Qiu Zhefeng's office, which is in Shaoxing Guiyuan New Village No. 32, is visited from time to time by local officials, real estate agents, architects, and so on.

They will ask the same question: How did you do so many interesting things?

Most of the topics and things that this group of people talks about are related to the houses in "Jiangnan", the Yangtze River Delta, from the ancient city to the countryside.

According to Qiu Zhefeng and his companions, this is called: Reshaping Jiangnan.

The Reborn of Dilapidated Houses

Qiu Zhefeng's office is a long strip-shaped building surrounded by residential buildings. Such a pattern is very common in the ancient city of Shaoxing.

With 16 rooms, the two buildings are rather closed and dark. It used to be an abandoned staff dormitory, and it also served as a garbage transfer station for kindergartens, warehouses, and even sanitation centers.

As it was full of various discarded garbage, people who wanted to rent and rebuild it into a restaurant or factory building gave up after seeing the gloom condition. However, Qiu Zhefeng decided to rent it.

41-year-old Qiu used to be a reporter in a newspaper office, now is a curator in Shaoxing, Zhejiang.

In Qiu’s view, the renovation of the house is supposed to be like building blocks, layer by layer. Yet, the architect hired quitted after only three months arguing that the work was too difficult to finish. 

Wang Hao from Ningbo is a well-known overseas returnee architect. He showed great interest after seeing the house and said to Qiu: “I’d like to do the rebuilding of the house, for free.”

After a year of renovation, this garbage transfer station has become a rural office building in the village with a picturesque environment around it.

As the city develops rapidly, some old houses have been demolished while some have been protected. However, most of them are abandoned. 

The renovation of Qiu's office building attracts both local people and small animals such as birds and cats. In his view, this restoration means a lot not only to the house but also the ecology of a community.

Xiaoyue House and Gao’s House

After the success of the rebuild of the office building, the two decided to do more challenging renovation experiments, and they found a dilapidated old house in Shangyu, Zhejiang. Qiu rented it immediately.

After three months of renovation, the old house became the living room of this small town where you can find nostalgia for the past of this small town. 

The Gao’s house built in the Ming Dynasty carried another mission. Last summer, Wang Hao had just repaired and renovated it into a museum. 

Experiment of Village

Over the past few years, Qiu has invited many architects, artists, and curators with overseas returnees experience to inject fresh energy into the millennium-old city of Shaoxing.

Architect Xiangnan built a food market in Xiafu Village, Diankou Town, Zhuji City. What Xiang wants to change is in fact a state prevailing in rural China today. Originally, this food market was very cluttered with sewage flowing, and people living here came to buy vegetables without any sense of enjoyment. 

Xiangnan sent his assistant, a Malaysian who can speak Chinese to live in the village for a week. The food market was redefined and designed based on these observations. 

Many people were surprised that such an avant-garde and practical food market would actually locate in a small mountain village in Shaoxing. 

Another architect, Wang Bin, designed and built a Convenience Service Center which features the shape in the triangle in Shangyu’s mountain area.

Two years later, Qiu Zhefeng brought Diankou Town to the Venice Biennale, showing the world the style of this southern Jiangnan town. 

Qiu Zhefeng, born in 1979, was born in Shengzhou, Shaoxing. He grew up in a thousand-year-old town and has been lived here all his born years. 

Having been a journalist for many years, he always cherished the idea of  “promoting social progress”. For him, tradition and culture are what count most.

(Compiled by Xu Yuhong)