Letter from Beijing

Letter from Beijing:
Art (and everything else) for sale

TOBY ZINMAN

Best sign of the trip: DANGER CAUTION: DO NOT CAPER. I’ve been capering for a month in China— with two weeks more to go. I always prefer to travel off-season, when there are fewer— if any— tourists, and you discover that everybody in China is Chinese, going about their daily business. I started in Hong Kong (covering the annual international Arts Festival for American Theatre magazine— seeing shows only in Cantonese); from there I traveled around Henan Province, a poor rural section of eastern China, where Chinese civilization actually began about 5,000 years ago. (My base was Sias University, where I was a visiting lecturer.) Xinzheng, the little town near the university, is the “hometown” of Huang Di, the legendary Yellow Emperor of pre-history.

And from there I flew to Beijing, a city of 17 million people (!) whose geographic area is the same size as Belgium (!). I continued on from Beijing to Xi’an (site of the terracotta warriors revealed in one of the world’s most amazing archaeological finds), and from there to Suzhou (city of gardens) and then on to Shanghai (city of the super duper).

People traveling to China for the Olympics are in for many surprises, not the least of which is the lack of tourist information (unless you’re lucky enough to stay in a hotel where the concierge actually speaks English) and the lack of English signage. (But who knows? Everything could change in the next couple of months and there might be info aplenty.)

But the happier surprises include how friendly and eager to help people are, and with my ridiculously limited Chinese— only “hello” (nee how) and “thank you” (xie xie)— I got along just fine, mostly walking, with the occasional cheap taxi.

Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome

The sights to see fulfill every expectation: At Tiananmen Square, the red flags flutter in the breeze over a vast plaza; stern, ramrod straight soldiers guard agitprop sculptures of workers striding into the future; and Mao’s portrait oversees it all. The city has many temples of great splendor, and Beihai Park is the site of the ruling center created by the Mongol warrior Genghis Khan, who called the new city Dadu (meaning Great Capitol). Eventually, his grandson, Kubla Khan, ruled from here. (So that’s why Coleridge called it Xanadu!) Many stately pleasure domes still to be seen, but none dating back to the 12th Century.

I walked— and got lost— in the many hutongs (complicated warrens of little alleyways) where many people still live. I ate lots of street food: divine sugar-glazed strawberries, and some outlandish snacks, like stewed goat feet and skewered slivers of cow lung, along with a sweet, glutinous concoction called almond tea, poured out of a gigantic kettle shaped like a dragon (these are all specialties of the exotic Night Market in Kaifeng). Shocking to look at is what I’ve been calling a squid Popsicle: grilled squid on a stick, tentacles waving, highly spiced and highly tasty.

Industrial buildings, now spectacular galleries

For those Olympic travelers interested in art as well as sport, and in the ultra-contemporary as well as the ultra-ancient, I recommend Factory 798. Who knew there was radical cool in China?

798, as Beijingers call it, is an enormous complex— much still under construction— of industrial buildings transformed into spectacular gallery spaces with names like Long March Space, Zero Field, Times Space and the major venue, UCCA (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art), where I saw the first Asian retrospective of the major Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping (who now lives in Paris). The Ullens, a Swiss couple, are major collectors of Chinese art. There’s a lovely café/bookstore called Timezone 8 (all of China is one time zone), and a tattoo parlor where you can have a classical 18th-Century Chinese painting copied onto your skin.

Small shows abound (plenty of social consciousness, satire, as you can tell from names like “Uprooted” and “Building Code Violations”). Fang Lijun, the Luo Brothers and Zhang Xiaogang are the hot names now. Contemporary Chinese art is selling for millions. Liu Xiaodon’s series, “Battlefield Realism” goes to auction this month with a record-breaking starting price of $7 million USD.

A green-headed Mao, suppressed

Especially intriguing to me was how many pieces involve multiples (1.4 billion people obviously affect the consciousness). The photographs in Cai Wedoxie’s “Landscapes 2000-2004” are filled with multiples (schoolgirls dressed alike, for example), and this replication, often amusing, is especially true in the sculpture installations. There are lines that cannot be crossed, however: The government shut down a show with a piece that portrayed Mao with a green head.

The contemporary art market exploded in China about three years ago (and almost all success in China is now measured in monetary terms). The recent runaway prices of student paintings have been much reported, with artists right out of the academy demanding $25,000 US per painting. The trendiest of the hot new crowd of painters have “associates” who produce pictures using the successful style to meet the demand for their work.

The British consul’s complaint

Coincidentally, the day after I visited Factory 798, I got the new issue of Time Out Beijing; on the cover was an ornate gilt frame around an ATM machine and the headline, “Has Chinese Art Sold Its Soul?” This is the question the retiring British consul, Stephen Bradley, seemed to address in his farewell speech last month when he chastised Hong Kong for being too money-minded: “Financial markets are not all that is needed to be a real international center. All great metropolises from ancient Alexandria onwards have also been, above all, intellectual and cultural centers.”

In a country so vast and so ancient as China, art lives in both the very old and very new. Unimaginably tall skyscrapers of spectacular design stand near magnificent Buddhist temples redolent with incense sticks people burn to pray for (among other things) wealth and success. Hosting the Olympics is “big face,” as the Chinese say—a point of great pride. August looms.