"Buzz Goes to China"
(July 2006)
Online Copy

In the northeast of Beijing, off of a busy expressway and down a quiet lane, sit rows of shuttered, aging factories. In the past, the complex produced electronics for the military. Now, in the same vaulted workspaces, a new kind of production has begun. Factory 798, or the Dashanzi Art District, has suddenly become the vanguard of Chinese and international art, a confluence of artists from across China and the world.

Surrounded by smokestacks and highrises, this burgeoning community both criticizes and cooperates in the global economy. Though unknown in the mainstream, collectors and curators have taken notice of 798 and, now, what was once bohemian is being groomed and glorified into the bourgeois.

On a study abroad program called Learning About China, through the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, this reporter and several other American students were able to walk through the galleries and studios, through the open-air blocks of these esoteric confines. To experience this district was to observe the status of any avant-garde art, of its grasp for individuality in a mass society, for authenticity in spite of wealthy patronage.

The development of 798 was an accumulation of the same historical events and ideas that many of the artists still dwell upon. In the early fifties, during the first Five-Year Plan, China and the Soviet Union cooperated to build “joint factories” and foster mutual economic growth. In need of electronics production for the army, the Chinese were recommended to reach out to East Germany for guidance.

A plan was created and the East Germans designed a Bauhaus-inspired factory complex. The buildings would have vaulted ceilings, allowing bright light and vast space in the work areas. It was to be built in a region called Dashanzi - undeveloped farmland northeast of the Beijing city center.

Joint Factory 718, as it was functionally named, opened in 1957. It was eventually divided into subunits, one of which was called 798. The employees numbered over ten thousand, with onsite housing and other amenities allowing a reprieve from the poverty throughout China, particularly during the Cultural Revolution.

Starved from government aid in the eighties, production withered at 718. Many subunits were closed, with a majority of the workers fired. Although, even today, some of the factories are still operational, creating an odd juxtaposition of daily laborers and leisurely artists in each other’s vicinity.

While the Joint Factory was shutting down, China’s fringe art community was being evicted from its residence in the northwest of Beijing. In 1995, Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts rented space in one of the abandoned factories. Other artists, both from China and abroad, heard of the available space and moved into the 798 district buildings, under the tall ceiling arches, under the peeling red paint of Maoist propaganda.

Today, there are dozens of galleries, studios, restaurants and shops, lining the alleyways and streets of the old factories and worker flats. The artwork is multifaceted, reflecting an international influence from the local – other artists displaying or working at 798 – and from the global – mass media-delivered consumerism and pop culture.

There is a range of styles on display: from explicit advertisement parodies, to impressionistic landscapes, to total abstraction. Through painting, sculpture, photography and video, most of these artists comment on the sprawl of capitalist ideologies and the political transformation of China into its current, capitalist-communist status.

Mao’s complacent portrait is the ubiquitous symbol throughout the gamut of the artwork.

For example, painter Sheng Qi cut off his little finger after the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Now, at his gallery in 798, his severed hand is the focal point of photographs, with tiny, idealized images resting in the palm. Or, consider Han Feng, who paints mass-produced consumable goods, like Starbucks cups or Puma sneakers, on traditional silk screens, in his series called “Made in China”.

Though often evoking American pop art and other modern, Western styles, the Sinicized context creates a new perspective and meaning. East Asian Languages and Cultures professor, and the leader of Learning About China, Gary Xu, commented that some of the artists try to self-reflect on the foreign influences and transcend into something new.

Yet, Xu also thinks that these artists’ ideas stand on tenuous ground: “The majority of the artists criticize globalized commodification and mindless consumption; but ironically, they also become complicit with what they criticize when they rely on the global art market. He continued that, “In order to sell their work in New York galleries, they turn their work into kitsch and speculate on the tastes of Western customers.”

Like New York City’s Greenwich Village and SoHo before it, the Dashanzi Art District is already being gentrified into an expensive status symbol. Luxury sedans roll through the dusty streets and the cafés charge prices beyond the means of an average Chinese worker. It has now hosted both the Beijing Biennale and its own Dashanzi International Art Festival, drawing tens of thousands of affluent visitors.

Further, the uncontrolled rent is increasing yearly, forcing out those artists who have not been discovered, whose works have not been deigned as elite.

With rising prosperity and attention, the government’s eye has focused on these subversive artists. If an artwork has political content, particularly about hushed history like Tiananmen, government agents will often appear and demand its removal from public display.

Beyond this threat is the status of the entire factory district itself. Despite lobbying efforts, there are plans to rebuild the area into an industrial park, allowing some of the thousands of laid-off workers to be reemployed back into manufacturing jobs.

So, in only a few years’ time, Dashanzi has experienced an accelerated life cycle of an artistic village.

It is a crisis, that in criticizing consumption and manufactured society, this art is itself another commodity. The factory setting is almost beyond ironic. Perhaps, it is a plea that, underneath the mechanical surface of industry, there must be something human – a heart that beats, a mind that thinks. Still, it could also be a joke, a slight from privileged artists paying lip service to common labor, to the condition of the masses they no longer experience.


©2009 Tim Peters/All rights reserved