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A Belgian Couple Will Give Beijing a New Home for Contemporary Art

The center is scheduled to open on November 2.

From The New York Times -- Interior Design, 7/27/2007 12:00:00 AM

If you wanted to illustrate the increasingly global nature of the money and influence driving the art world these days, you might invent a wealthy Belgian couple who live in, say, Switzerland, and plan to use the money they made selling a collection of English masterworks (Turner watercolors) to establish a center for contemporary art in Beijing, where one early show will probably feature a well-known German artist.

In a telephone interview this week, Baron Guy Ullens, who, with his wife, Myriam, perfectly fits that description — they sold their Turners, the biggest group to come on the market in more than a century, for $21 million this month at Sotheby’s — hastened to add that he was educated mostly in the United States. And that he is also using his money to set up philanthropic programs for children in Nepal.

Baron Ullens, 72, is to be in New York today to announce details of his plans for one of the largest contemporary art spaces in China, now nearing completion in a former munitions complex in the booming Dashanzi warehouse arts district in Beijing. The center, scheduled to open on Nov. 2, will transform two large factory buildings and a collection of smaller ones into as much as 26,000 square feet of exhibition space, with an auditorium and library.

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