When Yung Ho Chang returned to his native Beijing in 1993 after more than a decade of architectural training and practice in the United States, he was confronted by a society in dramatic flux. He found urban conditions and forms of development more easily characterized by absurdity than by habitability—Chen Xitong, for example, the corrupt mayor of Beijing in the 1990s, left a permanent mark on the city by decreeing that all new buildings bear a Chinese-style crown (later dubbed the “Chinese hat”), regardless of structure or design. Chang decided that if absurdity was the new normal, his only response could be to advocate for the abnormal. Thus was born Atelier FCJZ, a pioneering architectural practice whose name stands for feichang jianzhu, variously translated as “unusual architecture” or “very architecture.”

“Yung Ho Chang + FCJZ: Material-ism,” a retrospective showcasing the major accomplishments of Chang and his studio, was the first exhibition devoted to architecture at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Its subtitle is meant first to indicate the central role played by architectural materials in Chang’s practice. But, especially in its Chinese translation (weiwuzhuyi), it is also a deliberate reference to two of modern China’s biggest ideological juggernauts: Marxism and consumerism. Within UCCA’s giant main exhibition hall, the show was divided into six sections. Each was devoted to a separate theme, cataloging an interdisciplinary career that has played with traditional architectural forms and elevated plebeian materials through creative implementation, as in the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion for the 2010 World Expo, included in the section “Infernal Construct,” on the theme of approaches to construction. For the exterior of this building, Chang created a breathtaking LED display out of tubes made of recyclable polycarbonate plastic. In the section devoted to the courtyard, Chang’s classic The Split House, 2002, a house on the outskirts of Beijing that integrates the aforementioned traditional outdoor private space into the natural environment, demonstrated new possibilities for the indigenous architectural forms. The sections titled “Rear Window” and “Saint Jerome’s Study” showcased Chang’s collaborations with contemporary artists such as Wang Jianwei and Yang Fudong, as well as his engagement with art history.

Filling this main hall is no small task—at some 13,500 square feet, the factory-turned–exhibition space demands nothing less than a monumental amount of work and a correspondingly expansive vision from those who exhibit there. But the more than three hundred photographs, drawings, and models that made up the meat of the exhibition were decidedly small-scale. So six special displays, however, were conjured from huge wooden frames filled with concrete casts, custom-built showcases for each of the exhibition’s thematic sections. Sketches and photographs hung from the structures, while models rested on the surfaces of the concrete. There was a jarring contrast between the small, precise, self-contained sketches and models, and their raw, haphazard-looking wood and concrete displays, the former designed with an exactitude and internal rigor that seemed sorely lacking in the jumbo modules housing them. But the space—and the times—demands enormity, so the designs of Chang and FCJZ were framed by massive manifestations of material.

—Angie Baecker