Street Theater
An installation by YUNG HO CHANG and Atelier FCJZ
Curated by Hou Hanru & Evelyne Jouanno
Yung Ho Chang is a leading architect from China. After studying and teaching in the US for 15 years, he went back to his native Beijing to establish its first private architectural firm, Atelier FCJZ (“Fei Chang Jian Zhu” or “unusual architecture”), in the early 1990s. In the face of rapid and radical modernization and urbanization in China, the questions of international influence and Chinese tradition, as well as globalization and local specificity, have become the main issues in architectural and artistic debates and practice.
Having experience in both the West and China,Yung Ho Chang critically observes and analyzes the current situation of urban explosion in China and proposes highly inventive solutions. Inspired by both the transformational capacity of traditional Chinese architecture and urban planning as well as contemporary developments in architecture, economics and technology, Yung Ho Chang and his firm have developed new concepts and approaches—such as “Micro-Urbanism”—to negotiate the urban condition of high density and complexity.
The exhibition at Apex Art C.P. will be Yung Ho Chang and FCJZ's first solo exhibition in the US. For this show, Yung Ho Chang has created a site-specific installation to provide the audience with a direct and corporeal experience of his architectural vision and projects. One part of the installation will function as a “Street Theater” (the other a “PeepshowTheater”) in which a dialogue between Beijing's urban reality and Chang's innovative projects in the city takes place. Visible from inside and outside the gallery, it is also a compelling and efficient "translation" of a made-in-China text into the New York context.
A brochure containing an essay by Hou Hanru and Evelyne Jouanno will be available free of charge.
Apex Art Curatorial Program, New York
April 22 - May 22, 1999
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