Beijing's 798 art district

One of the best things to see in Beijing is the city's 798 art district, a fantastic area of old factories and warehouses now occupied by contemporary art galleries. I was there in February, marvelling at how contemporary art appears to be flourishing in what's supposed to be an authoritarian state. But first,  a bit of an apology, as I was not as diligent as I should have been in writing down who the works you're about to see are by.

Someone at 798 told me a story about the sculpture in the image below that provided an amusing insight into the to-and-fro negotiation of what constitutes appropriate artistic expression in China. Apparently at one stage the state requested that artists stop using Mao's head in their works. The sculpture below was a response to that, which many critics took to be a suggestion that the state was headless. Then the goverment purchased one of the works in this series for the national collection, saying it believed the headless sculpture meant the government represented all the people equally. As far as I know, the artist didn't step in to say which interpretation was correct.

One of the best galleries at 798 is the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA), established by European philanthropists. The exhibition below is named 'Moon in Glass' by artist Ling Jian and features portraits printed onto coloured mirrors. As you get closer, the images of the faces appear to recede, and you see your own reflection instead. What seemed like a glossy pop-art take on modern China was also working on other intriguing levels.

Also at UCCA, a fantastic show by painter Liu Xiaodong entitled 'Hometown Boy'. Liu went to stay in his old hometown for a period of a few months and painted beautiful, gentle scenes of his parents and childhood friends there. The show was accompanied by Liu's diary of his experience there, as well as an hour-long documentary by Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien that showed Liu working and interacting with his friends. The exhibition was, in part, a lament for the simpler style of life Liu believes China has lost - the state-run factory that used to employ most people in his hometown has laid off hundreds of workers, and many others have left to find work in the bigger cities. The exhibition raised questions about the price of China's recent economic progress.  

The next few images show the amazing buildings at 798 (which I think date from the 1960s), and the juxtaposition of the contemporary sculptures outside them. As you can see in one of the shots, the area is also used as a backdrop for bridal shoots.

This fantastic building below contains Pace Beijing gallery, another of 798's main attractions - not just for the architecture, but the art inside.

This industrial structure loomed across the courtyard from Pace - I'm not sure who did the sculpture on the building behind it.



And I think that's all the holiday shots I have to show you - I hope I haven't bombarded the blog with too much Beijing. I've also written a travel story about the city for Kia Ora (the Air New Zealand inflight magazine) which comes out soon. And one of the hotels I stayed at, The Opposite House (designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma) is covered in the April/May issue of HOME.

Update: It seems the tone of optimism in this post about contemporary art flourishing in an authoritarian state might be slightly misplaced: the New York Times reports that contemporary artist (and critic of the Chinese government) Ai Wei Wei has been detained. You can read the story at the link here. 

Beijing's Summer Palace

Welcome to Beijing's Summer Palace, which I (it's Jeremy here) visited a few weeks ago. It was not at all summery, but it was very beautiful. This is the pleasure palace where the Qing dynasty frittered away all their money while the country descended into chaos. When you visit, you can kind of see why - it'd be hard to pay attention to matters of state when you're surrounded by sumptuous landscaping like this (below). The lake in this image, Kunming, is said to have taken 100,000 people eight years to dig. They knew how to think big, those Qing leaders...

The marble boat in the image below is the most notorious symbol of the excesses of the Empress Dowager, Cixi - partly because the navy was being starved of funds around the same time it was being constructed.  

The formal rooms of the palace are all up the hill (created from the soil dug from the lake), but I'd seen them before so I stuck to the areas around the lake, which still include some impressive structures:

Here's the 17-arch bridge, leading to a small island in the middle of the lake from which a woman was singing Chinese opera across the ice: 

The monochromatic tones of the frozen lake and accompanying hazy sky were lovely, once I became accustomed to the cold (the temperature was a little below zero). 

The grounds of the palace are open to the public. These guys were giving their kites an early-morning flight on the 17-arch bridge. I was amazed they flew at all, given there seemed to be hardly a breath of wind.  

The next Beijing area we'll visit is the city's exciting 798 contemporary art district. That'll probably be later in the week.

Obamao in Beijing

Some tourist tat from Beijing: 'Obamao' T-shirts were doing a brisk trade, but our favourite item from this line was the mouse pad below. The bottom line on it reads 'You don't bird me, I don't bird you.' No, we don't know what that means either, but we kinda like it! We only hope the Republican Tea Party doesn't get hold of this memorabilia.

Beijing's Forbidden City

Those of you who detest other people's holiday snaps, turn away! Because I'm about to inflict another Beijing experience on you. This time it's the Forbidden City. If you haven't already been there, you will almost certainly have seen images of it (hopefully in the Bertolucci film The Last Emperor, which is fantastic). The day I visited wasn't conventionally photogenic, as there was a pea-soup haze. But the monochromatic effect this produced made the frozen moat look even chillier:


The Forbidden City is literally the centre of Beijing - just across Chang'an Avenue from Tiananmen Square, and right on the city's great north-south axis (which culminates in the Olympic Village, 16km north). Inside, it's all fantastically rigid formality and symmetry, with a series of pavilions and grand, empty squares unfolding one after the other:

All this austerity makes the arrival at the residential part of the Forbidden City even more delightful because of its contrast to the civic areas of the complex. Here, the courtyards are smaller and more intimate, and filled with trees:


There are also smaller, whimsical structures in the residential area, such as this pavilion:


So that's your very brief Forbidden City tour. Later this week we'll visit a hutong district and the fabled Summer Palace (albeit in winter).

We like: Beijing (part one)

It's Jeremy here - I've just been on holiday to Beijing and thought I'd show you some of my (very amateur) photos. The Chinese capital, of course, is justifiably well-known for the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the charming old hutong neighbourhoods, and many other older buildings. But China's incredible economic growth also means its capital serves up a feast of fantastic contemporary architecture. I won't show it all to you here (I'll save some other shots for subsequent posts) but here are some highlights. First, the airport, by Foster + Partners. Huge, elegant and swooping:


Almost everyone knows what Herzog and de Meuron's 'Bird's Nest' stadium looks like. Here's my favourite image that I took of it:

Still not quite occupied is OMA's CCTV Tower, partly because the fire at the TVCC Tower to the left (which you can see charred and scarred in the photo below) set back progress. I was fascinated by the almost organic patterns of the steel structure of the main building. It reminded me of an object that had been trussed with twine to hold it up.

The building didn't dominate the cityscape like the I thought it would - partly because the city is so big and because, at 54 storeys, it isn't unusually tall. But there's no getting away from it once you get into the general vicinity.

Tomorrow, I'll post images of some of the other contemporary highlights of the city - buildings by Steven Holl and Kengo Kuma in particular.

We like: Beijing (part two)

A bit more Beijing contemporary razzle-dazzle, this time Steven Holl's 'Linked Hybrid' in the city's northeast. This ring of towers (with nifty coloured insets around their windows) is joined by a series of spectacular skybridges.

Travellers' tip: pretend to be a rich expat looking for Beijing accommodation like I did, and you can get a tour of the apartments. Or one of them, at least. The disappointing aspect of this was that the apartments were really poorly finished inside, with crap paintwork and cracked tiles in the bathrooms, as well as dust everywhere. Where's the glamour? My Beijing friends tell me this is typical of many new Beijing developments. Quality control is apparently difficult, and everything happens at breakneck speed.

Unfortunately our tour didn't include any of the bridges, because a security guard wouldn't let us in there. Strange. Also, the swimming pool, located in one of the skybridges, isn't functional yet. A woman I met who lives there said she doubts it will ever be. I don't think that's for design reasons - she thought it was probably just because the developer had moved onto other things.

Over in the centre of town - just west of Tiananmen Square, to be exact, is Paul Andreu's National Grand Theatre, otherwise known as 'The Egg'. You have to buy tickets to a show to get into the auditoriums, and unfortunately there weren't any on the few nights I was there:

Here's a shot inside the Water Cube in the Olympic park. The building was more impressive inside than I had expected, although it's already showing terrible signs of wear and tear, and it's less than three years old:

This is a building by Kengo Kuma in the area of Sanlitun, a cool restaurant and shopping area in the eastern embassy district. Kuma also helped out with the masterplanning of this 'village', which aims to replicate the feel of the alleyways of the city's old hutong districts. To me, it seemed like a really successful way to group retail and food outlets in a contemporary way without resorting to a mall-like structure. Here, you had to go outside to move between shops and eateries:

Also by Kengo Kuma is The Opposite House, one of the hotels I stayed in (which is just north of the village complex pictured above). The hotel's terrific (as is the Sanlitun area generally), and highly recommended.

Still to come - shots of the older parts of Beijing, as well as the 798 art district. I'll post them sometime soon.