Beijing's new art district holds fest

Art in America, May, 2004 by Richard Vine

The first Dashanzi International Art Festival--comprising visual arts, music, theater, film, dance and sound art--is being held Apr. 24-May 23 in Beijing's Chaoyang District (about halfway between downtown and the city airport). Organized by the non-governmental Beijing Cultural Development Foundation and funded primarily by corporations, the event celebrates not only contemporary culture but also the unofficial means--private sponsorship and architectural preservation--that supporters find most congenial to artistic experimentation in China today.

Under the artistic direction of artist and designer Huang Rui, roughly 10 multinational exhibitions and dozens of concerts, firm screenings and performances will take place, accompanied by numerous related activities in local galleries, studios and cafes. Though participants are drawn largely from Asia, especially China, Western artists such as France's Chris Marker and Italy's Armin Linke will be featured as well. Some 20 artists' studios will be open to the public.

While hip DJs, VJs and rock performers may set the tone for many visitors, DIAF organizers give special emphasis to the half-dozen exhibitions and symposia dedicated to the issue of adapting former industrial spaces to cultural use. Precedents like the Musee d'Orsay, the Tate Modern, New York's SoHo, Chelsea and Williamsburg neighborhoods (or, more modestly, Toronto's Power Plant and Pittsburgh's Mattress Factory) are routinely cited by advocates of Dashanzi New Art District. The area contains a 1954 complex of East German-designed plants and warehouses that, in the last two years, has been entrepreneurially transformed into a thriving art community, complete with bohemian-chic galleries, studios, boutiques, restaurants and bars.

The BCD Foundation projects festival attendance as high as 200,000, compared to Dashanzi's typical monthly draw of 50,000 visitors (70 percent Chinese, 30 percent foreign)--figures which, in combination with international press attention, it hopes will transform the festival into an annual event and thus immunize the area against China's urban renewal fever. (Local politicians are already calling for demolition to make way for new manufacturing facilities.) For a more detailed account of Dashanzi and the important independent exhibitions held there last fall during the Beijing Biennale, see A.i.A.'s forthcoming Summer issue, which will contain a wide-ranging special section on Chinese contemporary art in the People's Republic and abroad.