Since its closure as a working station in 1982, bar the odd rock concert and party, it has been closed to the public. But in October we will all be given access to the site when the Serpentine Gallery will take over one of the two main former turbine halls, Turbine Hall B, to mount a massive exhibition of contemporary Chinese video, sound and installation art.

The Serpentine show will not be a one-off: according to a spokesman for Parkview, which owns the site and is overseeing its £1.5 billion redevelopment, this is just the first of a string of high-profile, large-scale arts events that will take place while the power station is being converted into a residential and leisure complex. The intention is to make Battersea Power Station an arts destination to rival Tate Modern and the Royal Opera House.

The fact that the first show is a survey of Chinese art is significant: Parkview is owned by the secretive Asian property tycoon Victor Hwang. “It seemed like an ideal marriage,” says Julia Peyton-Jones, the director of the Serpentine. “There’s this immediate connection with China with Victor, but also the Chinese themselves exhibit art in industrial spaces like this one. China is so of the moment — people are fascinated by it, it is really emerging as a superpower.”

Hwang, said to be worth £350 million, already has a relationship with the Serpentine. The summer pavilion the architect Cecil Balmond designed for the gallery in 2002 (with Toyo Ito) has been reconstructed inside the entrance to the power station. Balmond has also created the blueprint for Battersea’s redevelopment, which includes offices, flats, a park, hotel, and pedestrian bridge linking the power station to Pimlico.

The Hwangs declined to be interviewed directly for this article. “Ultimately, we want the station to be a creative hub,” Vicky Hwang, Victor’s daughter and Parkview’s director of leasing, said in a statement. Hwang has consulted with institutions as diverse as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Design Council and Bafta about using the power station “as a place to showcase creativity in its many forms”. Hwang wants the Battersea “brand” to become synonymous with art.

By the time its redevelopment is complete, Hwang, who lives in Mayfair, intends 50 per cent of its space — most significantly its central area — to be public. “I could have have brought in Barratt Homes, Travelodge and Holiday Inn,” Hwang once said. “But I wanted to do something special.”

Battersea Power Station was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who also designed the Tate Power Station building (home of Tate Modern), Waterloo Bridge and the red telephone box. Turbine Hall A was opened in 1933. Turbine Hall B, plus the chimneys, was completed in 1953. The site area covers 36 acres. Parkview bought the site in 1993 and its redevelopment has been a stop-start affair ever since. Almost a fortnight ago, after the departure of the chief executive Michael Roberts and the chief financial officer Michael Russell, Hwang took personal charge of the redevelopment, appointing his son Leo vice president and Vicky director of leasing. A spokesman insists that the redevelopment remains on course, despite one industry commentator describing the situation as “a vicious downward spiral”.

When I ask Peyton-Jones what Hwang thought of the idea of an art show when the Serpentine first approached Parkview, her eyes flick nervously to a Hwang representative. “I think Victor had better answer that,” she says. Well, was he excited, interested? Again Peyton-Jones says that’s for Hwang to say, but says the project has been pursued with “full and total confidence and conviction. Once we came to see the site desire and necessity came together — it became completely and utterly urgent to do it.”

Come October, visitors will arrive at an entrance created to the west of the site and have the chance to ride a Chinese bicycle along the few hundred yards to the power station itself on an off-white “carpet” made of a high-tech material. This installation, created by the architect Ma Qingyun, is called Plascape.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Serpentine’s curator-at-large who has conceived the show, says a piece of sound art will greet visitors, something that will accentuate the experience of where they will be standing. It is already an amazing sight. The concrete columns supporting the structure are eroded (but apparently not dangerously so), some windows retain their panes, others are blown out, the criss-crossing of iron girders is hypnotic. You feel Lilliputian amid the soaring, wrecked architecture. The challenge for the artists and architects, Peyton-Jones says, is to “articulate the space”.

“There are very few places as exciting in terms of size as Battersea Power Station,” Obrist says. “The exhibition in October will be the last opportunity for people to see this space before it is redeveloped, to discover the many vistas one cannot see from outside. The historian Eric Hobsbawm recently talked about ‘the protest against forgetting’ — the importance of memory in our cultural psyche — which is why it is good that people will be able to finally see this place.”

The video art will be shown on three levels of Turbine Hall B (Turbine Hall A was discounted because its spaces are too fragmented). Visitors will ascend a flight of stairs (there will also be disability access) to the barely lit levels two and three — both low-ceilinged and long, like floors of a multi-storey car park stretched to infinity.