Beijing Remodelled

A quick glance at this red doorway and it seems in keeping with the kind that once marked the homes of Imperial kinsmen in the centre of Beijing. Grand lacquered doors like these once featured at regular intervals along the lengths of the narrow hutongs in the heart of the capital, marking the entrance to Beijing's famed courtyard houses.

In recent years, they have slowly disappeared as the city opens itself up to redevelopment, preserved only in pockets in the area surrounding the Forbidden City. Instead, today doors, like the one shown here, are a common sight, peeling, dilapidated, beneath roofs dragged down with age. For the present, they are part of the charm of the ancient city, a charm that is gradually being eaten away by more modern architecture.

However, this door, for all its authentic detail, is not one that can be found in any Beijing hutong. It is a model, recreated with loving care as part of an exciting and ambitious project dreamt up by Beijing artist Lu Hao. It is one of hundreds of miniature buildings that are currently being constructed by a team of architectural model-makers that will recreate the entire city of Beijing within the defining boundary of its second ring road.

Trained as a painter of Chinese ink painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Lu Hao passed several years earning a respectable living with his charming ink works, before turning his creative skills to building objects. Struck by how the city was changing, he became increasingly interested in finding a modern way to express his experience of contemporary life. It seemed logical to begin with architecture.

Lu Hao grew up in a neat courtyard house in the area of southern Beijing known as Qianmen. For his Manchu family, the traditional attributes of the classical Chinese scholar were part of his daily life. In his youth, the central courtyard of the family home contained eight ponds filled with large Koi carp, one of which had been specially built under the spread of a pomegranate tree by Lu Hao and his grandfather. As many other would-be men of grace and culture, Lu Hao's grandfather also kept crickets, the bright green kind that lent the only colour to grey Beijing winters, and which, in the absence of television, radio or other forms of entertainment beyond regulated broadcasts, provided a welcome purring chirp to the ear.

Tradition is thus close to Lu Hao's heart. It pained him to see areas of the city torn up. So, packing up his ink brushes and rice paper, he began his "new" career as a contemporary artist by producing a series of exquisite architectural models of important cultural and historical sites in Beijing. These included the China Art Gallery and the Great Hall of the People. Lu Hao completed four works in this series which he titled Flower, Bird, Insect, Fish, recreating perfect architectural scaled-down models of Beijing's most renowned tourist attractions.

Using transparent Plexiglas, he makes them functional spaces that serve quite other purposes than the grand nature of the original buildings, yet functions that are absolutely in keeping with classical and contemporary life in Chinese culture, namely the keeping of insects (crickets), birds and fish as pets. Translucent and thus altered, these models resonate new life taking on the aura of tangible icons; a sentiment lost in the grey air and greying facades of grandeur tainted by modern dust and the encroaching tendrils of neon signs and glossy advertising horadings. The allusion is to the fragility of all cultural icons in the modern world.

Encouraged by the success of his models, Lu Hao began to work on a larger scale. The first of these pieces was a scale model of the stone boat at the Summer Palace. It was produced replete with protective turrets and defense mechanisms that would "save" it from any future Anglo-Allied invasion of the kind that destroyed the old Summer Palace - the Yuanmingyuan. This achieved to great success, Lu Hao embarked on his current work-in-progress, which when complete will cover an area of more than one hundred square metres.

He began by systematically photographing the entire area, and delving into historical records of architectural details to ensure that each and every element matched the reality. His model of Beijing employs a wide variety of materials to evoke the authentic atmosphere of the original buildings. "Old" Beijing is "built" of materials aimed to generate a sense of realism. This is starkly contrasted by the use of perspex to construct the buildings that line the grand boulevard of Chang-an Avenue, which effects a stunning, transparent and highly futuristic cityscape. "The model shows more than just a moment in Beijing's history," he says. "It reflects the impact of modernity upon the ancient and how people adapt to change. I wanted to capture the past, yet point to the future.

The work took more than six months to plan, for it required an enormous amount of research. This was carried out by a team of professors from Qinghua University whose knowledge was instrumental in enabling Lu Hao to achieve the authenticity he desired.

Once the hundreds of blue-prints had been drawn up, work began by a team of professional architectural model-makers, who devoted almost a year to the project. Beijing's most unusual development project is scheduled to be completed this summer.