by Linda Jaivin
The River of Golden Waters at the Forbidden City.
Beijing has an ambitious and successful programme of grey-water recycling, and a number of water-intensive industries have been forced out of the city. Local farmers too have been switching to less thirsty crops. There are controversial plans for further diversion of water from both the Yellow and Yangtze rivers and for energy-intensive desalination plants that won’t work in winter when the sea closest to Beijing freezes over.
Meanwhile, it never rains but it pours. The capital experienced its heaviest downpour in 60 years in a single 24-hour period in July 2012. Floodwaters surged down streets and submerged highways, claiming dozens of lives, destroying over 8,000 homes, causing billions of yuan in damage and exposing a gaping lack of attention to the city’s drainage infrastructure. I wrote to a friend living in a courtyard house in one of Beijing’s remaining hutong neighbourhoods (see pp. 173–9) to ask how she’d fared. She replied that the courtyard house had stood up well to the storm; her neighbourhood had been saved, she said, by the drainage provided by its ancient moats and canals. There may be some kind of lesson there.
On the Art Trail
By the late 1990s the outmoded electronics factories of sector 798 in the old Bauhaus-style military-industrial complex at Jiuxianqiao (Drunken Fairy Bridge) were struggling to keep afloat in the increasingly competitive, market-driven economy. In 2001 they began allowing artists to rent space in 798 for studios, living spaces and galleries. The cavernous workshops, some with Cultural Revolution era slogans still visible on the walls, made ideal backdrops for exhibitions of the studiously ironic ‘political pop’ that was trope du jour.
By 2003 sector 798 boasted over 400 galleries and a listing in Time magazine as one of the world’s top 25 art centres. But rising rents and what artist and critic Yin Ji’nan famously described in 2004 as an artistic ‘petting zoo’ atmosphere eventually drove most cutting-edge artists further afield. Some, including Ai Weiwei, one of the first into 798, moved to nearby Caochangdi Village. But the taming of 798 suited the municipal government. Beginning in 2008, with an eye on its tourism potential, the city government invested over 100 million yuan in infrastructure for the arts district. By 2010, 798 was drawing more than 2 million visitors, one-third of whom were foreigners. It has become as much a site to shop, eat and play as it is a place to view art.
The scene at Jiuxianqiao, Caochangdi and other ‘art districts’ or ‘art villages’ in Beijing continues to evolve. Within the same complex as 798 is 751 D•Park, a decommissioned coal gas plant. By the second decade of the new millennium 751 D•Park had become a hub for industrial, interior and fashion design, and a popular venue for fashion shows, ‘Design Week’ activities and international product launches alike.
798 Space gallery with Cultural Revolution slogans on the ceiling: ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’
Beijing’s highly commercialized art scene is a long way from the original, amateur spirit of Chinese art. In imperial times, a mastery of calligraphy, poetry and brush painting was the mark of the gentleman-scholar. Wang Xizhe’s Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion presented an ideal vision of that world. Wang and his friends, all talented scholar-officials, had gathered in the year 353 at a pavilion by a winding stream to drink and compose poetry. They floated wine cups on the water. Whenever one bumped against the side, the nearest person composed a verse on the spot. The Preface is a profoundly beautiful meditation on the fleeting nature of life and joy and its calligraphy is considered among the greatest works of Chinese art ever made. A seventh-century Tang emperor buried it with him in his tomb near Xi’an, commissioning several copies first. Over the centuries, artists have created numerous tributes to the Preface and the occasion that inspired it.
The eighteenth-century Qianlong emperor, one of the most energetic art collectors in history, had a passion for the Preface. He acquired some of the earliest Tang dynasty copies as well as the most magnificent of the artworks inspired by it, including paintings, jade carvings and calligraphy, for his collection in the Forbidden City. Qianlong even constructed his own ‘Flowing Cup Pavilion’, complete with an artificial winding stream, within the palace itself. Despite decades of looting and destruction, Beijing’s Palace Museum still boasts an extraordinary art collection. Several years back, the large gallery above the Meridian Gate put on a superb exhibition of works collected by Qianlong relating to Wang Xizhe’s masterpiece. It was a glimpse of a world that celebrated art, poetry and friendship above all else.
But if today’s art scene seems at times to be about money above all else, it’s good to recall that its own relatively recent antecedents are more Orchid Pavilion than auction house. From 1949 the Communist Party ordered art to serve the revolution. Yet even at the height of the Cultural Revolution, a small group of Beijing artists adhered to the ideals of beauty, friendship and art for its own sake. They painted quietly around the lakes at Shichahai and elsewhere when all around was politically orchestrated murder and madness.
The No-Names, as they called themselves, could not even have imagined exhibiting their art, much less selling it. They were an inspiration to others, including a group of young artists who came together in 1978, two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution. A number of them were associated with the samizdat publication Today, which held gatherings at the Yuanmingyuan, then an un reconstructed and unguarded ruin where people drank, declaimed poetry and celebrated the still-dangerous notion of self-expression. The artists called themselves the Stars to assert their place in a cosmos previously dominated by one Great Red Sun, as Chairman Mao was known. Their number included Ai Weiwei and others whose names still resonate in the Chinese art world today.
The Stars applied to the official Beijing Artists Association for permission to hold an exhibition. Nearly a year passed without news. Early in the morning on 27 September 1979, they descended on a narrow park flanking the China Art Gallery (today’s National Art Museum of China) with their work. In just over an hour, they’d mounted a guerrilla exhibition of 150 works on the park fence. Word of mouth attracted huge crowds – and the interest of the Public Security Bureau, which closed it down the following day. Days later, on crutches, the woodcut artist Ma Desheng, who’d been denied entry to art school on account of physical disability, led the Stars in a defiant and international headline-grabbing march down Chang’an Avenue under a banner demanding ‘democracy and artistic freedom’. They were given permission to hang their work in Beihai Park in late November 1979 and in August 1980, at the China Art Gallery itself.
Jiang Feng, then the chairman of the China Artists’ Association, reportedly said at the time: ‘When [the Stars] realize that the mass of the people don’t understand their work, they will learn and change their ways.’ I was one of an estimated 200,000 visitors (the overwhelming majority of whom were Chinese) who mobbed the gallery that summer to view the audacious works on show. But Jiang Feng had got it backwards: it was the Stars who changed everything else. The exhibition turned out to be a seminal moment in the development of China’s contemporary art scene.
Back then, there were no commercial galleries. Security forces regularly shut down shows held in public spaces like schools. Yet the scene attracted the diplomats, journalists and others in Beijing’s small foreign community, for it offered them a congenial, bohemian, even outlaw alternative to the official China of stilted banquets and limited social contacts. And so diplomats, journalists and others bought this ‘unofficial’ art, hosted exhibitions, talked up the art abroad and helped the artists to exhibit and travel overseas. Their particular excite ment about art that carried social and political messages or contained recognizably ‘Chinese’ imagery undeniably influenced the sort of art being produced.
Li Xianting, editor of Fine Arts in China – the authoritative Beijing journal of record on art trends in China from 1985 to 1989 – and a renowned champion of the scene, was critical of foreigners’ judgments, noting ‘they tend to be attracted to anyth
ing that is “unofficial”.’ Whenever I visited Li in his cramped quarters in a dazayuan by Shichahai, this champion of ‘unofficial’ art was always also keen to point out the ferment and experimentation taking place in the academies during those years as well.
Though there were other, regional hubs of artistic creativity in the 1980s, the opportunities Beijing offered for mutual contact and wider recognition made the capital a magnet for artists from the provinces. Recognizing opportunity, residents of Fuyuan Village at the old western gate of the Yuanmingyuan rented rooms to those without official permission to reside in the capital; contemporary art stars Fang Lijun and Guo Jian were among those who lived for a time in what became known as the Yuanmingyuan Artists’ Village.
In February 1989 Li Xianting helped curate a landmark exhibition of Chinese avant-garde art at the China Art Gallery. The exhibition, called ‘No U-Turn’, involved 186 artists from all over China and nearly 300 works, including Huang Yong Ping’s ‘The History of Chinese Painting’ and ‘A Concise History of Modern Art’ after Two Minutes in a Washing Machine and a giant cross made of condoms by the Gao Brothers. When the artists Tang Song and Xiao Lu opened fire with live ammunition on their installation Dialogue, the police closed the exhibition. It reopened, closed again because of a bomb threat (later alleged to be another performance artwork) and reopened again.
Wang Guangyi’s Our Workers are Strong, a sculpture at 798.
It was not long after that the protest movement erupted and students demonstrating for democracy raised the banner of the ‘No U-Turn’ exhibition as a political statement. Following the violent suppression of the movement on 3–4 June, Li Xianting and teachers at the Central Academy of Art, whose students had created a giant ‘Goddess of Democracy’ statue for Tiananmen Square, fell under intense investigation. A number of artists had already left China in the difficult years of the early 1980s; now a second wave fled overseas. ‘The modern art of the 1980s’, the critic Huang Zhuan observed, ‘disappeared almost overnight.’
It came back to life in the early 1990s, when Deng Xiaoping allowed market forces freer rein in the Chinese economy. The Australian Brian Wallace, who had been living in Beijing from the 1980s, had studied at the Central Academy of Art and organized temporary exhibitions of the new Chinese art in 1988 and 1989, saw his chance. In 1992, with the assistance of the Chinese Bureau for the Preservation of Cultural and Historic Relics, he opened China’s first commercial gallery, Red Gate, in the spectacular Dongbianmen watchtower of the old Outer City wall. Although Beijing today has too many commercial galleries to count, Red Gate and Wallace remain important players, even running an international programme of residencies for artists and curators. China’s growth into both an economic powerhouse and global art superpower draws artists from around the world to Beijing to work, exhibit and simply experience the scene. When, in 1985, Robert Rauschenberg became the first major contemporary artist to exhibit at the China Art Gallery, it created a sensation. In 2012, when Damien Hirst showed at a gallery in 798, it was just another (highly) notable exhibition in a crowded arts calendar that includes such major show-and-sell events as the Beijing Art Fair held each spring at the Agricultural Exhibition Hall.
Many of the Beijing artists who emigrated in previous decades, meanwhile, have returned to live and work there. The artist Guan Wei, who is now an Australian citizen, is one. In 2013 he suggested why when he summed up the scene to Artlink magazine as ‘chaotic, fast-paced, exciting, fun and risk-taking’.
Excitement aside, there are studios in the Beijing area that would be the envy of many artists around the world in terms of rental price and size. Over the course of a decade, the village of Songzhuang alone has attracted an incredible 4,000 artists. Living among them, fondly nicknamed the ‘Village Chief’, is the art writer, editor and curator Li Xianting.
The artist Ah Xian’s studio in Songzhuang.
Performance art at the opening of a private art museum in Tongxian county.
In 2006, at an auction in Beijing, the original, bullet-holed installation Dialogue from ‘No U-Turn’ sold for more than U.S. $200,000. That year, Sotheby’s and Christie’s between them passed some $22 million worth of contemporary Asian art under the hammer. The following year, contemporary artist Liu Xiaodong set a record for a sale in China when one of his works went for $8.2 million – yet still only one-tenth of the $83.2 million paid in England in 2010 for a single Qianlong era vase.
The Nest, the Cube, the Underpants and the Egg
On the day after the British owner of Segway Inc., Jimi Heselden, died riding his gyroscopically balanced ‘personal transporter’ off the edge of a cliff, I happened to be visiting the Beijing National Stadium, or ‘Bird’s Nest’. I’d seen a report on Heselden’s accidental death in the news. When I discovered a handful of people executing stately slaloms around witch’s hats on Segways there, I thought I’d stumbled on an eccentric tribute to the man.
It turned out that renting Segways to tourists to ride in the stadium is one of the strategies for recouping the building’s cripplingly high maintenance costs, which may reach $30 million a year. Visitor numbers to the Bird’s Nest have been in steady decline since the end of the 2008 Olympics and Paralympics. Although some 100 major events, including the Italian Super Cup and 2013 International Ski Federation Freestyle World Cup, have been held there between 2008 and 2013, it remains by and large an empty nest. The national football (soccer) team declined an invitation to make it their home base and other ideas, such as transforming the iconic structure into a hotel, have failed to excite much interest.
While I was there, so far as I could see, I was the only person who was not either an employee of the stadium or propelling a Segway over the same track where Usain Bolt had set his world record. It was lonely in those stands built to accommodate 91,000 (including 80,000 in fixed seating). Despite it being a beautiful, blue-sky autumnal day, ideal for sightseeing, the Olympic Plaza outside the stadium felt only slightly less desolate. The Ling Long Pagoda, the on-site broadcast centre, beamed The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ through loudspeakers at the tight clumps of provincial and Taiwanese tourists being herded by their guides from the Bird’s Nest to the ‘Water Cube’ (the National Aquatics Center) and finally over to a vast food tent. I followed them there, sampling ‘authentic Beijing treats’ for two to four times what I would pay outside the park in authentic Beijing itself.
The Bird’s Nest (National Stadium).
The Segway is at once admirable, touching and ridiculous. A similar blend of flair and folly are evoked by the charmingly tangled Bird’s Nest, designed by Herzog & de Meuron with Ai Weiwei, and the effervescent Water Cube (strictly speaking a Water Cuboid), with its hi-tech transparent cladding and solar-heated pools. Along with the Ling Long tower, which looks like a Chinese pagoda as imagined by the Jetsons, these landmark buildings sit as though dropped on the colossal expanse of the immaculate Olympic Green like big, shiny children’s toys on a playroom floor.
The Water Cube (Beijing National Aquatics Center).
The great architectural monuments of Beijing’s imperial past such as the Forbidden City and the lost pleasance of the Yuanmingyuan, though covering huge tracts of land, were, along with their designed landscapes, human in scale. They had nothing of the monumentalism of the ‘hyperbuildings’ that are the signature works of Beijing’s new architecture.
Many of the new landmarks, like the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube, have attracted nicknames, not all complimentary. The ‘Big Underpants’ is how Beijing people refer to the new headquarters of China Central Television (CCTV) on the East Third Ring Road. Rising just south of the site of King Zhao’s Golden Tower and the Line 10 subway station Jintaixizhao, the Big Underpants glows resolutely silver. It was designed by Rem Koolhaas, tagged ‘the Master of Bigness’ by architectural critic Martin Filler, with the urban architectural partnership OMA.
OMA had never previously designed a high-rise. Yet it is one of the largest tall buildings ever built,
with more than 473,000 sq. m of floor space. Its architects utilized construction processes never tried before; the Beijing authorities, who can make such decisions unencumbered by the consultation processes that might hamper such a project in democratic countries, gave it their blessings. The Asian Wall Street Journal has quoted OMA director Ole Scheeren as acknowledging, ‘A project like this would be impossible to do anywhere else in the world.’ Martin Filler describes the result as a ‘vertiginously off-kilter’ building and a ‘tour de force of high-tech engineering’ that displays ‘gravity-defying bravado’. Scheeren, who has an unusual conception of hutong, has elsewhere characterized it as ‘a huge hutong in the sky’.
The unique circulation system of this two-legged structure allows 2,000 visitors to tour the national television facility daily without disturbing any of the 10,000 people who work there. In Tide Players the Beijing writer Zha Jianying calls it ‘an ultra-futuristic, transparent piece of architecture designed by Rem Koolhaas to house the ultra-conservative, opaque headquarters of Chinese state media.’
When officials tried to give the knickers-in-a-twist structure a more dignified nickname, they settled on the fatally earnest ‘Zhichuang’ (Window on Knowledge). It took the people of Beijing, gold-medallists in wordplay, only as long as it takes to write a weibo (microblog) post to switch the characters for zhichuang to those of a homonym meaning haemorrhoid.
OMA also designed a 234-m-tall Beijing Television Cultural Centre that would house a five-star Mandarin Hotel next door to the, er, Window on Knowledge, as part of a larger complex. During the Chinese New Year celebrations of 2009, illegal fireworks accidentally set the unfinished hotel dramatically ablaze. This was not seen as a good omen for the coming year; under high-level orders not to transmit photos of the inferno, CCTV neglected to report on the story until social media had broadcast the story, complete with images, far and wide.
