Factory 798 and China’s Burgeoning Art Scene

China’s dramatic economic growth has been well documented in Western media. Receiving less attention is China’s up-and-coming contemporary art scene. The center of the artistic community in China is Factory 798, located between the fourth and fifth ring roads in Beijing. There, a group of artists have managed to transform a derelict factory into a burgeoning arts colony. Exposed brick walls, miles of pipes and tubes, and dramatic high ceilings house dozens of artists’ studios and galleries.

Factory 798 once was used to manufactured electronic parts for weapons during the Cold War. After falling demand led to the decline of the manufacturing plant, the only people attracted to the space were artists, who appreciated the cheap rent and spacious rooms. As the artists transformed the space into a desirable place to live and work, the area have faced a good deal of pressure to develop. In the past few years, the artists of Factory 79 have successfully fought plans to transform the area into either high-rise apartments and a power plant. Since 2002, the area has been formally incorporated by the government as an artistic development zone, officially making artists the economic drivers for the area. The plan has been resoundingly successful, attracting international attention. Artists routinely sell their work for tens of thousands of dollars. But their own success has made the space unaffordable to many of the artists that made it desirable it the first place. As such, the area faces a unique Chinese form of gentrification.

A group of students and I were fortunate enough to meet with Huang Rui, one of the founding members of Factory 798, who still lives and works in the area. During the 1970′s and 1980′s, as a member of the Stars Group of artists, Huang Rui provided an instrumental role of pushing the artistic agenda in China. Their performance art amounted to public protests, and were did not please the powers-that-be. Says Hilary Binks:

To fully appreciate the significance of the Stars exhibitions, one must understand the great difficulties that Chinese artists had previously endured ‚Äì their isolation, censorship and constant repression under the Communist regime. Thirty years before, from the Communist base at Yanan, Mao Zedong had announced the official canon of Chinese Socialist Realism. Artistic works were no longer meant for intellectuals and the refined literati, but for “the masses”. The new rules required artists to give up any form of individual self-expression. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) many artists suffered criticism as “intellectual partisans” and were sentenced to periods of hard labour in the countryside; painting was prohibited. Not until the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution was there any cultural thaw. The Stars Group seized on this and made a brave attempt to re-establish the idea of ziwo ‚Äì “I myself”. “The darkness of the past and the brightness of the future,” wrote the sculptor Wang Keping. “This should be our lesson and our responsibility.”

This political background permeates the atmosphere of Factory 798. Much of the art directly references recent historic changes in China. Mao’s image permeates much of the work, such as this rice and honey sculpture pictured below.

One of the creative industries housed in Factory 798 is Time Out Beijing, both the Chinese and English editions. We spoke with the managing editor, who described the difficulties of running a Western-style publication in China. He spoke of the difficulty in finding local writers who not only had a decent command of English, but also could critically examine the issues this rapidly expanding mega-city faces. There is a crisis of creativity in China, a historic legacy of the Cultural Revolution’s purging of intellectuals and critical thinking. It’s only the most recent generation of artists and writers who have grown up in the era of China’s open door policy under eased artistic restrictions that creativity has been fully begun to florish. Still, all published media — including foreign owned magazines — must submit to a board of censors before being published. This lack of creative freedom seems to directly contradict the government’s plans for art as the driving economic factor in the area.

Factory 798 in one of the only places I’ve seen graffiti and stencil art in Beijing. It’s hard to say if that is part of the sanctioned art encouraged by the government or if it’s a genuine expression of the artists working in the area. Despite it’s contradictions, Factory 798 is certainly one of the most unique places in Beijing. Despite it’s relatively affluent and isolation from the rest of the city, it houses some of the most progressive and important politically-informed art coming from China today.

Check out my photos from Factory 798 in the gallery; mirrored on Flickr.

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