Meandering through the art zone: Factory 798

You can read about the origins of Beijing's Art Zone 798 on the Wikipedia and on the Chinese Radio International websites. I think this was the most anomalous place we came across during our six weeks in China. We went there with Rob, Sally and George.

May 17th, Tuesday

It was a carefully counted, eighteen stop bus ride past the Olympic Stadia along the Beishuan Zhonglu and Donglu, after which the map got confusing. We started walking down Wanghonglu and a passer by, a young woman who happened to have worked in Dubai and spoke good English, redirected us. The Art Zone was also confusing, the maps impossible to follow, so we just trusted to luck. Its labyrinth of little galleries, studios, alleyways and courtyards (some 200 arts organisations operate here) stretch for miles, it seems, dotted with western-style coffee shops. Non-Chinese visitors / residents seem to make a beeline for this place and it had a risqué feel to it: the only part of the city where I saw graffiti.

I was always on the look out for signs of subversion in that regimented country; the Art Zone might be the kind of place where I'd notice something, I thought.

Part of the installation Yellow Signal

There were hints. In the alleyways and yards and on the street corners stood odd-looking sculptures, some perhaps in mockery of recent Chinese history, though their message was covert. One gallery had conventional landscapes in oils on display but most of the art was experimental. We entered a museum (without paying anything because we were identified as lǎo rén, old people) where we saw recent paintings in luminescent oils, very linear, illuminated from above by neon tube lights, an installation by Kong Lingnan called "Only Her Body"––a reference to Mother Earth, on which nothing is exempt from human interference. Environmental catastrophes were happening in the pictures, such as "The Drifting Peninsula." Wang Jianwei had put together a collection of distorted furniture (we wanted to call it "Nightmare at IKEA") which incorporated dry ice and flowing water on the desktops and traffic signals: the title of the work being "Yellow signal." It was said to "explore the territory between permission and prohibition," an apt metaphor for modern Chinese society, I suppose. (I gave this some more thought while we were in Hangzhou.) An even more striking metaphor was a creation that Chris and I discovered in another gallery, a map of China as a bees' nest (entitled Outer Space Project, created by the Gao brothers) with hundreds of tiny figures, photos of people from all walks of life––children, a blind man, prostitutes, acrobats, falling or diving figures––as part of the cave-like honeycomb. The idea was repeated, the same photos in different configurations superimposed on grids, one rectangular, one with little squares, on the adjoining walls.

A juxtaposition of ancient and modern art

Elsewhere in the art complex were galleries showing garish, almost tacky paintings (deliberately tacky, presumably) of stereotype Chinese faces and a peculiar painting of a naked lute player sticking his tongue out with fish swimming around him.

An enhanced courtyard in the 798 Zone

I dare say that to confine all this modern art within a disused factory in a relatively inaccessible part of town was a deliberate ploy on the authorities' part. Interesting, anyhow! Suffering from sensory overload, we liked the quiet Cave Café (Dòng Fáng Kāfēi) a converted warehouse with settees which wouldn't have seemed at all out of place in the States, where we were able to order cafe latte or coke and could relax.