Experiments with reality

Being 3 Gallery founder Mianbu (left) and Chinese artist Huang He who is exhibiting his works at the gallery. [Photo provided to China Daily]

For the gallery's anniversary, Mianbu has relocated it from the increasingly expensive and commercialized 798 Art Zone to a newly evolving arts district, an obsolete plastics factory 10 minutes' drive away.

Mianbu rented a total space of 1,800 square meters, separated into three sections. She turned an old boiler house of the 1950s, full of warmth and a sense of shelter, into a 14-meter-high, 300-square-meter churchlike hall, where various types of art can be exhibited.

The curator started collecting artworks in the early 1980s when she was 22, though she saw herself more as a poet than as an art dealer with deep pockets.

"In the early years, when I spent months of my salary to buy a painting and hang it on the wall, I could not close my eyes for the whole night. I kept looking at it and prayed 'please don't drop'." Mianbu recalls.

"There is a painting on the wall", the theme of the exhibition, is a concept promoted by Mianbu. The message here, she says, is essentially the value of paintings. China's enlarging middle class can be transformed, with proper education, into a strong clientele for works of arts, she says.

"We all have walls at home. The walls protect us, and meanwhile they restrain us. A painting on the wall will enable us to see through the walls and set us free," Mianbu says.