Beijing

Beijing from the hotel

 

Beijing could almost be anywhere, in any country. At first glance, there is little of the old Chinese-ness that exists in Shanghai or even Hong Kong. The city feels utterly ‘modern’ and new in an unremarkable, inexpensively constructed way. The heavy, authoritarian architecture is interspersed with the same anonymous glass and steel that signifies corporate power in every city and the occasional wonder – Rem Koolhaus’s unfinished CCTV Building, most notably. Driving down an elevated highway through the new business district where we stayed offered the advantage of perspective in this utterly flat city; big blocky buildings repeat endlessly, fading into the haze.

Because of the terrible pollution, Beijing seems to exist in a perpetual dusk light. There is no atmosphere – no clouds, no sky, no sun to chart the time of day.

My grandmothers – both here in the 80′s – remember having no access to anything, everything being officially sanctioned, guarded. That is definitely not the case now.  There is an ‘official’ presence – there were police in place of building security in large venues and throughout the airport – but we felt free to do whatever we wanted to do, go anywhere we wanted to go.

We planned our trip to coincide with the Chinese International Galleries Exposition, a huge [government sponsored] art fair that showcased primarily Asian and mid-level European galleries. There were also several big museum exhibitions opening.

A colleague from Asia Art Archive was in Beijing for the fair and a related conference and, the first day I was there, we planned to meet at the 798 Arts District. (http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/798/187853.htm)

798 was the number given in the Cultural Revolution to this former artillery factory complex (a huge sprawling compound of buildings that felt like the Brewery in LA). Apparently, it was abandoned and then re-inhabited in the 80’s by artists who lived and worked there. It then went through the Soho-effect and while it doesn’t yet have an actual commercial ‘mall’ feel, it is definitely a lifestyle destination where few artists could afford to rent a studio now. It has been beautified with trees and planters and there are outdoor cafes and coffee shops lining the boulevards. There were more galleries than I could count or begin to go into although we did see a lot. The standout was the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art – I think it is the first non-profit arts organization in China. (http://www.ucca.org.cn)

Started by the Ullens, Swiss collectors who lived in China for many years, the work was by far the most sophisticated that I have seen since moving to Asia. An exhibition by Qiu Zhijie (http://www.ucca.org.cn/portal/exhibition/view.798?id=15&menuId=20) called ‘Breaking through the Ice’ blew me away. He filled a football-field sized gallery with a series of related installations about China’s will to bigness (to steal a phrase from Michael Chabon).

It was overwhelming, incredible. There was also a show by Navin Rawanchaikul being installed called ‘Super China!’ which was excellent.

There was a familiar energy in the Beijing art world that I have come to associate with Asian art in general. Outside a few true innovators, the art world seems over-populated by people looking to the west and imitating what has already been done, almost as if art were a set of behaviors rather than an individual pursuit. Being at 798, I felt like I had stepped into a parallel dimension of Beijing. The hazy city faded away and we were in familiar reclaimed industrial territory, where art and commerce have struck a temporary balance.

While we waited for my friend to meet us, Frances and I had lunch at an outdoor cafe and people-watched. My friend showed up and the three of us took a taxi to the China International Gallery Exposition (http://www.cige-bj.com/main_en.html) (coincidentally in the conference center next door to hotel we chose for its proximity to M’s office. My friend got us in the VIP entrance – catalogue! – and F slept through most of the show. I missed about a third of it and went back the next day to check it out.

Most of the work was your typical Chinese contemporary art – political hyper-realism that by now has become flat and tiresome, derivative mimicry, and naive reinventions of the wheel (it’s hard to argue that you differentiate your highly polished amorphous stainless steel blob sculptures from Anish Kapoor’s by making them smaller). But there were some interesting surprises.

That afternoon, we found a grocery store, got milk (from Australia), yogurt (from Switzerland), and dish soap (from the US).

The next day, Frances and I went to the Today Art Museum (Beijing’s contemporary art museum). It is located in two very modern concrete warehouse-like buildings. They were getting ready for a huge opening called Fat Art and were busy transforming a walking street space beside the museum with food and bars and stages for bands. It was all very slick and hip and riddled with product placement – Moto and Smart Car and Puma. I met a few of the artists and looked around the exhibition – so-so.

Outside the museum, there was a Yue Minjun sculpture of 15 of his sarcastically ecstatic self-portraits, cast in steel or aluminum, each 12 feet or so high. Frances ran around and through the statues and the irony was lost on her – she thought they were all sharing a great joke.

After the Museum, Frances and I took a cab to Tiananmen Square down a long polluted boulevard where visibility was significantly reduced beyond

50 feet. Even at the square, it was as if we were in a cloud; we could not see any details of the buildings and even Mao’s huge portrait was a smudge in the distance.

The huge, gated-off, space was scattered with groups of people, tourists presumably, and all Chinese. I was disappointed that my visit didn’t coincide with any fancy marching or the rows and rows of guards in formation. I felt like I had been granted access to a vast concrete courtyard, lined by Potemkin buildings, but I was glad to have seen it.

That night, we got a hotel sitter and Courtenay (M’s friend from Fletcher who is the new Jamaican Ambassador to China) and his wife picked us up (with their driver!) at the hotel and we went to a dinner

Courtenay was hosting at a swank restaurant called 1949 – get it?. We were let out on a cobblestone driveway and were led through a maze of teak pathways and lush outdoor corridors, through two massive rolling, steel barricades to a private room in the heart of the uber-fancy tragically hip members’ only portion of the restaurant called the 49 club. The dinner was a traditional Chinese round table for 20 with a massive lazy susan inset into its center. I think there must have been a waiter for each guest; as soon as I took a sip of water, someone was refilling my glass and my dinner plate was replaced every time I turned away.

Courtenay was hosting the dinner for his predecessor, the former

Jamaican Ambassador to China and the attendees were his inner circle of friends from his four years in Beijing. They were a diverse and illustrious lot – ranging from the Bureau Chief of CBS in Asia (gorgeous Jamaican woman, flawlessly dressed, stick thin, chic afro), the head of Time Out Beijing (The international magazine about cultural happenings) and his cute wife (hip-thirty something Londoners), The head of Film acquisition and production for CCTV, the Chinese television channel (gorgeous porcelain-faced Chinese woman who ironically just produced a documentary about Ranch life in Texas and was thrilled to learn that I was actually from Texas…).

There were several ambassadors, two guys working for a mining company,  and the head of web development for the China News newspaper. It was an interesting mix of ex-pats and locals, all of whom unabashedly love

Beijing and could not say enough good things about it, with the exception of the air.

The next morning we woke up early and a driver picked us up and drove us about an hour and a half outside the city to Mutianyu to a section of the Great Wall that has been restored. The drive was really interesting. We watched the bravado of Beijing abruptly dissolve and in its place, emerge the hutong housing compounds and dusty country roads that I imagine comprise most of the country. We saw a lot of people gathering sticks in fields or by the roadside and many of the bikers and motorcyclists we saw were piled high with bundles of sticks. The walls of sticks stacked in all the alleys behind compounds confirmed our growing suspicion that wood-burning fire was the primary source of heat for these homes located as little as an hour outside Beijing.

We drove primarily through farmland and in trying to place what felt ‘different’ about it, we decided that the roadways and even the fields that they cut through felt as if they were built recently and organized by a central body, which it probably was; all the trees for miles were spaced at exact intervals in exact rows. We weren’t sure if it was a ‘green’ effort or evidence of a non-existent electrical grid, but all the streetlights were run by solar panels.

Once we neared the Great Wall, tourist restaurants started to pop up and evidence of an infrastructure increased. We parked and fought our way through the stalls of people selling Great Wall T-Shirts, hats, etc., and started the steep climb. We took turns carrying Frances in the Ergo backpack and then let her walk once we got to the actual wall. She was great. She really had fun peeking through the little windows that line the bottom of the edges of the wall and she must have been photographed 100 times. We decided that Frances is to the Chinese what puppies are to Americans; no one can resist a puppy.

The Wall is really beautiful, snaking and winding through the lush mountains and creating a lookout to the valleys to either side. Sadly, the visibility is ridiculously poor. Even out in this rural area, the air quality is still so bad that the sky is a white void and looking into the distance, it is as if through the smoke of a forest fire.

Anyway, we really were glad to have seen it and to have brought Frances to this ancient place. We had time left over with the driver, so we had him take us to the Forbidden City, which was much bigger that we expected it to be and very crowded, but incredibly beautiful, overwhelming in its scale. We decided that super-sized scale is a recurring theme in this country. Again, Frances was a showstopper. Whole tour-groups would corner us and all take her picture at once! Of course, she thought it was fabulous and sat on M’s shoulders saying, ‘hello, hello, hello.’ Just like HRH.

The next afternoon, we flew to Shanghai. It was incredible to be in Beijing. It is a city with so many layers. I don’t feel as though I got a sense for it at all, but that will keep us coming back.

798 Arts District

 

Gallery at 798

Man gathering sticks

Chinese car seat

local electrician

Neighborhood we passed on way to Great Wall

M and Frances climb the wall

Frances in the Forbidden City

Frances with Yue MinJun sculpture

Frances ponders Yue Minjun self portrait

Tiananmen Square

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