Collectors are queueing up to buy work by China's bright young artists. But while the scene is certainly buzzing, some worry that the domestic art world is selling out to the west, says Charlotte Higgins
Picture gallery: Chinese art at the Shanghai Biennale

Tuesday November 9, 2004
The Guardian


Body of work ... digital photographic art by Liu Wei, at the Biennale in Shanghai. Photo: Dan Chung/Guardian


At 50 Moganshan Street in Shanghai is a clump of dusty warehouses and small-scale factories, hedged around by a tall, encroaching thicket of tower blocks. Inside the compound can be glimpsed the busy activity of small-scale industry. A door lies ajar to reveal a dingy shoebox of a room, closely packed with bunk beds to accommodate migrant workers.

The building next door, by contrast, fronts the world with a sparkling plate-glass window; behind it is a minimalist office interior, Mies van der Rohe chairs set at neat angles. For 50 Moganshan Street is where, alongside the low-rent workshops, Shanghai's high-end contemporary art world has come to roost. Round every corner you'll find an artist's studio, or an exclusive dealer selling Chinese art for thousands of dollars out of some glamorously dilapidated warehouse. It's like a wet dream of SoHo in the early days.

People talk of an "explosion" of Chinese art. For a country that has virtually no contemporary art history, where artists' training is dominated by an ultra-traditional grounding in Chinese painting techniques, where the first clues as to what was happening in the postmodern western art world trickled through as recently as the late 1980s, the scene has mushroomed and transmuted with staggering velocity, artists running through mini-movements (political pop art, the much discussed trend for body art in the mid-1990s, through to a strong focus today on installation, film and video) with alarming speed. In Europe and the US, Chinese art is, as they say, hot. Of the art sold at Moganshan Street, the vast majority is to collectors from abroad. "Kissing foreigners' arses" is how one young art graduate dismissively describes it.

"China keeps being discovered," says Davide Quadrio, a touch wearily. An Italian long-term resident of the city, he is a curator who, for the past five years, has run a not-for-profit art centre, his current space accessible via a juddering goods lift up in a Moganshan Street warehouse.

"Chinese art is overexposed to foreign journalists, curators, dealers. And for some young artists it's difficult to deal with the expectations. People seem to have an overwhelming need for China at the moment - ideas from China, novelty from China. But you can't find 10 or 15 new young artists each year."

Quadrio has been one of the chief actors in the drama that has seen artistic activity in Shanghai transmute over the past decade "from an era of guerrillas to the era of a regular army", as artist Qiu Zhijie has put it. He recalls how, from a low-profile underground, with artists showing avant-garde work mainly to each other in their studios, a more public scene took shape. In 1996, Lorenz Hebling, a Swiss art dealer, set up the first private commercial gallery focused purely on contemporary Chinese work. A turning point came in 1999, when Quadrio's outfit, Bizart, put on an exhibition called Art For Sale. It was Shanghai's first large-scale show of avant-garde art outside the nascent commercial gallery circuit. "It was closed down after two days for pornography," says Quadrio, "but it was illegal anyway - we had squatted a mall." Despite its short life and a furious denunciation in the press, it was a huge success, ambitious in scale and intent, a call to arms for Shanghai artists.

Quadrio was now determined to set up a permanent, not-for-profit exhibition space. It wasn't as easy as it might sound. A cultural organisation in the city has no legal status unless affiliated to the government, thus coming under the power of the Shanghai Cultural Bureau. Such control, from a conservative, bureaucratic and extremely circumspect body, was never going to be viable for Quadrio. The way round it was to create a wholly owned Chinese company, becoming a "commercial enterprise in the eyes of the Chinese authorities". The numerous events and exhibitions he has held since then fly, mostly, below the radar of officialdom. It is one of many subtle accommodations Quadrio has come to with the authorities. "You play with the limits, and the government lets you play," he says. Money, rather than censorship, he stresses, is the biggest headache: Quadrio hires out his curatorial and technical skills to help pay for the programme, and works with foreign funders and foundations, including Arts Council England.

In one neighbouring warehouse, Li Liang, an artist and dealer, runs a gallery called Eastlink. He is an urbane, sleek figure, his office cluttered with artworks: 2ft-long rat sculptures by Jin Le, vulgarly entertaining multicoloured resin figures by Li Zhan Yang. "I'm doing two things," he says. "I have to have something to sell. And then there are exhibitions, where we can show more experimental work."

He is profoundly reluctant to talk about it ("that is in the past now"), but he was responsible for one of the most notorious events of the Shanghai art scene. In 2000, he ran a show on the unofficial "fringe" of the city's first Biennale, which operates from the government-run Shanghai Art Museum. Li Liang's show was, uncompromisingly enough, called Fuck Off, and it featured a photograph of a man eating a baby, by Zhu Yu. The work was one of the manifestations of the Chinese body art movement, in which, in a manner that makes the most violent excesses of the YBAs seem tame, human body parts, corpses, and leavings from medical operations were deployed as artistic materials. One artist reputedly even committed suicide as a performance work.

Li Liang's show, unsurprisingly, was shut down, and became an international scandal. He didn't do the cause of his own gallery any favours, but that first Biennale did make an impact, he says. "People began to see art in a different way. They started to understand that contemporary art won't harm society, particularly since it was coming out of the Art Museum. The atmosphere became more open."

Through Li Liang's windows I count eight cranes without turning my head. The drilling, hammering, thud and clang of construction is constant. He gestures towards the tower blocks: "These have all gone up in the past eight months." The onward march of the towers daily threatens the artists and curators at Moganshan Street. They have been here a matter of months - an earlier base nearby at West Suzhou Road, in a handsome 1930s British-designed granary, was demolished. It was the sort of building that in the west would have been preserved as a crucial piece of industrial heritage. "Maybe next year the government will make this place permanent as an artists' compound," says Li Liang, more in hope than expectation. "The Shanghai government is pushing for culture at the moment. In their eyes, there are good economic and touristic reasons for culture to be a part of the city ... at the same time, if they get their hands on this place, they will fuck it up with framing shops and Starbucks. There's a complete lack of imagination."

The Shanghai Biennale is the most obvious manifestation of the city's recognition that, as Lorenz Hebling puts it, "a big modern city doesn't just have highways, but also culture". Set in the magnificent 1930s racecourse club on the edge of Renmin Park, it's an extensive, ramblingly curated show with a focus on Chinese and South American work. Young Shanghai artists Xu Zhen and Yang Fudong are in evidence, the former with a playful installation for the museum's clock tower that sets the clock hands spinning wildly out of control, Yang Fudong with a haunting evocation on film of the disorientation of urban existence.

Victoria Liu, a chic, energetic Taiwanese curator whose parents left Shanghai just before the war, has now returned to the city of her roots. Over the past instalments of the Biennale she has seen "tremendous improvements from the team's hard work and persistence. It gives me great hope. The government - what's the government? It's the people who work in it. There's a younger generation in charge now, many with international educational backgrounds. The director of the art museum has travelled a lot, and he has clear ideas about how the Biennale can improve."

With her geometric-cut, scarlet-dyed hair and Issey Miyake trousers, she seems the epitome of jetset art-world glamour. We meet at her high-rise apartment block, the exotically named Sea of Clouds, and she whisks me off into a taxi to visit the huge new space she is about to embark on curating, called Bund 18. Housed in the marbled and pillared halls of the 1920s Bank of India, Australia and China, it is a splendid setting in which, when the builders move out, she is planning art and design shows, performance, film and concerts. "We want to generate people's interest in participating in art life. This isn't about selling," she says. "We'll also do things like print an art map of Shanghai - the sort of thing the gov ernment should be doing, to bring more interest to the city."

In a few weeks the rest of the building will fill with restaurants and boutiques: "Shanghai's most intriguing and beautiful retail, dining and entertainment experience" is how the publicity puts it. It's all magnificent, but will anyone who's not part of the Shanghainese or international super-rich dare venture past Cartier to find the exhibition space beyond?

Liu brushes the question away and puts her mind to finding a restaurant for lunch. But later, over the Shanghainese version of nouvelle cuisine, something seems to drop away. "You won't want to hear this," she says. "I teach western art at university, from the Eygptians to Damien Hirst. But western curators come here with limited knowledge of our art history, and don't bother to ask curators like me what's going on. Everything is judged by their own standards. For years we were grateful and humble. Now we want to do our own thing. My Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese colleagues think the same." She believes that Chinese artists are in danger of becoming "copycats" of their western colleagues, and wants to find ways for them to reconnect with their own art history: to find an authentic Chinese voice. "Young artists have no idea of art for art's sake - it's art for the market."

It will take years, she says, for interest in contemporary art to spread beyond the elite few. Even then, "the divide "is not going to be about east and west, but about economics, about massive disparity in earnings among Chinese." Less about kissing foreigners' arses, then, than kissing the arses of the rich.

(the funniest article I've ever read about chinese cuisine by a foreigner, though he was lit bit exaggerated, I sure..:P)

Stuart Jeffries, a graduate of the world's most cowardly culinary culture, pits his taste buds against the cuisine of Shanghai - from posh fusion to dog penis and fake crabs

Wednesday November 10, 2004
The Guardian

I have never, or at least not knowingly, had a dog's penis in my mouth. But Shanghai dining offers many such opportunities for squeamish westerners to broaden their oral experiences. Rohnie, our translator, picked up the menu at the Aromatic restaurant in the Xuhui district and read from the chef's recommendations. "You could have dog's feet," he suggested helpfully.
My British dining companion and I shook our heads. "Or dog's brains?" Christ, no. "Maybe you'd prefer dog's organs." We exchanged bilious glances before asking Rohnie precisely which organs we would be offered. "Heart, liver, and the others." We passed. "Or dog's pennis?" "Actually, it's pronounced 'penis'," said my dining companion, taking refuge in pedantry, as people who face extreme dining experiences understandably do.

My squeamishness was repeatedly tested by a week of Shanghai dining. But then I am from the most cowardly culinary culture in the world, where native meat-eaters eat chiefly boneless, skinless, faceless cuts, even when they order from so-called "Chinese restaurants". This way, we can delude ourselves that what we are eating has never died for our delectation.

Of course, Shanghai's restaurant scene is not just a series of fresh hells for westerners, but one of the more cosmopolitan and sophisticated in the world. At the top end, say at M on the Bund, Michelle Garnaut serves oriental foodies Sussex Pond lemon pudding and other apparently fashionable European dishes. At the equally accomplished Shanghai Uncle, a few doors up, I had an excellent Chinese meal, eating baked eel and pine-nut-coated ribs in the local style. At Xintandi, a posh foodie plaza, and elsewhere in town, I could have sampled Italian, French, Thai, Cantonese, Sichuanese, Hunanese or Ugyur cuisines.

At the bottom end of the food chain, at KFC or the Shanghai branch of Hooters that opened last month, I could have eaten chicken nuggets like a loser. I preferred to join busy Shanghainese on the streets, filling myself nutritiously and tastily as I walked with dumplings or local snacks such as xiaolongbao (little dragon balls) for the equivalent of 10p each. True, there's a gap in the market for a really good greasy spoon, but otherwise the Shanghainese have got the world's culinary moves down.

It is a foodie city, where people care about the quality of what they eat. When I arrived in town, I stumbled into a culinary rumpus unimaginable in London. That great autumnal Shanghainese delicacy, the hairy crab, has been counterfeited. These little crabs are considered the city's signature dish, but their very popularity has been their undoing: only 1,000 tons of authentic crabs are produced, but 10 times that number claim to be the real Yang Cheng hairy crabs.

The forgeries have legs that are just as hairy, but they are drawn from lakes whose conditions are not ideal for producing succulent meat. To stymie the counterfeiters, the Yang Cheng Lake Business Association has laser-stamped its crabs. The counterfeiters replied by laser-stamping their forgeries. Now the YCLBA is drawing up another scheme to wrong-foot the fraudsters, but they sensibly won't disclose its details.

Shanghai's food scene is undeniably fascinating, but hardly as piquant as my ethical struggle with Chinese food - or food, as it is known in China.

The Aromatic restaurant had a certain charm - red lanterns fringed the entrance, and inside a rustic ambience was created by panelled walls and rugged wooden seats. Fragrant steam rose from stockpots that had been placed on hotplates in wells in the middle of each table.

The idea of this hotpot restaurant, common throughout China, is that each table orders some fresh ingredients and your party throws them into a boiling pot of spicy stock. Once cooked, you take pieces of food from the pot with chopsticks and dip them in a range of sauces. Ideally, it's a lovely, convivial, communal experience, slurpy and boisterous, like much Chinese dining. Only the upsetting impact of the looming confrontation between dead dogs and Englishmen prevented it being so in our case.

"If you eat dog's penis, you will get more sexually active," said Rohnie. "Whatever part of the body you eat will enhance certain relevant characteristics." He never did explain what eating dog's feet would serve to enhance. Tail-chasing, perhaps.

Call us old-fashioned, call us repressed hypocrites, but we eschewed rather than chewed dog penis. "You could always just have dog meat," said Rohnie. "It comes in slices." So we did. He wanted to order a kilo of meat, but we talked him down to 250g, which came, served by waitress No55, along with all the other dishes we had wanted - spinach, potatoes, shrimps. The manager told us that the dogs are bred to be eaten in China's south-west and look like pigs. His staff do not, as some Koreans reportedly do, kill their dogs by beating them with clubs in order to tenderise the meat. He declined to discuss how his dogs were slaughtered.

The raw meat was light brown, but otherwise looked like bacon. There were no twinkling dog eyes, no clumps of poodle fur, no Fido dog-tag as, in our wildest imaginings, we had feared. We threw the meat into the pot and some minutes later, Rohnie ate 249g of it, while the British contingent made desperate wisecracks in order to defer the moment when we would eat.

"Here's the headline," said my British companion. "Soup doggy dog." "Or Bow wow chow," I retorted. Eventually we quickly nibbled on our 500mg each, and then agreed never to speak to each other of the matter again.

How does dog taste? Like chicken, of course. We ate little of the rest of the hotpot, since it had been contaminated with dog meat. I thought the bill would never come.

We asked the manager if we could see where the dogs were kept while they awaited slaughter. He refused, but suggested we might like to see the crocodiles instead. Three of them crawled and yawned in a barred cell next to the tanks of turtles and fish. They were each 7ft long and, apparently, ready for the pot. How does one prepare them for the table? First catch your crocodile ... We would have ordered them for lunch, but dog had shrunk our appetites to nothing.

"That is rather pathetic of you," said Rohnie. "Dog is very good for you, particularly as a winter dish, because its meat will keep you warm. If you ate the meat without knowing it was dog, you would probably like it." Fair point, I said. But I couldn't pretend I enjoyed what I had just eaten.

Shanghai is a place to find out what your culinary taboos are. To my surprise, I quite happily sucked meat off the bones of roasted snake segments, served to me in a sophisticated restaurant housed in an elegant 30s villa in the French concession. There, I also ate what may or may not have been true hairy crab, and plunged my chopsticks into the inner chamber of the crab to get at the highly prized ovaries and eggs.

But from the same menu, I proved unable to order liquor-marinated shrimps. They would have been served dazed in an alcoholic sauce and would have died at the table shortly before I ate them. I want my food to die out of my sight and never to meet its eyes as it rages against the dying of the light. Shame on me.

On a cream leatherette banquette at one of the city's few late-night diners, I ate goose foot in the midnight hour; its braised meat in a sesame sauce was particularly succulent. My dining companion, a translator and curator called Nico, who has experience of customising Shanghainese meals to sissy western palates, thought I was now ready for duck cheeks. A plate arrived consisting of six roasted ducks' heads, with six duck tongues and 12 cheeks. The tiny tongues were tough, the tender little cheeks falling away from ducky faces into my mouth.

It was thus that I French-kissed six dead ducks and tossed away the bones. When Nico praised me for being the first westerner she had met to eat this dish, for a silly moment I felt like a big man. No doubt I'd have felt even bigger if I'd swallowed dog's cock for afters. But I didn't. There are some things I will never be able to eat.

Thankfully, there was no opportunity for me to confront what may well be the most extreme dish China has to offer - not least because it is illegal. That dish is monkey brains, eaten from the cranium of a live monkey, held in a well in the dining table with the top of its skull removed. In Sichuan province, some people consider this as much a forbidden delicacy as the ortolan, the now-protected bird French president Francois Mitterrand ate a week before his death. The little bird, captured, force-fed for a fortnight and then killed by having a single slug of Armagnac poured down its throat, was taken by the president at a supper for his closest friends. A napkin over his head, he sucked the flesh, bones and blood before glancing around the room, reportedly "dizzy with contentment, his eyes sparkling".

But when it comes to challenging dining experiences, the Chinese outdo whatever the French can muster. They don't just eat frog's legs in Shanghai, for instance, but the whole body. For breakfast, I tasted a rice porridge, called congee, which contained boned frog torso and legs. But it contained no head meat. The Chinese, it seems, have their taboos, too.

No matter. In my imagination, working overtime as I dozed on the flight home, nothing was wasted. There, disembodied frogs' heads leapt up to be crunched in my mouth. Sad monkeys without skulls held my eye as I ate their brains. And a fluffy, pink-bowed Scottie terrier bounded towards me across a summer meadow. As he ran away, I saw that a human-bite-sized chunk had been taken from his side. My lips were covered in warm blood and my eyes were glowing like a dissolute French president's. What have I become?

I went for Jean Micheel Jarre's concert last night in the Forbidden City, it was also the opening ceremony of French Year in China.The two governments chose Jarre as a cultural intercourse icon to perform this costly multimedia show, it was because 13 years ago, In October 1981 Jean-Michel Jarre scored first, flying out to China to play a series of five concerts.

Maybe it´s of no use to talk about his present status as hip and trendy artist today, just like what my friend Erik commented, " These words best described him more than 20 years ago. Now he is a french institution, leader of his own audio-visual circus." His concerts in China from 1981 and the recordings are some of his best work, so I found some report on his last trip and some connected information with China from then on:

Jarre’s visit to China was hailed as a major event in the music world, and the political world as well, for no Western musician had been allowed to perform in China since the death of Chairman Mao. Jarre had spent over two years trying to persuade the Chinese authorities to let him play in their country and they had finally relented.

Yet no-one, least of all Jarre, could have imagined the phenomenal success of his concerts in Beijing and Shanghai. Chinese fans went absolutely wild for the French musician’s electronic sound and the Chinese authorities, who had once considered refusing Jarre a visa, ended up making him an honorary member of the Beijing Conservatoire.

Jarre’s extraordinary success in China (which continues to this day) resulted in a new double album entitled "Les Concerts en Chine". This album, released in 1982, captures the amazing ambience of Jarre’s mega-concerts in Beijing and Shanghai.

In 1983 Jean-Michel Jarre proved his innovative spirit once again, recording a new album entitled "Musiques pour supermarché". Only one copy of the album was pressed and the master copy of the album was destroyed. The sole copy of "Musiques pour supermarché" was then sold at auction to the highest bidder. The money raised by this extraordinary gesture was donated to a fund for young up-and-coming French musicians.

In November 1983, Jarre’s record company decided it was time for a major retrospective of the synthesizer wizard’s work and they released a selection of his greatest hits on a compilation album called "The Essential".

Meanwhile, Jarre had returned to the studio to begin work on his fourth album. "Zoolook". Released exactly a year after the Greatest Hits compilation, Jarre's fourth album proved an enormous critical and commercial success. The French press showered "Zoolook" with rave reviews and Jarre received a number of major French music awards including the "Victoire de la Musique" for Best Instrumental Album of the Year. He also won the prestigious "Grand Prix du Disque de l'Académie Charles Cros" for a second time.

While still possessing the inimitable Jarre touch, this fourth album was extremely different from his earlier works. "Zoolook" was basically a mix of sounds and voices that Jarre had recorded in the course of his international trips and then worked into a kind of vocal patchwork, fusing language and dialects from the four corners of the world.

Learn more at: http://www.rfimusique.com/siteEn/biographie/biographie_6019.asp

P.S. Another intersting thing is , the former concert, in that highly centralized age, all the tickets were under a strict control without any for private sales. Nevertheless, 13 years after, people still can't attend the concert without an embassy invitation...

Approved and supported by the Chinese Ministry of Culture, the 1st Architectural Biennial Beijing (ABB2004) had been held from September 20 th to October 6 th in Beijing , China . It is the first great serial exhibition of architectural culture and building industry and it is the largest architecture show and architectural theme activities in the Chinese history. The aim of ABB2004 is to show the architectural creation, advanced technology and new building materials, to build up a platform for sharing the latest information and a bridge for cooperation between the Chinese professionals with colleagues abroad.

ABB2004 mainly composed of 3 parts: exhibition, forum and architectural theme park. Namely the exhibitions and forums on the Works of International Eminent Architects, works of Students, cities and Towns planning, community Culture, interior design, public spaces and urban Environment, new building materials and technology, peak forums on architecture and culture, and the planning of the international architectural theme park. The tours to the excellent communities of housing building and modern building in Beijing for the participants will be organized and that will give visitors a better understanding of the development of building industry in Beijing .

In the past two decades China has been regarded as the largest construction site for the fast development of building industry and the largest number of new buildings going up. Especially after China became a member of WTO and Beijing became the host of the world Olympic Game in 2008, China confronts a high tide of construction boom. Many “focal pointed projects in Beijing ?will be discussed at forums, such as the State Stadium and Swimming Hall ( for world Olympic Game 2008), State Theater, CCTV Tower etc. All these projects are called “century Focal Point Projects?and are attractive to the professional in the world. The ABB2004 put much emphasis on these projects; warm debate were stressed on these topics.

Learn more at http://www.abbeijing.com/

Pékin change ?vitesse grand V, les hutong disparaissent semaine après semaine pour donner place ?d’énormes blocs de bâtiments vitrés, les voitures privées ont depuis le SARS complètement pris possession de la rue, de nouveaux restaurants excellents, aménagés et décorés avec goût, ouvrent chaque mois, les rues de Sanlitun ont, avec leurs cafés-terrasses, pris un cachet européen, les bords du lac Hou Hai dépassent le soir le quartier Lan Kwai Fong de Hong Kong en nombre et en animation. Tous les soirs, une jeunesse pékinoise vient s’affaler dans ses canapés et divans sortis sur les bords du lac. Et pourtant, malgr?tous ces changements, l’offre culturelle de Pékin en cinéma, spectacles et expositions reste d’une grande pauvret? Les musées sont tout aussi poussiéreux qu’il y a 20 ans, le jazz a du mal ?survivre, les galeries sont rares par rapport ?la taille de la cit? L’offre culturelle internationale ?Pékin, comparée ?celle de Hong Kong qui regorge de festivals de danse, de cinéma, de théâtre et de musique, est squelettique. La culture existe pourtant, nul ne saurait le nier quand l’on parle avec les Pékinois, mais il faut la chercher ailleurs, dans les marges de la cit? Elle déserte la scène officielle, rendue exsangue par les censeurs, et s’exprime de façon indépendante dans les interstices d’un système rigide qui laisse cependant prospérer en dehors de son contrôle toute une activit?culturelle ?demi-souterraine.

Dashanzi tente de faire vivre le présent sans renier le pass?
Dashanzi, l’ancien quartier industriel au Nord Est de Pékin en est un exemple réussi. L’Usine 798, l’une des usines de pointe de la République populaire de Chine au temps florissant du maoïsme est ?demi reconvertie en un village d’artistes avec librairies, ateliers, galeries, cafés et restaurants. Il existe ou il a exist?d’autres lieux de ce genre ?Pékin ou dans sa banlieue (La communaut?de Yuan Ming Yuan, l’ancien palais d’ét?ou le village de Song Zhuan). Certains n’ont eu qu’une existence éphémère, d’autres sont plus petits, plus dispersés ou moins organisés. Dashanzi est un projet plus ambitieux qui tente de faire vivre le présent sans renier le pass? Ce complexe d’usines numérot?alors 718 (le 7 indiquait les usines militaires) fut un modèle du genre créé dans les années 50 par les Allemands de l’Est. Les bâtiments d’une architecture utilitaire mais qui ne manquent pas de grâce, les hautes verrières exposées au nord portent les marques de l’architecture du Bauhaus ou du moins d’une architecture est-allemande influencée par celui-ci. Usine modèle de composants électroniques destinés ?l’armée, inaugurée en 1957, elle vit passer tous les hauts dignitaires des régimes communistes de l’époque et fut la fiert?des ouvriers qui y travaillèrent. Elle fut ensuite séparée en unités plus petites dont la plus célèbre fut l’Usine 798.

Dashanzi survécut ?la réforme du secteur étatique des années 80 mais périclita ensuite et dut fermer dans les années 90. C’est ?ce moment qu’elle attira l’attention de l’Académie centrale des beaux-arts de Pékin qui cherchait des ateliers pour abriter des sculptures monumentales. L’endroit séduisit le directeur de son département de Sculpture, Sui Jianguo, qui y installa ensuite son propre atelier en 2000 suivi d’un autre de ses professeurs, le sculpteur Yu Fan. L’une des premières occupantes fut aussi l’écrivain, compositeur et musicienne chinoise Liu Suola qui y aménagea sa demeure. A partir de 2001, d’autres suivirent : l’Américain Robert Bernell éditeur d’art depuis longtemps en Chine, y installa dans une ancienne cantine Timezone 8 Artbooks, la meilleure librairie d ‘art contemporain en Chine. Le mouvement s’accéléra et aujourd’hui Dashanzi s’étend sur près d’un kilomètre carr?et abrite plus de 75 unités : ateliers d’artistes, galeries, designers, associations culturelles, ateliers de mode, clubs, espaces de théâtre et de musique, cafés et restaurants. Beaucoup d’entre eux sont des noms très connus de l’art contemporain. Un certain nombre d’artistes comme Huang Hui ou Mao Lizi y ont ?la fois leur atelier, leur compagnie de design et leur restaurant (at caf?pour Huang Hui et Seven Bar pour Mao Lizi). Ces deux derniers sont d’ailleurs des vétérans du premier mouvement d’art contemporain en Chine en 1980, car ils étaient membres du Groupe des Etoiles qui défraya la chronique et dut s’exiler. Un troisième du même groupe est Ai Wei Wei, artiste et designer qui travaille sur le projet du grand stadium pour les jeux olympiques. Beaucoup de ces artistes des années 80 ont mont?des boîtes de design qui semblent prospérer. D’autres ont bénéfici?de l’intérêt des galeries étrangères car le march?de l’art contemporain en Chine reste très limit?même s’il s’est beaucoup développ?ces dernières années.

Au milieu des galeries et des ateliers, un Breton ouvre sa crêperie
En juillet dernier lors de la visite que j’y fis un jour de semaine, Dashanzi était calme, ses longues allées bordées d’arbres n’avaient que de rares passants, les visiteurs se comptaient sur le doigt de la main. La vie y semblait villageoise. Les longs tuyaux suspendus qui courent le long des bâtiments et au-dessus des allées crachaient de la vapeur blanche, preuve que quelques usines restent en activit?sur le site. A cinq heures, des groupes de jeunes femmes en uniformes blancs quittaient le travail. Il y avait un peu plus de monde dans les restaurants ou cafés. J’ai déjeun?chez Vincent, un Breton qui a ouvert une crêperie dans Dashanzi et y fait, sans doute les meilleures crêpes et galettes bretonnes que je n’ai jamais mangées en Asie. Au hasard des ateliers j’ai retrouv?avec plaisir des artistes que j’avais interviewés pour Paroles il y une quinzaine d’années. Et c’est cela qui fait la force de Dashanzi, ce mélange d’artistes de différentes générations et ce complexe d’ateliers, de librairies, de cafés et de restaurants qui fait que l’on s’attarde et prend plaisir ?la promenade. Il y a bien sûr plus de monde les soirs de fin de semaine et de week-end, mais pour survivre, Dashanzi a besoin de plus de visiteurs pékinois.

Dashanzi est cependant plus qu’un rassemblement d’ateliers et de galeries. C’est un espace culturel dou?d’une véritable dynamique qui organise de nombreux événements : concerts, performances, fêtes et grandes expositions d’art contemporain chinois ou international dont une participation ?la biennale de Pékin. Son nerf vital est l’Espace 798 et son animateur Huang Hui qui aida ?fonder la galerie Beijing-Tokyo Art Projects et fut le directeur du Premier Festival International des Arts de Dashanzi au début de cette année, dont d’ailleurs une jeune artiste française, Berenice Angremy, fut co-organisatrice.

Huang Hui a anim?également avec l’Ecole d’architecture de L’Académie centrale des Beaux-Arts de Pékin et l’Institut d’Architecture de Californie du Sud, deux recherches et réflexions sur l’Art, l’Architecture et la Sociét?en Chine, qui replacent Dashanzi dans son contexte historique du pass?et font une projection de son existence dans le futur. On doit aussi ?Huang Hui un splendide livre Beijing 798 qui retrace le pass?et le présent de Dashanzi, avec nombre de témoignages et photos d’époque et d’aujourd’hui.

Mais que deviendra Dashanzi ? Son existence n’est point du tout assurée, le site appartient ?un ancien groupe industriel d’état spécialis?en électricit?aujourd’hui privatis?qui préférerait plutôt le détruire que le préserver, car vu son étendue et sa location en bordure de Pékin, le site est aux yeux des promoteurs une mine d’or. Il a tent?d’ailleurs d’interdire le festival au début de cette année. Voil?pourquoi quand on rentre ?Dashanzi, on est surpris de voir barrières et gardiens en uniformes. Les autorités chinoises sont cependant curieuses de cette expérience puisque notamment la mairie de Pékin s’est intéressée ?savoir quelle pouvait être l’utilit?du lieu durant les Jeux Olympiques, et que de nombreux hôtes officiels, parfois même des chefs d’Etat, demandent ?visiter le site qui joue un rôle réel sur la scène artistique moderne de la Chine, absente des Musées de Pékin.

PAROLES
Setpembre / Octobre 2004 Nº 194