Raising glass to a dream

Fondation Louis Vuitton showcases its Parisian gift for the arts with an exhibition in Beijing, Chen Jie reports.

Driving past the World Trade Center in Beijing, on the west side of the Louis Vuitton store, you will see a huge poster featuring a dramatic structure that looks like a futuristic airship with billowing glass sails or else an iceberg. In fact, this distinctive modern interpretation of the crystal palaces of the past is Fondation Louis Vuitton, the arts center designed by the Canadian architect Frank Gehry for the LVMH Group that opened in Paris last October.

To showcase the museum, which acts as a home for the group's public and private art collections and as a platform for temporary exhibitions and performances by contemporary artists, the foundation has created a traveling version of the inaugural exhibition on Frank Gehry's building, which reflect both the architecture and the stories behind the project, that is being hosted in Beijing through Aug 9.

At the entrance, visitors are welcomed by a video of Lang Lang talking about music and art while playing the piano. The Chinese pianist played at the opening in Paris and also played at the opening of the Beijing exhibition on June 19.

"His video at the entrance is a special welcome to Chinese visitors," says the show's curator Frederic Migayrou, who is a professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London and deputy director of Pompidou Center in Paris.

"A few years ago, France brought great paintings by impressionist artists to China. Now we present this masterpiece. We cannot compare the two, but they are of the same level," he says.

Inside the exhibition, polite young ushers in tailored black trousers and crisp white shirts show visitors around. Emmanuelle Boutet, vice-president of communication, Louis Vuitton China, says that they recruited student volunteers and gave them two weeks of intensive training for the exhibition.

The show comprises a white space and a black space. The white space presents the historical and geographic context of the building, which is situated within the Jardin d'Acclimatation park in the Bois de Boulogne on the west side of Paris. Here visitors can learn about the genesis of the arts center and about some the events and exhibitions that are being hosted at the venue. One video shows French cellist Gautier Capucon giving a master class to students.

The dark space takes you on a journey through Gehry's creative universe, from his original free-form sketches of the building to all the models that were produced over the course of the project. They are installed in groups that trace the design of different aspects of the building, revealing how the design team progressively worked on the project. A team from Gehry's studio in Los Angeles spent two weeks installing everything.

"We worked on the exhibition in Paris last October and now we've moved the exhibits to Beijing. But the exhibition here is not exactly the same as that in Paris. It is specifically designed for the space in Beijing," says Humberto Barraza who has worked for five years with Gehry's studio.

The exhibition also highlights the investigation of materials that led to Gehry's development of the building's fa?ade, including the 12 curved glass sail-like panels that make up its distinctive fragmented exterior.

"The project is a dream, so the first idea was to create a dream. I wanted to create a dream for Bernard Arnault (chairman and CEO of LVMH), who had been dreaming about this," the 86-year-old architect says in a video.

The dream started 14 years ago. In 2001, Jean-Paul Claverie, who once worked in the French Ministry of Culture, joined LVMH as a counselor to Arnault. Claverie was so interested in Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao that he insisted Arnault make a trip to Spain to see it.

After canceling twice, Arnault finally visited Bilbao in November 2001 and a month later he had lunch with Gehry in New York to talk about creating a building for the Louis Vuitton foundation.

Arnault wanted to build a contemporary-art museum and cultural center. As a major art collector himself, Arnault hoped to reinforce the connection between the luxury goods houses of the group and cutting edge art and design.

Twelve large glass sails give volume, lightness and vitality to an assembly of white blocks, known as the "iceberg", which are the body of the building. Situated in a basin specially created for the purpose, the building looks are like a giant bird in the garden ready to take flight, or as Gehry says in the video, "like a floating ship".

"To reflect our constantly changing world, we wanted to create a building that would evolve according to the time (of the day) and the light in order to give the impression of something ephemeral and continually changing," he explains.

Construction on the building, which along with its contents will be handed over as a gift to Paris in 55 years, started in March 2008, and the two-story structure (the Paris government insisted that the building not be taller than buildings that had previously occupied the site) was completed in December 2013, with the landscaping of the approaches and the furnishing of the inside finished in spring 2014.

The exhibition in Beijing is the first in the Louis Vuitton foundation's "Beyond the Walls" program, which brings arts shows sponsored by it and art pieces in its collection on tour. After Beijing, the show will travel to Japan where it will be held at Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo, beginning Oct 15.

Contact the writer at chenjie@chinadaily.com.cn