The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art or UCCA is known not only for its sprawling contemporary art exhibition. UCCA is also the China's only non-profit art organization supported by a private foundation.
It's situated in a former munitions complex in the booming Dashanzi arts district in northeast Beijing. In the steaming Chinese art market, this anomaly attracts as much attention as it does controversy in the country's contemporary arts scene.
Until last November, this Bauhaus style factory was just a restaurant and a vacant exhibition space. Now it's the burgeoning center of Chinese contemporary artists. The character of UCCA may be read from its centerpiece--the Book from the Sky. It's by Xu Bing whose early fame traces to a period of radical artistic experimentation during the 1980s.
Works from artists who stand apart from the commercial mainstream are exhibited in UCCA by courtesy of its patrons, the fervid Chinese art collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens.
