From Palace To Tank

“Karaoke King” and art collector Qiao Zhibing is parlaying his popular Shanghai karaoke-club cum-exhibition-space into a museum-cum-recreation-space.

- Barbara Pollack

Shanghai Night is a karaoke palace like no other—a lavish five-story complex with chandeliers, marble floors, and wood-paneled rooms for private parties. Visitors are astounded by the opulence, as well as by the young hostesses in white dresses who stand in the hallways with numbers pinned to their sides, waiting in hopes that some rich patron might hire them for the night. It seems crazy that such care would go into an establishment devoted to so pedestrian an entertainment as karaoke. But the most surprising aspect of Shanghai Night is its first-class collection of contemporary art: works by Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, and Damien Hirst are all housed in display cases throughout the nightclub.

Shanghai Night is the brainchild of Chinese collector Qiao Zhibing, who, in just ten years, has made a name for himself as one of the leading buyers of international contemporary art in China. Now, poised to move beyond the nightclub as exhibition venue, the entrepreneur-collector is opening Tank Shanghai, a combination of art museum and recreation facility built from five empty oil tanks standing on the shores of the Huangpu River. Scheduled to debut in December, the complex, designed by Beijing-based OPEN Architecture, measures some 640,000 square feet, with about 100,000 square feet of exhibition space. It will be the new highlight of the art-rich West Bund Cultural Corridor, a government initiative that already includes the Long Museum and the Yuz Museum; Oriental Dreamworks will also soon open its doors there. Qiao estimates the budget for the project at 100 million RMB, or $15 million, most of it culled from his own resources.