more between New York and China

PaceWildenstein to Open Pace Beijing in August

- PaceWildenstein will open Pace Beijing, a twenty-two-thousand-square-foot space in a former munitions factory, this summer, reports Carol Vogel in the New York Times. The site is in the heart of the city's gallery neighborhood, the Factory 798 District. The twenty-million-dollar project is scheduled to open on August 8, in time for the Summer Olympics. "Beijing is a crossroads" for Taiwan and Hong Kong, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein. "Shows there sell out to other parts of Asia." Pace Beijing will be in a neighborhood that is the equivalent of New York's Chelsea. "Factory 798 District is the third-biggest sightseeing attraction in Beijing," said Glimcher (after the Great Wall and the Forbidden City). "There are already about two hundred galleries there," he added. "It has ten times the attendance of Chelsea." The new Pace gallery is being designed by Richard Gluckman, a New York architect whose work includes the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the recent expansion of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.

Glimcher has turned to local talent, hiring the critic and curator Leng Lin, forty-three, to be president of Pace Beijing. Leng founded the Beijing Commune, an alternative art space in the Factory 798 District, in 2004. Glimcher said the Beijing gallery would present four to six exhibitions a year, with a focus on Chinese art. The inaugural show, "Encounters," will be a group exhibition in which Zhang Huan and Zhang Xiaogang will be joined by longtime members of Pace's stable, like Chuck Close, Alex Katz and Lucas Samaras.