Songzhuang Art Gallery
Red-brick gallery folded into a courtyard U, built as the first public art space for a village of exiled painters.
This guide to the Songzhuang Art Gallery traces how a 1995 police clearance near Beijing's ruined Summer Palace scattered a colony of squatting painters, some of whom, including Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun, had already resettled in a bare farm village called Songzhuang. It follows the critic Li Xianting, who joined them and stayed, and the decade the growing artist colony spent with no public place to show its work before this building rose in 2006. The gallery's red-brick, courtyard-shaped design borrows straight from the farmhouses around it, with open ground-floor rooms for openings and crowds and quieter, skylit galleries above.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.