She Opened a Gallery Inside a Shopping Mall, Hoping to Bring "Aloof" Contemporary Art to a Mass Market

Whether people buy to collect, to decorate a home, or to give a gift, Zheng Xuan thinks this is a market worth growing — and closing the gap with ordinary demand is what she and her team have to work on.

"You press the button, we do the rest." That was Kodak's slogan for the Brownie camera in 1900. The Brownie was the first mass-produced consumer camera, and it made photography a popular pastime for the first time: anyone could pick one up and shoot.

Two years ago, Zheng Xuan and two partners founded a company that produces and promotes photographic art, and named it BROWNIE. They had the same question in mind: how do you bring photographic art into people's daily lives? The name first calls up the dessert — warm, easy to remember — and read a level deeper, it says what BROWNIE is after: pushing photography out toward a broader consumer market.

Over the past two years they have followed young photographers from around the world and hired craftsmen and color-management specialists with more than ten years of production experience, turning out limited-edition photographic works finished all the way through printing, framing and packaging. BROWNIE also launched a journal, BROWNIE, and a "photography publishing program." Last year we wrote about the first photo book they published, People of Shanghai.

This September, BROWNIE opened its first flagship store at Jing'an Kerry Centre in Shanghai.

Chinese galleries tend toward an "aloof" tone. The BROWNIE flagship looks more like a home-furnishings shop — or a lifestyle concept store.

Zheng Xuan travels often with friends, and in the Nordic countries she noticed institutions of every size packaging photographs, prints and illustration and pushing them into the market. Many artists even consign work to furniture stores, where plenty of people buy it. The market there is mature.

That gave her an idea: could she build a gallery that didn't hold ordinary people at a distance?

Photography was her first choice. "Compared with other art forms, photography is at least a fairly complete industry in China — there are suppliers, there are big fairs like Photofairs Shanghai. That's an enormous driving force, and it's what creates an industry atmosphere," she told QDaily.

Alexander Montague-Sparey, fair director of Photofairs Shanghai, once said in an interview: "Many well-informed Chinese businesspeople treat good photography as an asset, the same way they treat contemporary art... The Chinese photography market is nowhere near its peak, so there is still a large body of work by excellent artists and photographers out there to be collected."

But outside the fairs, galleries in China that concentrate on photography are rare.

A gallery's main job is to be an artist's agent, the middleman between artists and collectors. It is supposed to discover, nurture and package artists. In China, though, galleries usually neglect the space itself — they hang a few works like a museum display window, and don't even hang them well.

These spaces, which look designed to keep visitors away, usually cluster in art districts: Beijing's 798 and Caochangdi, Shanghai's M50 Creative Park. People who want to see shows or collect art are mostly willing to travel to one concentrated area, and traditional galleries don't depend on foot traffic for their money anyway.

BROWNIE went looking for a mall from the start. Jing'an Kerry Centre and HKRI Taikoo Hui were both on the list.

A mall means a far wider audience: office workers nearby, shoppers out for the day, even tourists. None of them are collectors, but any of them could become a customer.

Carré d'Artistes, the gallery we wrote about last year, sits in the Hubindao mall in Shanghai's Xintiandi and makes a similar pitch: let ordinary people get close to original artwork more easily. Its customers are mostly people who want better decoration at home, not the collectors who keep traditional galleries going.

Kerry Centre won out because of how the team planned the space. They wanted an Art Lounge at the very back of the store, serving specialty coffee, desserts and cocktails, which meant the unit needed plumbing. Many mall units for lease don't have it. After hunting around, only this second-floor space at Kerry Centre, near Nanjing West Road, worked.

Everyone likes to talk about "consumption upgrading" now, but spending several thousand or even tens of thousands of yuan on a photograph is plainly not yet a mainstream choice. Friends have asked Zheng Xuan, "Why pick something so hard to sell?" What she and her partners want to build, after all, is not a business for a small circle.

Interest came first. But she also saw a chance to do something the way she is good at doing it.

Zheng Xuan has worked at fashion magazines and at 4A advertising agencies, and earlier founded a new-media creative platform called UNDEF/NE — an online platform making original content about new ways of living, plus a physical space that ran events on creativity, design, contemporary art and emerging lifestyles.

She is drawn to the stories behind an artist's work, and she believes she can help artists — who are often not great talkers — tell those stories well, so that buyers understand what a piece is worth and the piece sells.

"If you're selling shoes, you have to make an ad and invent a story to tell people. But an artwork already has a story, and it's a true one. The artist just may not be able to tell it the way they would in an interview," Zheng Xuan told QDaily.

After years in media and advertising, she has taken on much of BROWNIE's work — signing artists, developing products, running store design and operations — while her two partners, both from finance, handle fundraising and outside business deals.

When she decided to open the flagship, she went about it much the way she would put together a magazine.

She brought in Flack Studio, an Australian architecture and interior design firm, to design the store. To explain how the 200-plus square meters should be laid out, Zheng Xuan made the designers a deck of a dozen-odd slides. It did not tell them what design she wanted, and it cited no reference cases. The whole deck was about "What is photography? What is our product? And what kind of tour do I want to give the customer?"

"If they couldn't grasp that our point is to bring photographic art into people's daily lives, the space might come out looking pretty, but it wouldn't let anyone experience or feel anything," Zheng Xuan said.

Flack Studio built a photographic world meant to surround the customer. Sharply contrasting colors and materials run through the store in a way that talks back to the pictures on the walls: smooth marble counters against rough cylinders, terrazzo floors, tinted acrylic and soft curtain fabric, a quiet pale-gray base lifted by matte pink and lemon yellow. Every contrast of texture and sight is part of the experience.

At the entrance you step first into the open Public Gallery, where an interactive sound installation quickly closes the distance between you and the photographs.

The first room inside the store is the Campaign Gallery, which shows a complete series by one BROWNIE-signed photographer as the quarterly feature.

The second room, the Home Gallery, gathers contemporary art furniture from around the world to build domestic scenes inspired by the photographs: Italian designer Luca Nichetto's coral-colored whale-shark armchair HAI, the sculptural Standing Lamp N°1 by Belgian design duo Muller Van Severen, and Dita & Olivia, tinted art mirrors, a new piece by Davide Monopoli, art director of the German studio Pulpo. Hung with the photographs, these rooms work as a show flat, demonstrating where pictures of different sizes might go in a home.

The third room, the VIP Gallery, shows work on shelves, and each month presents two groups of BROWNIE's monthly picks around a set theme. Next door is a VIP lounge, where a BROWNIE gallery adviser talks with you one-on-one and offers personal buying advice.

Then comes the Art Lounge, where even the coffee and the cocktails hide photographic details. The single-origin coffee includes a BROWNIE blend with notes of cream, cocoa and cookies, and the cocktails take their flavors from master photographs — Taxi by the "New York School" photographer Saul Leiter, Assembly by the Japanese photographer Osamu Yokonami, and others.

Tucked at the very back, the Lounge Gallery is an event space for small photography shows, book launches, artist workshops and similar things. It also stocks avant-garde photography journals from around the world, among them IMA, Photoworks, Apartamento and Victory.

"The whole store is laid out to give people a process — first trying to get close, then understanding, and then owning," Zheng Xuan explained.

Since opening, BROWNIE's foot traffic has been decent. As Zheng Xuan sees it, that is partly because the team did a lot of online promotion, and partly because Kerry Centre put them in front of exactly the right crowd.

What surprised the team was that they made a sale every day for the first week and more. But for about 60 percent of visitors, the most pressing question was "What's the difference between this and the photos we take ourselves?" or "I could shoot something like this too, couldn't I?"

That is what Zheng Xuan finds interesting — or, put another way, the part of the market still waiting to be dug out. Every month Shanghai holds all sorts of photography exhibitions. How do people actually read them, or understand them? What do these works have to do with their lives?

"Consumers change endlessly. You have no idea why they want to buy a thing," she says. "They don't have to like art. Maybe they just want something more understated at home, something that represents them better."

Whether people buy to collect, to decorate, or to give a gift, Zheng Xuan thinks this is a market worth growing — and closing the gap with ordinary demand is what BROWNIE has to work on.

Getting a customer to accept that a photograph is worth several thousand yuan takes more than a well-made space and a deeper experience. It takes a good story.

Before signing any artist, the BROWNIE team spends hours talking with them, much like conducting an in-depth interview. The process is closer to digging out information, or to curating: understanding what the artist wants to say and how they turn the idea into images.

Only then does the team retell that story in a form more people can take in — through its official accounts, or through an interactive installation in the store.

Take Zheng Ting, the artist featured this quarter. Her series Baker Salon puts together two objects that seem to have nothing to do with each other, baked bread and braided hair: she invited strangers of different ages to make bread together, starting from kneading the dough, then braided the bread into someone else's hair.

Looking only at the photographs, most people would conclude the artist is using photography for some kind of body-art experiment. What the BROWNIE team wants to do is tell the whole story behind the work.

Baker Salon began with a simple craving. Newly arrived in London, Zheng Ting was homesick and missed Taiwanese wheat-flour food and steamed buns. With no baking experience at all, she decided to make baozi herself. Baozi in English is "Chinese steamed buns," but when she searched online for "bun," the screen filled with round Western loaves and hair buns. That gave Zheng Ting her idea, and it became the absurd starting point of the series. Turning a remembered flavor into real food, she found new things to touch and to see.

Zheng Xuan can tell a pile of stories like this about every work in the store. When she first set up BROWNIE, she brought in the photography historian and curator He Yining as art adviser, and followed her to visit photographers and galleries, to art shows, and through photography magazines and books, learning the field systematically.

"That way people can feel strongly that you're doing culture, not just selling goods."

In her view, only on a full understanding of the artist and the work can BROWNIE produce content for its online platforms and stage different kinds of exhibitions in the store — giving an artist more varied ways to be introduced, and making a customer's urge to buy easier to spark.

That also sets BROWNIE's standard for the artists it works with. Beyond the requirement that the work be personal — not commercial shoots or commissions — Zheng Xuan insists: "These works have to have a concept, and even if the concept isn't fully formed, we can help it grow. And it has to be a series. We don't sign single images, because a mature artist needs a logical thread to tell a story."

So far BROWNIE has signed more than 600 works by over 50 artists, split evenly between photographers in China and abroad.

Besides staging shows and selling work, BROWNIE's role as agent brings offers from institutions and brands looking to commission shoots. That is not a business they want to push right now. "I'd rather not sacrifice a photographer's value by having them shoot very commercial things," Zheng Xuan told us. "Unless a genuinely suitable brand comes along in good faith, willing to work with the artist and respect their work."

Still, as a commodity, contemporary art is not bought often the way fast-moving consumer goods are, and unlike furniture it isn't a necessity. Several thousand or even tens of thousands of yuan is not money an ordinary person spends lightly.

To capture a market this young, the BROWNIE team has to do more than build an experience in a physical space and tell good stories. How to develop products the public finds easier to accept, in more varied forms, and how to keep customers curious over time — Zheng Xuan is weighing those questions too.

Images courtesy of BROWNIE.