A 798 Memoir
This article was published in the book Beijing 798: Reflections on Factory of Art, Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2008, ed. Huang Rui. Scroll down for Chinese translation by Du Keke.
It was all I could do not to scream the other day when a baby-faced guard in an ill-fitting uniform told me in a thick northeastern accent that I couldn’t park my Jeep on the street in front of the Long March Space. It was an otherwise ordinary rainy November afternoon in the art district of Factory 798, except that the compound’s management had that day implemented a long-overdue policy whereby visitors could no longer leave cars wherever they wished. It certainly was not the fault of the guard, who called me “big brother” and tried to bum a cigarette (I didn’t have one) as I made the walk from a legitimate parking spot back toward the Long March. Still, I was irrationally bitter. After all, five years ago as a 23-year-old Chinese-contemporary-art aspirant just coming off a post-collegiate Fulbright year, I often rode my three-wheeled motorcycle through spaces that are now galleries. I always knew the moment would come when the factory’s primordial free-for-all gave way to regulated system, but I still didn’t want to admit it had arrived.
Perhaps more than anywhere else in Beijing, 798 is where I felt, in those years when 2008 still seemed a long way off, the shape of things to come. I came of age amidst its arched concrete chambers, starting the day after I quit a summer job with a law firm and made the trip out Xiaoyun Lu and past the Fourth Ring (how far away it seemed then!) in sculptor and early 798 inhabitant Sui Jianguo’s Volkswagen station wagon. I remember how alluring, and how distant, the world of art and design seemed that afternoon when Robert Bernell came by the construction site of the Beijing Tokyo Art Projects looking to introduce two fashionable Londoners from the magazine Wallpaper to Huang Rui. It became clear right away that I could enter this world, even as an uncredentialed kid, because it was only then taking shape. And so I translated the catalogue for the first exhibition ever held in 798, curated by Feng and titled “Beijing Afloat” in homage to the Ukiyo-e school of printmaking that literally translates as “Pictures of the Floating World.” I came up with that English name, perhaps officially marking the beginning of my involvement in the discourse of contemporary art from China, an involvement that has become a career.
The day of the “Beijing Afloat” opening—October 12, 2002—my motorcycle broke down. I left it just south of the courtyard outside the B.T.A.P., and it was pushed around the corner the following day (after we had eaten a celebratory meal of mushroom hotpot with our Japanese hosts, and I had left for Guangzhou to work on the triennial that would open the following month) by a young curator and his artist girlfriend, two of the factory’s first loft residents. They locked it for me and left it to sit, untouched, for a month on the pedestrian alley behind Xu Yong’s “798 Space” that now hosts four cafes, three galleries, and a gift shop. Back from Guangzhou, I spent one morning touring Erik Eckholm, then the New York Times bureau chief in Beijing, around the few open galleries and studios, as he prepared to write the report that would bring the place its first whiff of international attention. Another morning, I went with Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie—my employers as a junior member of the Long March team—as they scoped out the chamber that would become the first Long March Space, originally known as the “25000 Li Cultural Transmission Center” after the length of the famous Red Army trek. On some winter nights, all of the artists and residents of the factory would gather in one or another’s studio for hotpot. We watched the invasion of Iraq on a tiny television in Bai Yiluo’s bachelor pad. When spring came, we would drink lukewarm beer on the roof above Ma Han’s studio, scaling a rickety parapet from inside before lounging on the tarry shingles and watching the stars.
A few months later I sold my motorcycle and left Beijing, but only after after curating a tiny exhibition at the Long March by the artist Wang Wei, in which he hired a crew of migrant workers to build, and then destroy, a four-walled structure of second-hand brick inside the gallery hall. That work reflected a number of themes, but first among them was the angst many of us then felt over the fate of the factory we had come to cherish. Would this space remain for us as a place to gather, look, and think about the new conditions taking shape around us, or would it be swallowed by the same tides of development and urbanization out of which its current incarnation had grown? Back in Cambridge, Mass. I hung small artist’s proofs of Wang Wei’s series of twelve photos from the exhibition (entitled Temporary Space) on the wall of my graduate-student apartment, and nostalgically wore my “Dashanzi Art District” (the name by which anyone other than the factory management was asked to call 798 publicly) t-shirt to Qing history seminars. Nowhere could have felt farther from Beijing and its emergent cultural sensibility than the exquisite stagnation of Harvard, particularly in the knowledge that with each day the city was growing, and that my Beijing friends were still there witnessing it.
Over the following two and a half years I would make frequent trips back to China, and Factory 798 seemed slightly more developed with every return visit: new galleries and cafes appeared in ever more remote parts of the compound; the Japanese tour buses and corporate press conferences grew into constant presences; rumors of major Euro-American museums and art schools moving in would fly through the art circle and then disappear. Some of the original tenants went out of business or moved elsewhere, subletting their spaces at rates five and six times what they had leased them for. And yet there were constants—the AT Café, Timezone 8 bookstore—that, like coming through the airport expressway tollgate or driving past Tian’anmen, convinced me I had arrived, however briefly, back in the northern capital.
In April of 2006, on the heels of the Sotheby’s New York auction of contemporary Chinese art that marked the beginning of the current market frenzy, I returned to Beijing, just as the third edition of the Dashanzi International Art Festival was opening in the furnace-room space that would soon be transformed into the Ullens Center. The moment had arrived where it was no longer interesting, or possible, to hang out in the AT Café working on an essay or translation and wondering exactly who everyone at the surrounding tables was and what they were up to. Art in China had become a full-fledged system, with its own hierarchies, rituals, and codes. And 798 was somehow the hollow center of this whole system, a monument to the power of a creative China even if most of the real art-world action was happening elsewhere.
In almost two years since that giddy spring, 798 has changed yet again, as government actors invested in the notion of “creative industry” exert their considerable influence over the zone. My favorite addition is not the Nike showroom (a museum of sneaker history on the factory’s northern edge) but a new public plaza called “Originality Square” located nearby. This intervention, this naming in accordance with a now-popular ideological doctrine, could only be done by the new configuration of forces shaping the district’s future—a loose coalition of residents and tenants, nominally united and serviced by a management office comprised of district and factory officials. Giant signs bearing the numbers “798” now appear at all of the compound’s major entrances, but they are all but unnecessary at a moment when every cab driver knows exactly where the zone lies. On a warm weekend afternoon, the place is downright crowded with gallery-goers and urban thrill-seekers, all drawn to its tight pedestrian scale, visual delights, and bourgeois comforts. Most of the artists are gone and the stores are moving in, as the cycle that took thirty years to unfold in SoHo happens here in just five. Call it commercialization, call it legitimization, call it administration—in some ways it doesn’t matter. The district may be around for years to come, but its semiotic work was finished with the first few newspaper reports. China has learned how to turn its socialist remains into leisure palaces, and its artistic ingenuity into a marketable brand.
前几天去长征空间，刚停下车，旁边突然杀出一个娃娃脸保安，穿一套不合身的制服，操着浓重的东北口音告诉我，门前街道不能停车。我心里腾地一下无名火起，费了好大劲才压制住要尖叫的冲动。那天下着雨，怎么看都是798艺术区的一个普通的十一月下午，只一点除外：厂区管理层决定在当天落实一项制定已久的政策——禁止访客随意停车。这当然不是那个保安的错。当我从指定停车点往回走的时候，他一边叫我“大哥”，一边试图问我讨根烟抽（我没有带烟）。但我还是忍不住感到愤怒。毕竟，五年前大学毕业后参加的富布莱特项目刚结束那阵，23岁的我作为一名热爱中国当代艺术的文艺青年，常常骑着我的长江750跨斗摩托在如今已是大小画廊的厂房间来回穿梭。我知道798原始的全民免费模式总有一天会被各种规章制度取代，但我仍不愿承认这一天已经到来。
在那些2008奥运会看起来依然遥遥无期的日子里，798也许比北京其他任何地方更能让我感受到未来的形状。这些带拱顶的混凝土厂房见证了我的成长，故事要从辞掉律师事务所工作的那个夏日说起，我坐在798最早的居民之一、雕塑家隋建国的大众旅行车里从霄云路穿过四环（当时四环看起来多么遥远）。我记得那天下午罗伯特·伯纳尔去了东京艺术工程的建筑工地，想介绍《Wallpaper》杂志两个时髦的伦敦人跟黄锐认识，当时艺术和设计的世界看起来真是遥远又迷人！但很快我便清楚地意识到即使作为一个没有任何资历的小孩儿，我也能够进入这个世界，因为一切都还在成形阶段。所以，我为798举办的首场展览翻译了画册文案，策展人是冯博一，展览名为“北京浮世绘”（Beijing Afloat），主要目的是向日本浮世绘流派致敬，该流派名称直译过来就是“关于漂浮世界的绘画”。英文名是我想出来的，这也许标志着我介入中国当代艺术话语的正式开始，而如今这种介入已成为我的职业。
“北京浮世绘”开幕当天——2002年10月12日——我的摩托车坏了。我把它丢在东京艺术工程门前院子的南边。第二天，一个年轻的策展人和他的艺术家女朋友（两人都是798最早的一批居民）帮我把车拖到了拐角（这之前我们跟日本主办方人员一起吃了蘑菇火锅庆功宴，然后我就动身去了广州，为下个月即将开幕的广州三年展做准备）。车被锁起来后就一直原封不动地在徐勇“798时态空间”后面的人行道上搁了一个月，现在那里共有四家咖啡馆，三家画廊，一家礼品店。从广州回来后的一天上午，我带着当时《纽约时报》北京记者站负责人Erik Eckholm造访了798为数不多的几家开放画廊和工作室，为他正准备着手的报道收集素材。正是他的这篇文章让798第一次在海外受到关注。另一天上午，我跟卢杰和邱志杰一起察看了后来成为第一个“长征空间”（最初名叫“二万五千里文化传播中心”，取红军著名的两万五千里长征之意）的场地。当时我是长征活动里年龄较小的成员，这两人则是我的“老板”。冬天晚上，厂区所有艺术家和居民有时会聚在某个工作室吃集体火锅。在白宜洛单身公寓里那台小得可怜的电视上，我们目睹了伊拉克战争的爆发。到了春天，我们就聚到马晗工作室的房顶上喝点儿半温不热的啤酒，先从里面爬上一堵摇摇欲坠的护墙，然后往沥青屋顶上一躺，满天的星星数也数不完。
几个月后，我卖掉摩托车，离开了北京。但走之前，我在长征空间策划了一个王卫的个展。展览过程中，他雇了一群民工在展厅里用二手砖块建造一个全封闭的建筑，然后再将其摧毁。这个作品反映了好几个主题，其中最重要的还是当时大家对我们如此珍视的这个厂区命运的担忧。这里会一直是我们聚会、观察并思考身边新生事物的场所吗？还是即将被孕育了它当前形态的城市化发展大潮所吞没？回到马萨诸塞州的剑桥市，我把王卫展览（名叫“临时空间”）的一套十二张小照片挂在寝室墙上，无比怀念地穿着“大山子艺术区”（除了厂区管理层，所有人都被要求在公开场合用这个名字称呼798）的T恤衫去参加清朝历史研习会。哈佛精巧优雅的停滞让我觉得自己从来没有跟北京及其新兴的文化鉴赏力离得这么远，尤其是想到北京每天都在变化，而我北京的朋友们仍在当地见证这种成长。
接下来的两年半，我时常回到中国。每次回来，798好像都会有些小小的变化：新的画廊和咖啡馆在厂区各个偏远角落生根发芽；日本旅游巴士和公司新闻发布会慢慢成了798一景；关于欧美大型博物馆和艺术学校即将进驻的流言时不时从艺术圈上空飞过，然后消失在空气里。部分“原住民”破产了或者搬去了别处，把自己的空间以五六倍于原价的租金转租给其他人。但也有屹立不倒的老住户——AT咖啡店、东八时区书店——就像通过机场高速的收费站或者路过天安门广场，它们的存在让我确信，不管停留时间有多短，我的确是回到了北国首都。
2006年四月，标志着如今狂热市场开端的苏富比中国当代艺术品纽约拍卖会结束不久，我回到了北京，刚好碰上第三届大山子国际艺术节在大炉窑（很快被改造成尤伦斯当代艺术中心）开幕。在AT咖啡店一边写文章、做翻译，一边猜测旁边桌子的人都是谁、想干什么已经不再有趣，也不再可能。中国艺术已变成一个发育完整的系统，有自己的阶层、程序和规则。798就是这整个系统空洞的中心，一座象征中国创造力的纪念碑，尽管真正的艺术活动发生在其他地方。
让人头晕目眩的那个春天已经过去快两年，政府对“创意产业”的投资给798带来很大影响，厂区面貌再次发生改变。我最喜欢的新增部分不是耐克空间（厂区北边的一座记录运动鞋历史的博物馆），而是附近新建的“创意广场”。这种介入，这种根据当前流行的意识形态信条所做的命名，只有在决定该地区未来的新的力量格局下才能实现——这是一个居民和租户组成的松散团体，名义上联合在一起，接受由地区和厂方官员组成的管理层的服务。现在每个主要入口处都竖起了“798”的巨型标牌，但鉴于每个出租车司机都知道798在哪，这样的标志就有些多余。任何一个温暖的周末下午，这里都彻底挤满了看画展或者找乐的人，吸引他们的不仅是798靠步行就能逛完的紧凑布局，还有从中可以获得的视觉愉悦和中产阶级享受。大多数艺术家已经搬走，各种商店开始入驻，仿佛纽约苏荷区花了三十年才完成的周期在这里只用五年就全部走完。称其为商业化、合法化或行政化——从某些方面来讲根本无所谓。这个地方可能还会存在好长时间，但它的象征性工作在最早的几篇新闻报道发表后就宣告结束。中国已经学会怎样把社会主义遗迹变成休闲会所，如何把艺术独创性变成可以赚钱的品牌。