798 District’s iconic Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) has been for sale for over a year. Now the popular gallery has finally been purchased by a group of prominent Chinese investors who will turn the formerly private company into a foundation, South China Morning Post reports.
Guy Ullens, a Belgian art collector, put UCCA on the market in June 2016. The private center had no art collection, no actual real estate and cost roughly RMB41 million to finance each year.
The amount the investment group paid for UCCA remains undisclosed.
Current UCCA director Philip Tinari will continue to run the center. However, it will now operate as a non-profit, tax-exempt organization, which will help attract donors to help pay the annual operational fees.
“The old model had worked under Mr. Ullens’ generosity but he had set it up in 2007 as a private company. Now that the public-facing activities are run by a charity, we will be able to raise funds more easily and hopefully improve the production quality of our exhibitions and the size of the audience,” Tinari said.
“Our mission continues to be a desire to put Chinese art in a global context, to provoke and stimulate a discussion about a vital part of art history,” Tinari added.
Now that UCCA is under new ownership, plans are in the works to completely renovate the facility, which will reopen under the same name in the summer of 2018 with an exhibition by Xu Bing.
UCCA has long been one of the most popular galleries in 798 and is visited by roughly one million people each year.
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