Ｍｏｄｅｒｎ　Ａｒｔ　ｉｎ　ａｎ　Ａｎｃｉｅｎｔ　Ｓｅｔｔｉｎｇ.docVIP

Ｍｏｄｅｒｎ　Ａｒｔ　ｉｎ　ａｎ　Ａｎｃｉｅｎｔ　Ｓｅｔｔｉｎｇ 　　 　　ASCENDING the ancient stone steps to Red Gate Gallery reveals the quintessential Beijing panorama. The gallery is housed in Dongbianmen Watchtower, a Ming Dynasty structure straddling the last crumbling vestiges of Beijing’s city wall. Like a besieged bastion of the city’s imperial past, the watchtower is hemmed in by railway lines and Beijing’s Second Ring Road. The glass and steel edifices of the CBD loom in the distance. It’s appropriate that this ancient fortress, surrounded by a cornucopia of modern development, houses a gallery that has long been a cultural bastion of a more contemporary kind. 　　For 17 years, Red Gate has been exhibiting Chinese contemporary art. The story of Red Gate, and its Australian director Brian Wallace, is the story of the rise of China’s contemporary art movement ?C from a barely tolerated, underground practice to a highly visible, internationally renowned creative industry. 　　 　　Early Days 　　 　　When Brian moved to Beijing in the mid-1980s, he found a nascent art scene completely without institutional support, but hungry for a chance to express itself. He writes evocatively of that time in To the Watchtower, a book produced to celebrate Red Gate’s 15th anniversary in 2006: “Young artists circulated through Beijing with slides of their work, or the work itself tucked under their arms, hoping to connect with people interested in their art. They would exhibit on foreigners’ sofas or guide the curious to their tiny homes.” 　　The young Australian befriended many of these artists and quickly fell into the organizational role he was to play for the next two decades. “There was no official support, and no galleries as such,” he recalls. “Many of these exhibitions were just organized by the artists themselves. So with my artist friends we thought, ‘why don’t we take it to a higher level,’ and send out proper invitations and have cocktail parties for the openings? So that’s what I started doing.”