when I visit. I find him covered in dirt and surrounded by vegetation and flowers, including one of his favourites, a fern-like plant called Pretty Dragon’s Tongue. He leads us towards one of the old ruins where there is a wooden terrace on which stands a cluster of bamboo chairs. Behind us is another, smaller, concrete ruin where thick vines twist in the wall like something from Angkor Wat. “Fang calls it ‘a space as a vase’,” says Võ, of the art installation. “What I appreciate about Wei is that she will tell potential collectors who want to buy my work that they first need to understand it,” he continues. “In some cases that has meant waiting several years for a piece, or telling my collectors that, instead of buying my artwork, they should buy a farm or grow their own.”Later, Wei takes me to another part of the park to visit one of the newest installations, hidden in the jungle foliage. Among a forest of massive monsteras is a small kitchen where Võ is waiting for us; here he cooks his favourite Vietnamese dishes for visiting artists, friends and collectors. Over bowls of pho, Wei says that the owner of the park, a friend, has given up on creating definitive spaces for her. “I told him, ‘Come on, it’s nature, you can’t make boundaries,’” she says. “We still don’t know what we are doing here, but I don’t really like to define it too much. I think, though, that our job is to be more like gardeners and our gallery is more like an invitation, or a borrowed landscape, than a fixed space.”The next day, Võ is travelling to Hong Kong to check on another project he is working on in Asia, the now four‑year-old M+, a contemporary museum within the city’s still evolving West Kowloon Cultural District, a mega arts hub developed on reclaimed land. The museum – a monumental 18-storey, 700,000sq ft building, with a façade that faces Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour – was designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and contains a vast, 775sq m subterranean area, dubbed “Found Space”, whose use was still unresolved following the building’s completion. Initially, the M+ team considered turning it into a version of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. “We decided however that we should do something different,” says Doryun Chong, the museum’s artistic director and chief curator. “Not just a facsimile of a western model. After much discussion we thought we should hand it over to an artist to reimagine.”For Chong, it was clear that artist would be Võ. “Danh symbolises this moment in the 21st century, like Isamu Noguchi did the last,” he says. It was the challenge of an undefined space in the heart of a new institution, which itself is in the centre of a world capital going through a political transition that served as the powerful magnet for Võ. “Rather than a dead space, I saw it as a laboratory, a place where architectural exhibitions, film screenings, performances and design objects could all merge,” he says. The museum plans to work with Võ in the long-term for this project. Last fall, he started planting there a continuation of the ideas first sowed at Güldenhof and at the Mirrored Gardens. Võ, who obsessively collects artisanal objects such as straw brooms and egg baskets, is next planning to create a bazaar in the space, with the help of the curators at M+. Some of the museum team have been concerned as to how they were going to pull this off, but Chong says he has become used to “receiving the side-eye” at Võ’s unconventional requests. “This is what is so exciting about some of the projects going on here in Asia. New paradigms are being invented,” he says. “This is what the Found Space is all about. It’s a place to experiment and break the rules.”“I’ve had the good fortune of having many exhibitions early in my career,” Võ concludes. “I am no longer interested in shipping huge artworks around the world and making gigantic sculptures. Instead I’m interested in asking questions, rethinking systems and being part of a dialogue about what a cultural space for the future can be.”
