You don’t have to have lived in Beijing long be- fore you’ve heard someone complain about the quality of something. The city and country have developed so fast that progress has often come at the expense of quality. Buildings only months old already show signs of wear and tear, clothes fall apart after just one washing, things break imme- diately after purchase ... There’s no end to the list.

Rightly credited with founding the first foreign-owned contemporary art gallery in Beijing, Brian Wallace came to China from Australia in 1984. In 1991, after studying Chinese language and then art history at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he established Red Gate Gallery in a historic Ming Dynasty Watchtower at Dongbianmen.