Seeking low rent, China artists cutting a path outside Beijing
ARTISTS in need of affordable studio space are often drawn to out-of-the-way or hardscrabbleneighbourhoods. The visual artists who flocked to SoHo in Manhattan decades ago helped resurrect what had been a deteriorating factory and warehouse district.
Young artists also helped revive parts of other major cities, including Berlin, Paris and Detroit.
In China, a small, nondescript city called Yanjiao, about an hour’s drive from Beijing, has been experiencing a similar influx of artists, though it is highly unlikely that they will initiate the kind of renaissance that has tourists flocking to Williamsburg and SoHo.
That’s because the artists’ inexpensive studios in Yanjiao lack exposed brick walls or distressed wood beams. Instead, they tend to feature concrete walls and cheap metal fittings, and they are generally in large, uninspired apartment blocks.
Yanjiao, with a population of about 300,000, was once known mostly as a “sleeper city”, whose residents commuted to jobs in Beijing.
The idealistic but impoverished artists here, many of them young graduates from Beijing’s art schools, work and live in these apartment blocks.
Driven by high rents and the constant threat of demolition in Beijing, many artists who might previously have hun- kered down in the city, China’s unofficial cultural capital, are flocking to Yanjiao to chase their dreams.
“The only reason for artists living in Yanjiao is that it’s cheap,” one of them, Zhang Yongji, 27, said with a laugh.
Zhang dreamed of making it big in Beijing. But after graduating from the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts there in 2012, he looked into renting a studio in the city and found he could not afford one. A friend of his was living in Yanjiao, and after visiting, he decided to move here.
Eventually, he settled into an apartment complex called the South Side of Hawaii, one of the city’s many sprawling, colourfully named residential complexes designed in a faux European style. In 2013, he and a group of friends founded On Space, an apartment turned experimental art gallery.
Many of China’s most famous contemporary artists emerged from so-called artist villages on the urban fringes of Beijing. One of the best known of these enclaves is Caochangdi Village, which became an artists’ hub after Ai Weiwei built his studio there in 1999. However, as Beijing’s city limits have expanded, many smaller artist villages have been torn down to make way for new development.
Yanjiao initially attracted attention from the artistic community in 2006, when the Central Academy of Fine Arts established a satellite campus not far from the South Side of Hawaii. Art supply, printing and framing shops quickly popped up.
The first artists found it lonely. “When I first got here, my building was completely empty, and there were no lights at night,” said Pange Yang, 26, who arrived in 2012. “I was the only person in the building.”
But as word-of-mouth about Yanjiao spread, more artists began coming.
“I was preparing to really do the poor, starving artist thing in Songzhuang,” a well-established artist village about a halfhour away, said Li Tianqi, 24, another founder of On Space. “But why rent a tiny shack in Songzhuang when you can have a nice studio in Yanjiao?”
Yanjiao has also caught the eye of established artists. Its most famous tenants are the Gao Brothers, a pair of multimedia artists internationally known for their irreverent sculptures.
Referring to the quickly gentrifying 798 Art District in Beijing, Gao Zhen, the older brother, said in an interview, “In 798, we still won’t be allowed to exhibit certain works of art, and you just can’t completely let go of your worries because even renting studios in 798 isn’t completely stable, with demolitions and relocations.”
Most artists in Yanjiao work in more humble circumstances. Much of the city’s surplus of residential space takes the form of cheap, unfinished apartments called maopifang. Little more than concrete shells, they are perfect for artists looking to create studios.
Yanjiao’s days as an affordable outpost may be numbered. Rents have tripled since the first artists moved in, mainly because of property speculation, and the number of unfinished maopifangs has dwindled.
Moreover, despite the city’s now solid reputation as an offshoot artistic community, Beijing’s big-city allure remains.