Art at 798

Saturday was beautiful and sunny, even warm. Sun streamed in through my big window and I gave the turtles a good dose of natural UV. I had some vague thought of trying to find the big market my tutor had mentioned, but decided against it as I needed recovery time--I always seem to, after Friday madness. I even got some work done and had an instant noodle lunch. I think this is the last batch of instant noodles I'm buying for a while. I'm pretty sick of them.

My friend CC called at around 2:30 in the afternoon. We had met at the orientation at DC and somehow I'd got the feeling that she seemed to like me so I decided to like her too. She is based in a different city, but she travels around quite a lot and this weekend she was in Beijing. She was going to wander around a contemporary art area of the city called 798 and did I want to go too? Why not? Of course 798 is not marked on any maps. Fortunately one of her friends had a rough idea of where it was. It was about a 10 minute phone conversation with a lot of triangular back and forth regarding what to tell the taxi driver, the general area of the city, and so on. Then I got dressed and went out to get a taxi. It went off completely without a hitch; the driver knew exactly what I was talking about, and I beat them there. I probably could have taken a bus even! But it was only a 40 RMB taxi ride, though it was all the way on the other side of the city.

When I got there, it was a street with a very different feeling from my barren but high-tech "silicon valley" neighborhood. It was a cute funky row of shops with its back to the "art area". They were partly international-oriented, but only superficially. It was, you might say, a downscale tourist area but not as grubby as the foreign-student district in Wudaokou, which is my nearest subway stop. "Toggery" wins the Chinglish prize for the day as a translation of "clothing." It was a toggery sort of street. I waited on it for some time, and happened to see three mule-drawn carts clopping down the road with heavy loads of bricks. It's hard to understand why that's an efficient way to move bricks but it must be. I also got a cup of soy-milk and a great pastry from a bakery window. I was extremely satisfied with this snack, not sure why exactly, except the pastry tasted exactly the way I thought it would taste from looking at it. If I describe it, it won't sound good--sticky, oily, dense, crunchy, sweet--but when it's mid-afternoon and you had instant noodles for lunch, that sort of thing really hits the spot. From a nearby newsstand I bought a magazine my Chinese tutor had recommended, and passed the time very pleasantly except for having to fend off an extremely aggressive beggar.

CC's Chinese friend was driving a BMW with many many gadgets including a proximity detector that actually showed you a picture of the proximity as well as making warning noises. He explained it was a company car. We went into the 798 area and wandered around. The story of 798, as well as I could figure out, is the same story as any urban artsy area: it started as a super low rent warehouse district but suddenly became a highly commercialized hot and trendy spot. Extra-elegant graffiti in a light industrial setting, and block after block of art galleries with open doors and hip attendants. Then in among the galleries: expensive clothing and jewelry stores.

I mostly didn't much care much for the art. These are pictures of some sculptures which looked like blobs of colored beads from afar. If you looked closer they are actually hundreds of tiny human figures struggling across shattered landscapes. If you looked closely, they were very sad. CC was mildly interested in them and took some photos with her enormous camera (I had big camera envy). I said they were interesting but there was something not quite right about them. She agreed that they were shallow. But I wouldn't put it that way. Kind of the opposite problem. They were deep, but from far away too unaesthetic. The message would have been more interesting if from far away they were beautiful and tended to draw you in to look closer--and then you'd see the struggling little figures. But from far away they just looked confusing.



But contemporary art is so much an exercise in judgment and selection. It's hard to imagine that there has ever been so much crap masquerading as art as there is in the current contemporary art scene. But I suppose the crap level must actually be reasonably stable. It just that crap from earlier eras of history end up in the dumpster, or a hotel room, or a museum in Ohio, or destroyed in natural disasters, or something. Whatever. I was fairly underwhelmed.

Also, a dressed up model with a really shallow kind of sex-kitten look was roaming through the corridors and galleries followed by a roving pack of male photographers. She would pose, the light guy would raise lights and umbrellas, the cameras would click, she would move on. I did not dignify that activity, even ironically, by photographing it. I was fairly disgusted.

In addition to incomprehensibly abstract stuff and downright ugly pop-art, there were painting in a whitish snowy barely colored style that recalled misty Chinese landscapes except the perspective and figural techniques were Western. I was initially somewhat interested, but there were so many of them. Then there were lots of Mao-era photographs, a few blatantly political things (tanks, blood, etc.), photographs of grubby peasant kids and harsh countryside living. I found the spaces more interesting than the art in them.

It was easy to spend a long time there. CC's Chinese friend headed back to work in his fancy car, and CC's other friend disappeared periodically for long phone conversations with: his Chinese ex-wife, his Chinese ex-girlfriend, his current Chinese girlfriend. :P As CC said, he gets a lot of attention, a mature, leonine sort of white guy, not tall but not short either (especially not for here), stock, sandy-haired, rugged-featured, a teacher of business English here in Beijing, sigh. Actually the first person of "the type" that I've encountered during my stay here, but he was it in spades.

When I saw the moon coming out I made some pictures and then begged off the rest of the evening, first arranging to have dinner with CC the next evening because we hadn't really had a chance to talk. I was pleased and happy that she wanted to. She seems mostly to hang out with people who are more into art than I am.

Back home (I extravagantly took a cab again, just because I couldn't be bothered trying to figure out what street I was on) I had a pretty unsatisfying dinner at the same dumpling restaurant I had considered excellent my first week here. Oh how quickly the standards rise. Then I went to a bookstore and bought a big set of books for just over 100 RMB, investing in my future. On the way home I gave in to the temptation to try something new and bought these tiny tiny oranges They were delicious, skins so thin that after you peeled them off they were almost translucent, and easy to peel like clementines. Also with the same extra-sweet taste as clementines. The orange-seller was mad at me because he couldn't talk me into buying three jin, which was a hefty sackful. I insisted on only half that and he was grumpy. But even that many are more than I can eat!