China is buzzing! A great deal of frenetic energy is being channeled into creating spruced up architectural gems, burgeoning galleries and glittering skylines. Join us on a tour of China which focuses on the contemporary while at the same time exploring its relationship with the past. Leading the tour will be well-known and respected tour leader, John de Pury who has traveled extensively in China and knows every corner of this emerging country.
The trip begins in Beijing which, partly in preparation for the Olympics scheduled for August 2008 is being subjected to extensive urban re-engineering. Once-forbidden designers are flocking to China, and the list of architects working in the country reads like an honor roll for the industry. Admire Beijing’s new opera house designed by Paul Andreu and Rem Koolhaas’s television authority headquarters which leans and looms like some kind of science-fiction creature poised to stomp all over the surrounding business district. Drive out of Beijing to admire the breath-taking Commune by the Great Wall, a collection of contemporary private houses designed by twelve of Asia’s best-known architects. The grand vision behind Ms. Xin’s masterpiece was to encourage architectural creativity and the result is breathtaking.
Visit the Red Gate Gallery where Australian Brian Wallace transformed a watchtower known as the Dongbianmen into a beautiful private art gallery. Represented in the vast airy interior, where light streams in through windows set deep in thick walls, are contemporary Chinese artists. Enjoy dinner at the Courtyard Restaurant, located in an old house next to the East Gate of the Forbidden City. Here the walls are decorated with some of China’s best contemporary art. On Beijing’s outskirts at Dashanzi where laborers once worked in Mao’s industrialized Beijing, factories have been converted into studios, galleries and design houses known as Factory 798. After two nights in Xian, head to Shanghai and marvel at how the cranes and bamboo scaffolding have been replaced with extraordinary vision. Pudong’s Star-Trek-meets-Disney skyline is already globally iconic, and the spruced up Bund houses institutions like the Shanghai Gallery of Art where director Weng Ling shows cutting-edge art.
A dynamic and diverse arts scene is emerging in Shanghai with hundreds of public art spaces and new museums expected to open by 2008. Visit the Duolun Museum of Modern Art and the area known as Suzhou Creek, an industrial wasteland now converted into an art district. Admire works by artists such as Zhao Bandi and Feng Feng before enjoying a meal at the Whampoa Club where Jereme Leung has created the city’s most innovative Shanghainese-inspired menu. Enjoy a cruise on the Huangpu River where, as barges chug alongside, you will see the city as Shanghai’s early visitors saw it – from the water with the Bund on one side and newly-built Pudong with its sparkling architecture on the other. Return home from Shanghai. Please note this trip is co-sponsored by Painted Desert Art and Cultural Tours.
Group size is limited to 20 travelers.
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