Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.\u201cWhat is a gallery?\u201d asks Chinese gallerist Zhang Wei as I follow her along a raised platform circling the lush garden and lily pond of a\u00a0formerly abandoned park outside the city of Guangzhou. We survey her experimental art garden: a vista of palm trees opens up alongside an\u00a0eclectic assortment of connected multicoloured buildings, some with cement fa\u00e7ades embedded with shells designed by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto.\u00a0She and her partner Hu Fang opened Vitamin Creative Space \u2013 an international art space and gallery that explores contemporary art from a Chinese context and philosophy \u2013 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).\u00a0The space is used to amplify the symbiotic relationship between art and nature, a concept at the heart of the work of the\u00a0Vietnam-born Danish artist Danh V\u00f5, with whom the\u00a0pair have worked for more than a decade. V\u00f5, 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\u00a0of G\u00fcldenhof, his home on a former East German\u00a0farm collective outside Berlin.As Wei and Fang were breaking ground on Mirrored Gardens in Guangzhou, V\u00f5 was transforming G\u00fcldenhof into an experiential outdoor art space with the help of\u00a0local 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. \u201cG\u00fcldenhof\u00a0was a lightbulb moment,\u201d says V\u00f5, of how the\u00a0farm has galvanised his creative process. \u201cIt\u2019s become a space for people to enter and collaborate. An organic platform for another form of creativity to grow.\u201d\u00a0Having visited V\u00f5 many times at his farm, Wei and Fang carried those ideas back to China to bloom in the Mirrored Gardens. \u201cWe learned from Danh that running a gallery is about an exchange of ideas and values,\u201d says Wei, who was so inspired by G\u00fcldenhof that she and Fang chose to host a pavilion piece by V\u00f5 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 \u2013 to\u00a0 recreate a version of G\u00fcldenhof 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 \u201cruins\u201d \u2013 the buildings once used as the offices of the agricultural park that formerly occupied the land. V\u00f5\u00a0himself saw Re-space for the first time in the spring of\u00a02023, and was astounded by what Wei and Fang had done.\u00a0\u201cWhat kind of gallerist would make this kind of effort?\u201d he says. He now returns to Re-space several times\u00a0a year to add and change and plant new things.\u00a0V\u00f5 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\u2019s Tongue. He leads us towards one of the old ruins where there is a wooden terrace on which stands a\u00a0cluster of bamboo chairs. Behind us is another, smaller, concrete ruin where thick vines twist in the wall like something from Angkor Wat. \u201cFang calls it \u2018a space as a\u00a0vase\u2019,\u201d says V\u00f5, of the art installation. \u201cWhat I appreciate about Wei is that she will tell potential collectors who\u00a0want to buy my work that they first need to understand it,\u201d he continues. \u201cIn some cases that has meant waiting several years for a\u00a0piece, or telling my collectors that, instead of buying my\u00a0artwork, they should buy a farm or grow their own.\u201dLater, 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 V\u00f5 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. \u201cI told him, \u2018Come on, it\u2019s nature, you can\u2019t make boundaries,\u2019\u201d she says.\u00a0 \u201cWe still don\u2019t know what we are doing here, but I don\u2019t 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.\u201dThe next day, V\u00f5 is travelling to Hong Kong to check on another project he\u00a0is working on in Asia, the now four\u2011year-old M+, a contemporary museum within the city\u2019s still evolving West Kowloon Cultural District, a mega arts hub developed on reclaimed land. The museum \u2013 a monumental 18-storey, 700,000sq ft building, with a fa\u00e7ade that faces Hong Kong\u2019s Victoria Harbour \u2013 was designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and contains a vast, 775sq m subterranean area, dubbed \u201cFound Space\u201d, whose use was still unresolved following the building\u2019s completion. Initially, the M+ team considered turning it into a version of Tate Modern\u2019s Turbine Hall. \u201cWe decided however that we should do something different,\u201d says Doryun Chong, the museum\u2019s artistic director and chief curator. \u201cNot just a facsimile of a western model. After much discussion we thought we should hand it over to an artist to reimagine.\u201dFor Chong, it was clear that artist would be V\u00f5. \u201cDanh symbolises this moment in the 21st century, like Isamu Noguchi did the last,\u201d 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\u00a0political transition that served as the powerful magnet for V\u00f5. \u201cRather than a dead space, I saw it as a laboratory,\u00a0a\u00a0place where architectural exhibitions, film screenings, performances and design objects could all merge,\u201d he says. The museum plans to work with V\u00f5 in\u00a0the long-term for this project. Last fall, he started planting there a continuation of the ideas first sowed at G\u00fcldenhof and at the Mirrored Gardens. \u00a0V\u00f5, who obsessively collects artisanal objects such as straw brooms and egg baskets, is next planning to create a\u00a0bazaar in the space, with the help of the curators at M+. Some of the museum team have been concerned as to how\u00a0they were going to pull this off, but Chong says he has\u00a0become used to \u201creceiving the side-eye\u201d at V\u00f5\u2019s unconventional requests. \u201cThis is what is so exciting about some of the projects going on here in Asia. New paradigms are being invented,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is what the Found Space is all about. It\u2019s a place to experiment and break the rules.\u201d\u201cI\u2019ve had the good fortune of having many exhibitions\u00a0early in my career,\u201d V\u00f5 concludes. \u201cI am no\u00a0longer interested in shipping huge artworks around the world and making gigantic sculptures. Instead I\u2019m\u00a0interested in asking questions, rethinking systems and being part of a dialogue about what a cultural space\u00a0for the future can be.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.\u201cWhat is a gallery?\u201d asks Chinese gallerist Zhang Wei as I follow her along a raised platform circling the lush garden and lily pond of a\u00a0formerly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":274034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-274033","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274035,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274033\/revisions\/274035"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}