What a Giant! How Do Those Huge, Striking Public Artworks Get Made?

This Australian company, UAP, has 24 years in the business, and it has lived through most of the changes in the public art market.

On the plazas outside the eight main entrances of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, several oddly shaped installations appeared: a bright red "ball of yarn," plump abstract animals, a Chinese knot with two pillars stretching out from it, wooden figures with black heads, and firework sculptures bursting open into lantern shapes. Their most obvious common feature was sheer size.

Perhaps because they looked like fun, children and adults alike began to play with them —

A Chinese girl put both hands on a "ball of yarn" and bent one leg, trying to climb to the top. The bright red, magenta, bright yellow and sky-blue animals drew enormous crowds: a middle-aged man dropped himself against a rabbit's head and half-sat there to rest his feet, while children were lifted by their parents onto a bear cub's arm, or clambered up on their own and wedged themselves between the rabbit's ears. Under the Chinese knot hoisted into the air, people leaned naturally against its colored pillars, wrapped in nylon rope, and struck poses for photos.

The excitement in their bodies and faces was caught on camera. At the time, though, they probably had no idea that these huge installations belong to a distinct branch of art.

The maker of these outsized sculptures is a company called UAP, short for Urban Art Projects. Its business is public art installations for urban space. UAP is based in Brisbane, Australia, and was founded by local twin brothers Daniel Tobin and Matthew Tobin.

In 2009, UAP beat out more than 100 international bidding teams for the chance to make public art installations for the Shanghai World Expo. That project became its first work in the Chinese market.

Daniel Tobin calls these installations "Big Art." In contemporary art circles they go by another name — Mega Art. The adjective that usually travels with them is "oversize." What sets this kind of art apart is its extraordinary scale.

For any artwork, size is a factor you cannot ignore. It determines where the piece can stand, and it shapes how the piece gets made. Most art of conventional size — the paintings and sculptures people know well — can be finished by one artist working alone, and it usually makes no special demands of the room it hangs in.

Big Art is far more complicated. The artist is not its only maker. Realizing an oversized work takes more than an unfettered idea; it also takes a team with the technical skill to build it and the training to understand design.

UAP is that force behind the scenes, the one that turns ideas into objects.

Its staff is a complicated mix. Alongside designers, engineers, architects and curators, there is a technical team working in the factory — people who do not sit at computers drawing plans but wear protective masks and heavy protective suits, tipping out scalding liquid metal, swinging hammers at parts, or setting up ladders and climbing up and down to install the work.

Artists and architects are sometimes UAP's direct clients. The well-known American architect Frank Gehry is one of them. UAP once helped his firm build a structurally complicated staircase inside a teaching building at the University of Technology Sydney.

Most of the time, though, the client is a developer or a government. They need large art installations to dress up the open public spaces of malls, office towers, plazas and parks. And only clients with that kind of money can pay for the chain of time and labor that runs from design through fabrication, transport, assembly and later maintenance.

UAP's in-house design team designs 15% to 20% of its projects on its own. The rest are done with artists or architects, and UAP mostly decides who those collaborators will be.

This is not an easy business.

First, as with ordinary art, UAP has to find a market willing to take Mega Art. Second, it has to be able to actually build the things, and at the same time keep enough contacts in the creative world to feed a steady supply of ideas into different projects.

Mega Art has only caught on worldwide in the past decade or so. As Daniel remembers it, when UAP was founded in Brisbane in 1993, the market for public art installations was still small. Most of the jobs they took were small too, nothing like what they had first imagined.

Six years later, things began to turn. The Queensland government launched a program called Art Built-in, which set aside 2% of the state budget for public building construction to support public art and work art into the city's public spaces. In the capital, Brisbane, the state government also set up a dedicated body, the Public Art Agency, to carry the policy out.

"That policy really helped us build the business. A lot of commercial organizations saw the government doing public art, thought it worked well, and started copying it, adding public artworks to their own building projects or parks... By the time the government policy ended, I worked out the proportions and found that projects done for the government came to about 8% to 9%, and everything else was commissioned by commercial organizations," Daniel told QDaily.

Once the policy had pulled commercial money in, Australian landscape architects, designers and artists started paying more attention to public space, which in turn improved the design of public space and buildings. "Whether it's a park or a public space inside a building, they now think about how to design those areas better," Daniel said.

After 2000, large installations began drawing steadier attention. If you have ever walked through Art Basel — one of the most celebrated international art fairs in the world — you may remember its Unlimited section. In recent years this area, given over to avant-garde work, has shown astonishingly large installations more and more often. That is a weathervane for the whole art market.

In a 2016 report, the Financial Times pointed to a trend: more and more very rich private collectors have begun to follow these oversized works and to spend heavily on them. Once bought, some go into lavish private homes, but a large share end up in private museums.

In public space, the piece of Mega Art Chinese audiences know best is probably the Rubber Duck. Its creator, the Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, has worked with UAP before — in April this year they put up a giant octopus in Shenzhen's Yantian District.

Named after the sea monster Kraken, this octopus wears a felt hat and spreads eight thick tentacles across the ground, looking thoroughly goofy and lovable. It is friendlier than the Rubber Duck: adults and children can open small doors on the tentacles and crawl along a passage all the way into the octopus's head, where there is a fairly open space to play. Two tentacles have slides built into them, so people can slide out of the octopus's body.

The octopus is part of the Yihaicheng property project, commissioned by Vanke and designed by UAP with Hofman. In China, commercial property is the main buyer of Mega Art.

"Ten years ago I was already working at an art museum, and back then people didn't really talk about the idea of public art — it was more popular in Europe and the US... Developers had basically no public art projects; nobody thought they were necessary. But the big change in recent years is that commercial property developers in particular want their properties to feel more cultured, to set themselves apart from everyone else, and art plays a big part in that," Zhang Yingyun, creative planning director at UAP's Shanghai office, told QDaily.

Driven by commercial money, China's public art market has taken a different shape from Australia's or America's. "The categories of art are very different. In China we've done a lot of mall projects, but the mall is a very Asian idea — in the US there really aren't that many malls, and even commercial projects there tend to be boutiques. Most of our New York projects are in public space, like Times Square, Chinatown and museums. In Australia we have hospital projects too. But in Shanghai, none of that exists yet," Zhang Yingyun said.

So most of UAP's work in China turns up in commercial space.

At the Ningbo International Financial Center, the Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich, who is known for working with rattan and posts, worked with UAP on a 12-meter-tall piece called "Cocoon." Hand-forged copper rods form a complicated openwork structure that hangs the whole way down from the ceiling, filling a long, narrow atrium that had felt empty. To echo China's long history, the copper rods were chemically colored to take on the texture of bronze.

At Rui Hong Tian Di Moon Bay, a commercial development in Shanghai, the French designer Arnaud Lapierre finished his first permanent work in China with UAP's help — "Mirror Image." It stands 3.5 meters tall and 5.5 meters wide, a cylinder built from reflective cubes; because of its particular structure and the highly polished stainless steel it uses, an abstract picture of the city forms on its surface. People can walk inside the installation and meet its countless mirrored faces up close.

Making these works playful, interesting and good-looking is only the surface requirement. The most important thing in design is how well a piece sits with the place around it.

What UAP wants to avoid is "plunk art" — an artwork plunked down abruptly in a spot it has nothing to do with. "Essentially, that's moving a gallery show straight into a mall. We try hard not to make that kind of thing. When a work fits, people want to stand next to it," Dane Currey, UAP's Shanghai design director, said in an interview.

"Fit matters a lot. Artists are very subjective — even inside the same office, some people love a piece and some people hate it. But public art has to be designed to suit different places. When we work with artists, we want the ideas they bring to suit the place the installation is going. So designing for a hospital is definitely very different from designing for a mall," Zhang Yingyun told QDaily.

The choice of material is the key to meeting that standard of fit.

"What material can carry the structure — and that also depends on the site. If it hangs indoors, you have to think about whether the weight of the material is right; if it stands outdoors, whether the material can take wind and rain. The point is to try things out with the artist and find which material makes the most sense. If we can't find the most suitable material, the artist may have to compromise a bit for the sake of the effect on site," Zhang Yingyun explained.

Lindy Lee, an Australian artist of Asian descent, designed an ellipsoidal installation for a Shanghai property project by Taiwan's Ting Hsin Group. It sits between two buildings. To create a sense of oneness, the installation is made of mirrored stainless steel, so the buildings and scenery around it are reflected on its surface. Lights are set inside the sphere; at night the orange light comes on and shines out through the drilled holes covering the surface, answering the warm light inside the buildings.

Lindy Lee is an unusual case among the artists UAP has worked with. Before she met UAP, her work was made almost entirely on paper. After a friend introduced her to Daniel, she started working in UAP's Brisbane factory, painting while talking with the technicians, and slowly came to the idea of making three-dimensional installations.

The factory gave Lindy the conditions to explore new ground. First she put on protective gear and, imitating the splashed-ink technique of traditional Chinese painting, poured liquid copper onto a concrete floor, then assembled the hardened copper pieces into the shapes she wanted. Then she began to think about how to make a free sculpture — one whose final form would be decided entirely by the material itself, rather than ground into a preset shape by a force humans imposed on it.

In the end, after trying many materials, the UAP team chose cornstarch and liquid lead to make it happen. When the high-temperature molten lead was poured into the powder, which held its shape well enough to give support, the flow of the lead produced free forms. The finished sculptures took shape through a model maker's prototyping and a foundry worker's casting. The pieces in this series were made in different sizes depending on the client, the largest reaching 1.5 meters tall.

This back-and-forth is exactly the effect UAP wants. Even though the team can design on its own, Daniel says they would rather bring artists in: "Creative people from outside the team working with us tend to set off more ideas."

UAP keeps a large database of artists. Many of the names in it were brought in by team members who used to work in the art business. The team has curators of its own who go to exhibitions constantly and talk with curators at art institutions, updating the database to keep it current. UAP also sponsors a number of art institutions and foundations.

"In Australia we support a museum in Brisbane called the Museum of Modern Art — we're their long-term sponsor, and we talk to every artist who shows there. If they have ideas about fabrication, we're happy to have them come to our factory to talk. In Shanghai we support the Rockbund Art Museum, and in New York we're a sponsor of the Public Art Fund. Wherever we have an office, we want to sponsor local art. Sponsoring local art lets us meet more young artists and find out how they want to widen their practice, or what problems they've run into — they're always welcome to come to us," Zhang Yingyun told QDaily.

In 24 years, UAP's projects have reached 47 cities around the world. That has to do with a public art market that keeps growing, and it is tied closely to the foresight of the two founders, Daniel Tobin and Matthew Tobin, and to their grip on the opportunities in front of them.

At the 1988 Brisbane World Expo, Daniel and Matthew were cleaners. Every night, once the crowds had gone, they came out onto the empty plazas to clean the sculptures that adults had crowded around for photos and children had climbed all day.

That unglamorous job is how Daniel and Matthew found the potential in public art. The visitors laughing and throwing an arm around the comic human figures had almost no idea what public art was, but the excitement they gave off in their faces and their bodies showed the twins that these installations worked.

By the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, 17 years of work in the Australian market had won them the key to the Chinese market. After high manufacturing costs in Australia had weakened UAP's competitiveness, they opened a new office and factory in Shanghai.

In eight years in China, the public art installations UAP has made with various artists have gone into hotels, office towers and malls in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Zhengzhou, Hainan and elsewhere. Sometimes the same developer builds several of these commercial buildings together, which leaves a lot of curatorial room for public art.

For UAP, this is an ideal market. "Chinese clients are all very willing to take risks," and "the Chinese market has enormous potential" — Daniel came back to both points repeatedly in the interview. Beyond rich clients willing to spend, the variety of Chinese urban space has also opened new paths for UAP.

"China has a lot of cities, and there are big differences from one city to another — Chongqing and Shanghai, for example. Every city has new space and old space, so there are a lot of chances for public art to grow," Daniel told QDaily.

Daniel says he is still learning all the time. Before he came to China he knew nothing about the country. His brother Matthew says even the vegetables sold on Shanghai's streets were strange to them. "Communication is a big problem. Even opening an office in New York, where there's no language barrier, we ran into plenty of difficulties because of cultural differences. You have to understand how things were done in a new place in the past in order to understand how to move a project forward now and in the future. I think communication is the most important part and the hardest part," Daniel said.

The fast growth of the art market in China's first-tier cities in recent years has eased that somewhat.

"Art malls like K11, more and more galleries being built, plus a lot of pop-up art events, keep widening the base of people who accept public art. The many events held at the West Bund, the Long Museum and places like them are very good for people — the more creative things people see, the more they accept public art. All of it helps us talk to clients better, and helps clients understand what they can do," Daniel told QDaily.

Cover image from UAP