Text description provided by the architects. The CITIC Pacific Plaza is located in the heart of the Nanjing West Road commercial district in Shanghai. Above CITIC Pacific Plaza, there are two office towers, and a key target for the mall’s transformation is to attract white-collar workers during their lunch breaks and after-work gatherings. Combining dining and art, the space aims to provide office workers with an environment for midday rest and refreshment during the workweek. The Zhang Yu Gallery’s entry into the mall is an experimental collaboration between the artist Zhang Yu and CITIC Pacific. Unlike typical retail spaces, the gallery serves as a public exhibition space for the artist, strongly reflecting his personal artistic identity.
As an experimental endeavor in a commercial setting, the artist sought to create a flexible exhibition space within the constraints of a limited budget and space. The gallery includes a private tea room for meeting guests, a storage area, and a section for selling peripheral items. The entrance needed to express the artist’s personal style without revealing the entire interior to passersby. Zhang Yu’s work blends traditional ink painting with meticulous use of vivid colors. Meanwhile, our architectural approach involved computational algorithms, creating an intriguing contrast: hand-drawn versus algorithm-driven processes.
This combination led to a unique spatial experience—a space that brings an immersive, dreamlike quality into the otherwise homogeneous and somewhat monotonous commercial environment. Consumption is the final stage of production, not a parallel concept. The Gallery emerged after the artist had accumulated a certain following and influence within the industry. The artist’s audience is primarily composed of millennials, who discover themselves through consumption. They find the person they want to become by discovering the products or artworks they desire. The gallery’s spatial design enhances the experience of this demographic’s interaction with the art. Strong emotional responses trigger exploration and connection with the artworks, which is what the designers aimed for.
The gallery entrance, designed through computational mechanics and made up of 1,000 pieces of 1.5mm colorful galvanized steel, opens like a sudden burst of rice paper, echoing the stretched paint strokes in the artist’s works. In the mall’s environment, it creates a visually striking entrance. Given the strict construction timelines and conditions within the mall, all the colorful galvanized steel panels were pre-processed in the factory and then bolted together on-site, ensuring quick assembly without welding, and without needing additional structural support. Necessary fire safety openings were also added to meet building codes. Here, technology serves both as a tool and as part of the artistic expression.
The rise of computational design technology has led to contemporary customization and prefabrication, with CNC cutting being one of the workflows. CNC machines process materials based on inputted drawings or digital models. Hot-dip galvanization, where steel is immersed in a zinc bath to form a protective coating, gives the construction materials a metallic sheen, complementing the golden elements in the artist’s works. The detailed entrance installation is a three-dimensional embodiment of the “Butterfly Dream” motif, with its colorful wings and eyes, as seen in the artist’s paintings. It creates an illusion of stepping out of a traditional commercial environment and into a fantasy world, beginning the journey into the artwork.
Inspired by artist Doug Wheeler, the gallery interior employs a seamless wall design to create a boundless white space, echoing the artist’s use of blank space in his paintings and enhancing the immersive, dreamlike atmosphere. This environment not only serves as a surreal backdrop for the artwork but also isolates visitors from the busy shopping mall outside, offering instead a meditative experience with art at a slower pace.
