ARTIN' IT UP AT 798

(kougar + coveted limited-edition dinosaur sculpture + microsoft photo editor's "watercolor" effect)

Last weekend we took a little in-city school field trip. The destination was 798, the former site of a massive munitions plant which is now the city's most famous art district. One of my favorite memories of Taipei is of a day when Fiona and I visited a modern art museum and tried, with our mutually limited language skills, to talk about art and ideas that aimed to transcend language. I hoped to have a similarly enriching experience this time around and was excited for the opportunity for some off-duty time with some of my favorite teachers.

Zhao laoshi at the Ullens Center:

Song laoshi at the 798 Photo Gallery:

798 has been growing at breakneck speed in pace with the Chinese art market -- even I noticed big changes since the first time I visited last November. Rents have gone up, cafes have gone upscale and there are undoubtedly grounds for all the criticisms I've heard of the place. Still, I think its pretty great. I've always had a twisted affection for the factory aesthetic (I blame Mister Rodgers) and consider the juxtaposition of smokestacks and airplane hangars with giant red dinosaur sculptures and other fruity modern art to be one of the great weird surprises of reform-era Beijing. It also happened to be an awfully nice day.

The re-purposing of the former production and storage facilities at 798 makes for some great spaces to show art. Most galleries are large and bright, with concrete floors, brick walls, and old pipes and exposed building components. The team of East German designers and engineers behind the plant built some of China's only true Bauhaus-style architecture, making its current incarnation all the more appropriate, and also making the grumblers all the more irritable about the Disney-fication of the place, seen in such things as cafe doors filled with coffee beans,

(but check out the sweet rooftop terrace!)

and kooky, cutesy bathroom signs:

Geez people, don't you know art is SERIOUS?

I think these people understood.

We were all waiting in rapt silence for the sudden lurching movement of a large trash bin, which rolled across the space at intervals to crash into the structure at left.

Inside the structure, lifelike renderings of old men were lurching and jerking and crashing into each other's wheelchairs.

The piece, by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, was part of an installation at Galleria Continua called Unmoved. It made me giggle. It also made me think back to the moment many years ago when I decided that I would not be intimidated or bamboozled by contemporary art. I was visiting Carly in Portland and we went to the museum one day and encountered a piece which involved animal costumes, a low stage, and some cheesy club music. The viewer was instructed to don the animal costumes and then ascend to the stage to dance. Done and done. I remember the artist's statement and could appreciate its reason, but I remember the experience itself far more intensely. I liked that it was playful and accessible and weird and that it stimulated thought and conversation. This piece with the trash bin and the old men in wheelchairs did the same, even if I found it extremely difficult to try to express what I thought it said in Chinese.

I saw several fine pieces on our field trip, bought some good books, and had ample opportunities to use my electronic dictionary to look up things like "conceptual" and "shock value". Much of the best work was at 798's only museum, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. There I saw Wang Luyuan's "W Bike", a bicycle that looks like any other except for the fact that it can only ride backwards, Lin Yilin's "Our Future", a large wall being breached by a ferocious dragon, Feng Mengbo's "Game Over: Long March", a depiction of the CCP's glorious Long March across China as a video game, and Lu Hao's "Peng Peng Cars" (bumper cars), in which small remote controlled cars carried either shiny new skyscrapers or small structures representing historic Beijing.

So I suppose that the moral of the story is that if you want your art to be successful in the Chinese market it should involve crashing, breaking, bumping, or other dangerous circumstances. Also, dinosaurs are very hot.