1 - Elsewheres

Summary

At the beginning, I played with the SoHo words … maybe it sounds very cynical, but at the time we were desperate, because everything was being torn down and we had to attract people. (Berenice Angremy, quoted in Currier, 2008: 260)

There is a triumphalism to telling the story of how 798 was saved from demolition that has been coupled with cynicism from the outset. It was a victory haunted by the belief of the key actors involved in its preservation that although the area had been saved from demolition, it was also set on an irrevocable course towards commercialization and regulation. What was once a settlement of subversive artists would inevitably make way for touristic consumption.

The story of 798 is set in Beijing, and provides the inspiration for exploring the relationship between making art spaces and cities. The number ‘798’ refers to the address of a former manufacturing compound outside of the Fourth Ring Road in the Chaoyang District. Constructed by the Chinese and Soviets in the 1950s with the help of East German engineers in the Bauhaus style, the compound covers 64 hectares. It is comprised of multiple factory and office structures that formerly accommodated Asia's largest military electronics plant, which was run as a state-owned enterprise. The area was largely deindustrialized in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Seven Stars Group, a municipality-based management group, administers the compound. As manufacturing shut down and factory workers were laid off, the Seven Stars Group began leasing spaces in the 1990s to generate rents to help pay for the pensions owed to former workers. The large spaces and low rents attracted artists, and the timing was serendipitous, occurring in conjunction with other changes in Beijing's artistic scene: many artists had been displaced by the recent dismantling of another artist area in Beijing (Yuanmingyuan Artist Village); the prestigious Chinese Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) had just relocated the campus in proximity to 798; and the 1990s was also a period in which many artists moved or came back to Beijing from elsewhere.

The story of artistic repurposing in 798 often extols its physical and community-oriented characteristics. It was a ‘perfect venue for art studios and exhibition halls’, which served in the early years as an underground village (Zhang, 2014).