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The Secret Passion of Bob Rennie —
Page 4
A few weeks later, on a warm Sunday afternoon in January,
Rennie walks the 20 minutes from the Hotel Vancouver
(where he’s left his gold Bentley Continental
coupe) to the Wing Sang building on East Pender. Built
in three stages (1889, 1901, 1912), the former home
of an import/export business—directly across from
the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden—is
the oldest building in Chinatown. As of July, it will
be home to both Rennie Marketing Systems and the Rennie
Collection Canada. “Larry [Beasley] and I discovered
this on one of our walks, back in 2004,” he says,
opening the padlocked door. Within months, he’d
purchased it for $1 million.
Inside, pigeons flutter around the hollowed-out space.
Rennie plans to turn the front half of the building,
some 6,000 square feet, into offices, with Rennie
Marketing Systems on the top two floors and Rennie Resales—the
fast-growing sales division led by his son, Kris—on
the main floor. His “museum,” as he calls
it, will take up the back 20,000 square feet but will
be closed to the public. “For now, it’s
just an extension of our living room.”
Rennie is torn about the purpose of his collection,
and who should see it.
He desperately wanted exhibition rooms where he could
take visiting collectors and artists to show the work;
with the paucity of local gallery space—and his
entrenched standoff with the VAG—building his
own museum seemed the logical, if expensive, choice.
“The European donors to Harvard: they were recently
in town, and they have a serious interest in contemporary
art. So they’d come see the museum,” says
Rennie. “Emily Carr students—perhaps. But
it’s not here to kill 10 minutes of a bus tour
over at Sun Yat-Sen.”
We ascend an intersecting series of gangplanks to the
rearmost section of the Wing Sang: a six-storey structure
that once contained 48 separate rooms (and, according
to Rennie, housed an S&M operation). It’s
being turned into a 40-foot-high gallery—one of
five retrofitted spaces for exhibiting art (among them
a glass-roofed slot gallery that will connect the two
buildings). The first installation, to be unveiled in
October, will be the 40-odd works Rennie owns by American
artist Robert Beck. (“It was going to be Ian Wallace,
but too many of our works are out on loan.”) “We’ll
do one installation every four to six months,”
says Rennie. “It will take 15 years to install
the whole collection—if we don’t acquire.”
Just before the sun starts to set, we climb a ladder
to the moss-covered roof of the Wing Sang. From here—where
a sculpture garden is planned—we get an unobstructed
view of Rennie’s shimmering
down-town legacy, as well as the construction zone of
Southeast False Creek. “My village!” he
cries out as he spots the site of the Olympic Village
development. Rennie—who buys into all the projects
he markets—plans to move into the Fairmont Pacific
Rim next year, keeping his False Creek condo for art.
As for the new gallery downstairs: “If we wanted
to donate it one day, it’s set up as a working
museum. The right load occupancies for male and female
washrooms, circulation, exiting—everything’s
in place.
“If life goes sideways,” he adds, “I’ll
have to sell these things. But this is why I work.”
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