ARCHIVING ARTIFACTS

CLIENT
LOCATION
COMPLETION
RENOVATION AREA
SCOPE
DESIGN TEAM
PROJECT INTERN
PHOTOGRAPHY
 POPMART
Beijing, China
November 2025
50 m2
Facade, Interior Design
Josh Ren, Baoer Wang
Jiaxin Zhang, Joshua In 
WenStudio

The 798 Art District in Beijing evolved from an industrial complex built in the 1950s into one of the city’s most important sites for contemporary art. Concrete factory buildings, truss structures, and an open urban fabric form a distinctive industrial context that continues to generate creative and cultural energy. Within this setting, POP MART Gallery explores contemporary IP culture through exhibitions and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Centered on artists and IP figures, popular culture is translated into spatial experiences that reassert the presence of youth culture within contemporary life.

A Cultural Generator
The spatial concept originates from archive rooms. Here, the archive is redefined as a publicly accessible cultural repository. The gallery collects, organizes, and preserves the creative output of POP MART and its collaborating artists, while opening this system to the public through a mode of creative retail. Visitors are positioned not only as consumers, but as participants entering a collection system, walking, observing, and encountering IP creation as a form of contemporary cultural production.

Flexible Openness
To accommodate changing exhibition formats, the renovated space maintains a high degree of openness. On the ground floor, previously enclosed entrances are reopened to introduce natural light and reorganize circulation, while providing operational flexibility under different conditions. On the upper floor, flexible display systems allow the space to shift between archive, exhibition, and retail. Continuous modules, reconfigurable units, and adjustable programs enable the space to be repeatedly reorganized, operating as a cultural container that can be updated, recorded, and re-archived over time.

Material Preservation and Cultural Visibility
This space is conceived not as a conventional retail environment, but as a public IP archive. Physical IP works are presented as cultural artifacts—classified by creation, version, time, and memory—rather than as commodities alone. The archive becomes POP MART Gallery’s direct spatial response to contemporary IP culture: a site that records creative production, cultural circulation, and the evolving conditions of youth culture.









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