Still life in the city

Updated: 2016-08-26 08:41

By Hatty Liu(China Daily Europe)

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Building artist villages away from the hustle and bustle

If the 19th-century European stereotype of the artist is a depressive genius in a drafty garret, the 20th-century American cliche is of artists taking over post-industrial urban lofts, scratching out a living in a warehouse before being priced out by gentrifying forces.

China is no different.

Still life in the city

The 21st-century Chinese art scene has areas like Beijing's 798 Art District, with graffitied facades and rusty pipes. However, in the northeast quadrant of Beijing's Chaoyang district, there are art communities of a "post-agricultural" character that is unique to the story of Chinese urban development.

The village of Feijiacun is a 10-minute bus ride from the second-last stop on Beijing's Subway Line 14. A dusty road leads from a traditional gate past a line of scrappy groceries and diners. However, now and then, the road opens onto vine-covered entrances of what seem to be traditional courtyard homes adorned with signs in vivid colors, impeccably spelled English, and sleek typefaces.

Feijiacun, though the smallest village by area in Chaoyang district's Cuigezhuang county, is one of the 10 major art districts of Beijing. Painters, photographers, tattoo artists and film distribution companies live and work side by side with newly arrived migrant workers attracted to the city's outskirts by affordable rent. In the middle of the village, a former pickled vegetable factory houses the Shangri-la Cultural and Arts Community, one of the larger art communities in the district.

There you can find the airy new rehearsal and training center of the Beijing Dance Theater, an internationally renowned contemporary dance troupe, and smaller tenants ranging from potters and sculptors to the Red Gate Gallery international residency program.

"Most regular people don't know about us, but artists have been coming here for a long time," says Tan, the property manager of the Shangri-la Community who wished to go by his surname. "Most people have heard of 798, and they're of course a bigger deal than us, but we actually got started earlier. What the artists here are looking for is a peaceful and affordable environment to work in and above all, a quiet place to live."

Still life in the city

"Art districts and villages are seen in many Chinese urban areas, including Shanghai, Chengdu and Xi'an. Beijing's art villages, however, are undoubtedly among the most well-known. The most famous of them all, Caochangdi, is actually a little closer geographically to 798 and more used to being the center of the action.

Architects and media alike have been struck by the visual of kooky sculptures, international gallery shows, and China's finest avant-garde sensibilities being made in close proximity to chickens, sheep, and marginal and migratory parts of Chinese society.

"It's under the radar, it's not pretentious, and there are the large spaces and freedom to move and do without all the eyes of those living with all the norms of society looking on," says Mary-Ann Ray, who along with Robert Mangurian are the principals behind BASE Studio, a Beijing architectural think tank, and the authors of Caochangdi, Beijing Inside Out, an architectural and sociological study of the contemporary transformation of Caochangdi.

"The urban village (城中村, village within the city) is a description applied to Caochangdi, Feijiacun and several hundred other locations in Beijing, though they are more prevalent in South China. As Chinese cities sprawl outwards, villages located on the outskirts of cities have seen their agricultural land purchased by the government to allow new construction while the villagers themselves were permitted to remain on residential land.

These days, rural collectives in urban areas in China can transform themselves into collectively owned property companies. Villagers can have a new livelihood in remodeling or adding onto their traditional single-story dwellings, which can be rented out.

Caochangdi and Feijiacun were both once imperial burial grounds of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), and later agricultural people's communes. They also saw industrial development in the past decades. Architecture that reflects both the agricultural and industrial development eras can be seen.

Because construction in the urban villages is mostly illegal and unregulated, it results in very dense development poorly served by utilities. But Caochangdi and Feijiacun still have courtyards, fields and an average building height of less than three stories. Nonetheless, even in Beijing the term "urban village" conjures an image of lawlessness and poverty.

"Urban village is not a good concept - I don't want that label to be applied here," Tan says.

"Artists have been settling here for a long time, before a lot of the development, before there was even much migrant housing, and they come here because it's actually a nicer environment than the city."

Image problems aside, villages within the urban sprawl have an undeniable economic appeal. Lofts for rent in Caochangdi are currently advertised online for as low as 0.8 yuan (12 US cents; 11 euro cents) per square meter per day, while most cost two to three yuan per square meter per day. Though artists can spend tens of thousands of yuan on renovation, these prices are a steal in a city where office space rents for an average of 311 yuan per square meter per month.

China's 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010) identified the development of China's cultural and creative industries as a national economic priority and encouraged the development of creative industry hubs in major cities. City governments responded with their own policy outlines.

Even in an ad-hoc village like Caochangdi, which has traded on a marginal and counter cultural character from the start, government support can have benefits. Village leaders got the art district designated a cultural industry zone.

"The dusty road leading from Feijiacun's gate terminates in a T-crossing resembling a scene out of a ganji (赶集), weekly market days that county towns across China host for surrounding villages. Amidst a row of butchers, rotisseries and small restaurants, there are vendors hawking shoes in screaming colors and music pounding from a stereo outside a tiny, two-chair hair salon.

The village certainly seems like a world apart from the loft of co-owned by actor-turned-photographer Weng Yang and his friends, newcomers who moved to Feijiacun only four months ago in search of an affordable space for their new business, Su Studio. The studio's interior is made up of pristine white walls, floor-to-ceiling windows, and Apple electronics. The courtyard and the low walls of the compound block out most of the noise from the street.

"I'd say economics are still the primary reason - here the rent is lower, even lower than some other art villages. But there's a bigger context: Whether you do photography like us, or sculpture or painting, as an artist you look for a certain ambience (氛围)," Weng says.

"Everybody here walks the same path, as artists, and there's a lot of opportunity to exchange - though you'll find our work a little more commercially oriented than some of the other artists," he admits.

"But the village ambience is what I aspire to creatively: Creation comes from life, or actually, it depends on life. We're not holed up in (the studio), thinking of the villagers as these rustics that don't go with our image.

Courtesy of The World of Chinese, www.theworldofchinese.com

The World of Chinese

 Still life in the city

A former pickled vegetable factory in Feijiacun has become an artist workshop. Hatty Liu / The World of Chinese

(China Daily European Weekly 08/26/2016 page23)

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