THE KINDEST REGARDS

The Zhongshan Building is an old architectural structure in Kuala Lumpur. Having lived through the turnings of time, its ground floor courtyard once housed a fresh market selling local produce from fruits to vegetables while the upper floor was occupied by twenty living units whose residents were foreign laborers working in Malaysia’s capital city. With Kampung Attap being a neighborhood that is located near KL’s city center, several offers have been made to buy and turn the building into an entertainment complex. But to Rob Tan who was born and raised in this building, the structure is and could be more than just a low-budget hotel. Such belief led to the birth of the city’s latest arts and research community. The empty rooms are rented out to the people from the art and design communities (primarily the folks of Design Union) with the condition being that they can do pretty much anything as long as it doesn’t affect the building’s structure. “Kuala Lumpur’s design community isn’t really that big so once the idea spread, we had a lot of people contacting us. We all know that the community exists but what most designers are looking for is simply just a place.”

From our conversation with Tan, we learned that Kuala Lumpur once had a space of a similar nature known as The Annexe located in Sentral Market, but it was later closed permanently. Initially, the goal Tan had for the Zhongshan Building was for it to be a space that would be able to support members of the design community in the same way and to the same extent that Cockpit Arts had done for the design community in London. “Most galleries in Kuala Lumpur are rather commercially driven so we started to talk with the design practitioners in Kuala Lumpur and came to the conclusion that what they wanted was a space where they could live and work together.”

Nevertheless, while what Cockpit Arts offers is a largescale organization that welcomes applicants from different fields of design to work within the same physical space, with services encompassing design consultancy for those who want to start their own brands and assistance with issues like the formation of a business model, financial management and advice with legal protocols as well as sales promotional programs such as the creation of a website where buyers can search and contact makers directly. The main objective is to help support designers and encourage them to pursue and develop their design careers. For the Zhongshan Building (in the beginning), Tan doesn’t position the space to fall in line with what Cockpit Arts is doing. What he aspires to do is create a space for the people in the design/art communities with the rather straightforward benefit being the financial aid offered through the building’s comparatively low rental rate.

“I don’t have to burden myself with the rent because the building is already mine.” What’s cool about this community is the diversity of the tenants that range from members of the design crowd to professionals from other industries. With the current number of tenants reaching almost 20 different groups, their interests vary and practices ramify into 10 different activities ranging from a screening room, galleries, print studio, library, bookshop, café, tailor boutique and graphic studios to a space for an artist-in-residence program, and the most surprising member of the community, a legal office. Another interesting thing about the Zhongshan Building is Tan’s adaptation of residential units into the semi-public space, which has a great deal of influence on the spatial experience that the place has to offer. For instance, if one were to visit a punk rock records shop named Tadang Record Store, he or she would have to walk past a lecture room run by Malaysia Design Archive and through the bookshop, Tintabudi Bookstore in order to reach the building’s communal walkway and finally arrive at the record parlor. If you’re planning to go to the hang out space called Living Room Collective on the upper floor, you are forced to walk past at least one of the tenants’ studios and on the very same floor, you will come across Rumah Attap Library & Collective, a non-profit library that has put together an impressive collection of political science publications that welcomes everyone to spend their time in their reading room. The floor plan of the Zhongshan Building is pretty much like a maze and the doors of some of the rooms are standard-looking doors that don’t even indicate what is waiting behind. Visitors are handed an element of surprise and excitement when knocking on these doors and finding out what kind of experience they are about to encounter. The walkways are designed to force people to walk through one room in order to get to another, and such manipulation of the building’s circulation brings about a positive final result in the sense that it helps distribute visitors to access every unit in the Zhongshan Building and ultimately stimulates conversations between the hosts and visitors for it’s very unlikely that one will find their desired destination without speaking and asking for direction from the tenants.

The Zhongshan Building was officially opened in July of 2017 although some of the units had begun their activities prior to the opening day. art4d was present at the talk held by Malaysia Design Archive under the topic Artistic Responses to Recent Street Protests in Kuala Lumpur. We will not be discussing the content of the talk here, but we can tell you that it essentially featured the transitional time before Malaysia achieved independence from Great Britain under the leadership of the UMNO Party. What we found to be very impressive is that despite the scheduled time of the talk being 20.00 (which is fairly late for an academic lecture of such an intense subject matter), almost 30 interested individuals crammed into that small room to listen to the speakers.  On the very same night, in another room located in the same building, a screening session of fono’s films was being hosted.

In the near future, the Zhongshan Building will welcome a Singapore-national gift shop called Naiise, which will take over a space on the ground floor next to OUR ArtProjects’ gallery. Tan told art4d that the arrival of Naiise should be another gimmick that is expected to attract a new and somewhat wider group of people to the community. But from our observation, the factor that brings visitors to the Zhongshan Building is more accurately the content that the space is creating. It remains to be seen whether the tenants will be replaced in the future, and who will be the new additions because at the end of the day, the change of tenants should be beneficial for the space in the long run, especially when considering the new subject matter and activities they will bring to the building’s spatial program.

The Zhongshan Building เป็นอาคารเก่าที่ผ่านการใช้งานมาหลายยุคหลายสมัย คอร์ตยาร์ดชั้นล่างเคยเป็นตลาดสด ขายผักผลไม้มาก่อน ส่วนชั้นบนที่เป็นห้องพักประมาณ 20 ห้องเคยถูกใช้เป็นที่พักของแรงงานต่างชาติที่มาทำงานในกัวลาลัมเปอร์ในช่วงเวลาหนึ่ง หลังจากนั้น ด้วยความที่ย่าน Kampung Attap อยู่ใกล้กับศูนย์กลางเมืองกัวลาลัมเปอร์ จึงมีหลายๆ คนยื่นข้อเสนอขอซื้ออาคารนี้ไปทำาเป็นสถานเริงรมย์ แต่สำหรับ Rob Tan ที่เกิดและเติบโตในอาคารหลังนี้ เขามองว่าอาคารนี้สามารถเป็นอย่างอื่นได้มากกว่าแค่โรงแรมราคาถูก เขาจึงเปลี่ยนมันมาเป็น arts and research community โดยเปิดห้องว่างเหล่านั้นให้กลุ่มคนทำงานศิลปะ / ออกแบบ (โดยเฉพาะกลุ่ม DesignUnion) เช่าในเงื่อนไขที่ว่าทำอะไรก็ได้ที่ไม่ส่งผลกระทบต่อโครงสร้างอาคาร “วงการดีไซน์ในกัวลาลัมเปอร์ไม่ได้ใหญ่มาก พอไอเดียกระจายออกไปก็มีคนติดต่อเข้ามาทันที คือเรารู้ว่า community มันมีอยู่แล้ว เพียงแต่นักออกแบบส่วนใหญ่ต้องการ place เท่านั้นเอง”