Hotel Kapok Beijing

While not exactly nestled down a quiet alleyway, Hotel Kapok has an enviable location. If you want to be any closer to the Forbidden City, you'll have to move into the Emperor's old bedroom. And all the retail diversions of Wangfujing are nearby. A fledgling local brand, Kapok offers 62 standard rooms and 27 suites. Conceived by local architect Zhu Pei, the hotel was fashioned out of a gutted five-storey former government building to incorporate the ideas of "translucence" and "blur". With its distinctive exterior wrapping of gridded, frosted fibreglass – which causes the hotel to softly glow at night – and its generous use of natural interior light, the overall effect is indeed one of light and air – so welcome in a city that is somewhat short on both. Rooms are fresh and modern, with wooden floors, ginkgo-print wallpapers and plenty of glass and mirrors to give a sense of space (although the rooms are not at all shoe-boxey); huge bathtubs and little pebbled courtyards (not in all rooms)are memorable touches. Rooms are arranged around a central atrium and there's a bar, business and fitness centres, restaurant, sauna and in-room internet.

16 Donghuamen Dajie, Dong Cheng District

www.kapokhotelbeijing.com

• fledgling (adj): a person or organisation that is immature, inexperienced or undeveloped. 
• translucence (adj): allowing light, but not detailed images, to come through.

Chinese Ethnic Culture Park

A large museum displaying and studying the folk cultures and social life of China's 56 ethnic groups. On a land of nearly 500,000 sq m, the museum collects over 100,000 cultural relics, in addition to replicas of architecture and living environment of Tibetan, Mongol and several other ethnic minorities. www.emuseum.org.cn

• relic (n) an object surviving from an earlier time esp one of historical or sentimental interest.  

Olympic Sports Centre

Covering an area of 975,000 sq m, the center has 50 buildings, including the natatorium, gymnasium, track-and-field area and hockey stadium, along with the Asian Games Village, conference center, hotels, office buildings, apartments and entertainment center for journalists and athletes. The newly completed "Bird's Nest" and "Water Cube", major venues of the 2008 Olympic Games, are in close vicinity.

• natatorium (n): swimming pool, eps ones indoors.
• track and field (n): athletic events that take place on a running track and a nearby field, such as: biathlon, hurdles, shot put, cross-country run, javelin throw, steeplechase, decathlon, long jump, triathlon, discus throw, marathon, triple jump, hammer throw, modern pentathlon, walk, heptathlon, pole vault, high jump, relay

French Architecture

La Grande Arche, La Defense

For more check out Kevin McCloud's website on Channel 4.

What's the place?

Since the early 1980s, a number of Chinese artists has managed to study or exhibit abroad, and from time to time international shows, especially in Europe, presented post-Mao work that suggested the rise of an avant-garde in the People's Republic. Most notably, in 1993 Andreas Schmid and Hans van Dijk (a Belgian, soon to become a pioneering organizer and archivist within China) curated China Avant-garde: Counter-currents in Art and Culture, a sixty-artist survey at the Haus der Kulturen de Welt in Berlin. Nearly a score of mainland Chinese painters appeared in a group show at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and a few others turned up in subsequent installments. The seminal 1993 exhibition China's New Art, Post-1989, organized by scholar-dealer Chang Tsong-zung (Johnson Chang) with critic Li Xianting, was documented by an English-language book that reached far beyond the show's original Hong Kong venues. And in 1997, shortly after the first progressive galleries opened on the mainland, Texas expatriate Robert Bernell began to offer hundreds of English-language articles and books on new Chinese art through his Beijing and Hong Kong-based website, bookstore, and publishing company, today called Timezone 8.

- New China, New Art

Click the album below to view the full Timezone8 2009 catalogue.

timezone