Architect Yung Ho Chang in focus
Mainland architect Yung Ho Chang has spent much of his career creating modern designs with Chinese characteristics. Now his work is the subject of a retrospective, writesHannah Xu
China has always had an intricate relationship with materialism, says one of the nation's foremost modern architects, Yung Ho Chang.
"At school, we were taught about Marxism's dialectical materialism, which was absurd and incomprehensible at a time of scarcity," he says. "Today, a preoccupation with consumption and material comfort saturates our society."
Chang, 56, has spent almost three decades incorporating modern architecture into the Chinese context. On Sunday, a retrospective of his career will open at Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing, featuring more than 40 models, 270 drawings and six installation works dating from the early 1980s to today.
Running until December 2, the exhibition represents the creative reinterpretation of historical continuity by Chang and his practice, Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ), during an era of unprecedented change on the mainland.
For the exhibition, UCCA's 1,200 square metre Great Hall will be transformed into a hutong neighbourhood, containing six courtyards. Each courtyard will feature a different aspect of Chang's practice, from architectural designs to his new endeavours in fashion and film.
The exhibition, titled Yung Ho Chang + FCJZ: Material-ism, is a pun on dialectical materialism, the current cult of material comfort and the central role of materials in an architect's work. "Architects deal with materials every day," he says. "To us, materials are not a belief but our culture."
A native of Beijing, Chang followed the footsteps of his father Zhang Kaiji, a renowned architect, in attending his alma mater, Nanjing Institute of Technology (now Southeast University), in Jiangsu province in 1977, when universities reopened after the Cultural Revolution. In 1981, Chang was accepted by Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, on a scholarship to pursue a bachelor's degree in architecture, and went on to the University of California at Berkeley for his master's. He went on to teach at various universities in the US, including the University of Michigan, Berkeley and served as head of architecture at the Massachussets Institute of Technology.
