SONG ZHANG

2023.2

PORTFOLIO OF SELECTED WORKS 2020-2022

Instructor: W. Jude Leblanc

Reflective Dynamism

Instructor: Danielle Willems

In terms of nowadays art museums, the space is often static and clumsy, which often falls into the same fallacy of linearity and interiority, one sees the end of the museum through the linear arch corridor, and the gallery spaces are normally placed on the two sides. So what if we break down such stereotypes of art museums and create spaces that flow on a trajectory of views?

View on a large scale speaks to the context. Views give shape to the overall geometry in the plan by orienting and protruding towards the existing boat house, waterworks, and art museum; View on a medium scale speaks to the landscape. The interior is intertwined with the exterior landscape and opens views from the ground level creating free circulation in and out; View on a small scale speaks to the interior. As views bounce and reflect back and forth in plan and section. It leads the flow of circulation, which finally shapes the space within.

The “Asia Society” Art Museum Atlanta consists of three programmatic components: Media, art, and nature. Media includes a public library and a theater for performing arts, which engages with the city street and functions as a threshold from the outer business to the inner tranquility. For the art component, the main section of the art gallery is devoted to the work of Ai Weiwei. As a contemporary artist, Ai Weiwei is largely influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s lifescene readymade. With his unique Chinese cultural background, he uses art as a weapon to criticize social and political issues. The design, therefore, aims to create a narrative of Aiweiwei’s artwork spatially. Inspired from the Soviet Montage theory, the cross-reference of scenes and characters can also be viewed spatially as an alignment of artwork and nature. The design creates a promenade that rigorously crops the views of ascending trees and descending water, making the exhibition space a neutral threshold for the artworks. Overall, the art museum is a campus or a landscape of media, art, and nature, embedded and interweaved in the urban context.