About 200 people were gathered on a rooftop in Chinatown for an art opening inside a former storage shed. To get to the show, visitors walked through the one-bedroom apartment of Adam Zhu, the proprietor of Market Gallery.
“Normally, I’m grilling at an opening,” he says. “Newcomers are a bit taken aback, especially when they get to the apartment’s door. They’re like, ‘Wait, am I in the right place?’”
Zhu, the artist, skateboarder, and photographer, moved into the apartment in 2015, and he’s been renovating it ever since. Last summer, he enlisted the artist and contractor Andrew Kass to turn a rudimentary plywood structure used as a rehearsal space by his friends in the jazz band Onyx Collective into a 9-by-15-foot exhibition space with concrete walls and folding glass doors. Kass was the subject of Market’s first opening in November.
A view of Marcus Jahmal’s “Match Made in Heaven” at Market Gallery, from April.
Photo: Izzy Leung
“It’s really snowballing into becoming this platform for emerging artists and more established artists to show their work,” says Zhu, who has hosted seven shows on his roof, where he has installed picnic tables and a firepit. The structure of the shed “creates this awesome impact for the art where you can look through the window before going in.”
Zhu, 28, grew up in the East Village and has been skateboarding since he was old enough to ride the subway alone; later, he helped preserve a skate spot in Tompkins Square Park. After Supreme opened on Lafayette Street, he became a regular and then an employee, and today he serves as a brand consultant. A decade ago, Zhu’s parents moved to Shanghai, where his father is originally from, and left the Chinatown apartment in his care.
Adam Zhu
Photo: Rachel Simon
“I convinced my dad to let me move in and help manage it while he was away, and I found roommates, and it was like what you imagine that would be like,” Zhu says. “There was a messy chaotic-ness during those early years.” The skater Shawn Powers and the hip-hop group Ratking used to crash there, and the graffiti artist Sabio built a plywood wall on the roof that over the years has been tagged by the likes of Cornbread, Yes2, GOOG, EARSNOT, and Curve.
“It’s been painted hundreds of times.” These days, Zhu is there on his own, the kitchen has been refurbished, and a homemade cookout on the roof is as wild as the scene gets. “I used to work in kitchens before I worked at Supreme, and I hosted dinner parties,” he says. “Now I have a more pointed way to host artists.”
Amanda Ba, “Experiments: Private Paintings,” is on view at Market Gallery until August 10.
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