Urban Dialogues: Beijing-Copenhagen

A group of students from KADK presents the results of a cross-cultural collaboration at the Danish Cultural Center in Beijing during Beijing Design Week 2018.

The exhibition 'Urban Dialogues: Beijing-Copenhagen' is the KADK contribution to the Beijing Design Week 2018, the biggest architecture and design event in Asia. Following cities such as London, Milan, Amsterdam and Barcelona in previous years, the City of Copenhagen is the 2018 guest city with the larger exhibition and program entitled 'Living is Giving'.

Urban Dialogues: Beijing-Copenhagen is a collaboration rbetween the Urbanism and Societal Change program at KADK’s School of Architecture and students and faculty of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Beijing.

Groups of students and teachers from the two schools have visited eachother several times during the year. Together with local citizens the students have worked together in a dialogical process, addressing a diversity of urban challenges in Beijing and Copenhagen respectively. 

Cultural exchange through dialogue

Collectively, the work explores what forms of cross-cultural learnings and experimentation might be possible if conventional one-directional interactions – e.g. ‘export’ – are expanded in favour of more open two-way dialogues and exchange. How might such an exchange and transfer of local conditions, expertise, and conceptual and cultural approaches, as well as representational formats, support an open creative field of cross-pollinated spatialities, atmospheres and expressions, across and between two cultures – without erasing characteristics of each culture?

The exhibition consists of drawings, videos and objects – the centerpiece of which is a 25m long model of spatial interventions on six different neighborhoods across Beijing, developed by KADK students. The model is conceived as a hybrid between the 2-dimensional narrative surface of the traditional Chinese scroll, and the partially flattened 3-dimensional space of the classical European frieze. The object explores a space of dialogue between model and image; but also between space and narrative; and west and east.

The project and the exhibition is supported by the S.C Van Fond, Dreyers Fond, Oticon Fonden and KADK.