Art Gallery

This weekend included a trip to a modern art gallery, called 798, in Northeast Beijing. The site was an old factory area that got bought/reclaimed/traded with political favors/or some other sort of crazy Chinese economic mumbo-jumbo to a coalition of art dealers that kept part of the factory's name (it was, of course, Factory 798 back in the day). The coolest part was probably actually seeing all of the old factory stuff, including an abandoned train-fueling station with a coal-burning engine sitting idle on the tracks.

I picked a wonderful day to forget my camera, but Zephyr's phone (Zephyr is a coworker of mine) got a few noteworthy shots:

The first is one of a few slogans painted on the factory walls during either the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. Workers actually probably painted them voluntarily, in their fervor of the moment.
"Long live the great Chinese Communist Party!"

A picture of me, about 20 feet up on a tracked crane, looking down. Also, for some reason, black and white. Who knows.


This sculpture is modern, made in 2007 by one of the modern artists, but in the style of a Culutral Revolution poster. The worker (with his eight-inch-thick forearms, a trademark of the time) is holding a brush, showing that anyone can be an artist if endowed with formiddable forearms and Chairman Maozedong thought. The interesting thing bout this sculpture was the quality of the medium--the iron-based metal used to make it was not only rusted, but it was of an inconsistent grade, and cracked in certain parts where the alloy had not settled, bubbled a bit, and generally looked bad. I realised with perfect clarity after a few moments of thinking--this abandoned factory, I am sure, at some point had vast wasteful expanses of pig iron or half-attempts at steel made in the backyard furnaces of peasants during the Great Leap Forward, shipped in on those coal trains, and then rejected in disgust by the marginally-more-qualified engineers of the factory. The artist almost certainly got his sculpting materials from such an industrial graveyard, and not simply because they were free, but because they represented the result of the thought of the time.


Some of the paintings were strange, some were beautiful, but some actually got to make powerful statements about China's past--the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the general behavior of great leaders like Mao Zedong. Some of the political satires were a bit chilling, especially those of the Cultural Revolution. Zephyr and I had a brief discussion on the different realms in which one can discuss Chinese history and policy, and apparently some history is open to China's very small ivory tower. But there was no word of the Tiananmen Square incident.

When I mentioned that, Zephyr said "nobody worries about it anymore, it's history!" I got a bit confused, and said "well, why do you worry about the Japanese so much? That's 65-year-old history." Which got me a jumbled response about Japanese attitudes about it today, but I got a small mark of admission when I asked "if nobody worries about it, why aren't you allowed to talk about it?"

I then told her why China's banned art was so popular in the US. If a single piece of art is so powerful as to threaten the security of the largest authoritarian government in the world, then it must really have something to say.