Zeng Xiaolian Museum of Art / Elepheno Architects

Text description provided by the architects. The World Horticultural Exposition was held in the “spring city” of Kunming in 1999, under the theme of “Man and Nature–Marching into the 21st Century.” The ‘99 Expo has had a profound and lasting impact on the growth of Kunming as a city, and the development of the tourism industry in Yunnan Province, and stands as an unforgettable memory for a generation of Kunmingers. Twenty-two years later, the 15th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity (COP15) is being held in Kunming. On this occasion, Contemporary Gallery Kunming selected a vacant venue within the original World Horticultural Expo Garden for an artistic revitalization project, to construct a small art museum dedicated to the art of Zeng Xiaolian, a long-time scientific illustrator for the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The project is located on the north side of the Expo Gardens Friendship Road, on the sites of the former Pakistan and Vietnam Gardens. The conception of the museum layout began with thinking about how to conceive of the site’s “preexistence.” While much expo architecture is removed from its environment and surrounding cultural context, our first impression of the Pakistan and Vietnam Gardens was quite vivid: stepping on the weathered red bricks, touching the cracks in the marble, seeing the shadows of columns, and trees cast by the powerful sunlight. This richness is the result of a long period of natural growth, which has bestowed the site with a sense of historical memory.

We define “preexistence” as the preservation and persistence of “new heritage”: the previous content as a historical thread has not been scraped away, and remains legible, while the newly-written content becomes like a new image layer laid down on a piece of tracing paper over the original—old and new are carefully stacked together, past and present connected, but not mutually interfering with one another. The steel structure satisfied the need for rapid construction while also minimizing the impact on the surrounding environment. The final plan did not fall a single tree, while the original open-air pavilion, stone plaque, marble banisters, wall niches, and stone benches of the Pakistan pavilion were preserved in their entirety and integrated into the museum.

Red bricks are used in the interior as the exterior floor materials and extended to the exterior. Viewing frames facing the courtyard are opened sparingly between the paintings, and the boundary between interior and exterior is blurred. Simultaneously visitors shuttle through the interior, exterior, and semi-exterior space while visiting and observing the paintings.

While most walls rise from the floor, the walls of this museum are hung from the steel structure that stands overhead, and the bottom of the walls just need to be simply connected and fixed with the ground to avoid excavation of strip foundations or ground beams. The curves and intersections of these lightweight suspended walls form the rich interior and exterior spaces.

If the original art gallery is a floating entity, by wrapping a ring of the curtain, its boundary is offset. A new edge emerges that abstracts and filters the natural surroundings, and also generate layers between the primitive vegetation and new landscape design, so people can even travel inside the two layers of the system. The shadow is decomposed through the curtain and projected on the wall, and it is not clear whether it is a leaf or a branch. It is the presence of the medium that translates the sunlight, trees, wind, and time, and this is an aesthetic painting that only belongs to this scene.