Edit: I had finished writing this post very neatly and then lost the second half of it when the “Publish Post” button led me to a 404. I rewrote the second half, but I don’t think it was as good as it was.
This coming Tuesday evening we will all leave for Shenzhen, so our time here in Beijing is almost over. Yesterday I was really feeling like doing some filming, so later tonight I might walk around and get some shots of Haidian District. I would love to try making another montage video, but I know that the connotations I’d infuse into it would be largely ignorant since I’m still super new to Beijing. A montage video done in Shenzhen after I’ve been there for a few months would be better…but only a few more days to take advantage of it here!
When I do this later today I could well be the one weird guy walking around with a camera (maybe I’ll take some white people with me so people treat me nicer), but in other trendy areas of Beijing, at least, I don’t think anybody would take a second glance. The artists in the 798 district, or Qijiuba (literally 798), would be out there with not only their cameras, but also their hipster vests and thick-rimmed glasses. When we got off the bus the cityscape seemed like the normal Beijing street (dusty, dominated by the road running through it, with stands and shops scattered about) but as soon as we turned the corner into Qijiuba it was like I was back in downtown Olympia.
Well, that’s hyperbole, really – Olympia doesn’t have the humidity, tropical forestation, or dusty cramped feeling of Beijing. But this part of Beijing felt bohemian! Graffiti, before unseen anywhere in Beijing, was strewn all over walls in tastefully outrageous murals, and the Chinese there walked with a jaunty cockiness and flaunted their clothing and their company, looking more like put-together Asian-American or Taiwanese scenesters on their way to an independent movie shooting. There actually were a couple people posing for a photo shoot on a neighborhood fire escape. We wandered into a dark alleyway with walls covered in stylized portraits of nude female aliens and up a dark stairwell until we popped into a well-lit and neat hostel. There was a European guy sitting in the kitchen with his back to us, surfing the net and munching on a bagel. The proprietor had the beginnings of a potbelly under his t-shirt and sported a long, black ponytail – and not the kind that Jackie Chan wears in period movies. The kind that aging guitar hippies wear in Olympia. We thanked him for letting us walk around his space, and moved on.
My favorite space there, however, was a large gallery called “postcapital,” and we spent most of our time there browsing through its exhibits. Like most of the other large gallery spaces in Qijiuba, postcapital was situated in an abandoned military factory designed by the East Germans in a time of international Communist cooperation. I did some research and found that the name “798″ was the entire district’s designation from the time when it was completely given to military factory use, and the Germans fought with the Soviet and Chinese planners to include a type of architectual modernism distinct from the angular utilitarianism of the latter two’s designs. The result were wide open rooms with gently curved dome-ceilings full of high windows and light – the effect making for a kind of semi-Bauhaus, semi-Andy Warhol feel in postcapital.
That mass-produced Warhol feeling may have been evoked by the place’s former factory usage, but in postcapital it was definitely a deliberate effect. After all, the gallery’s focus was social theory and metadiscursivity, using current-day capitalism’s manifestations in media and ideology to track the course of late capitalism and theorize the beginning of a new “postcapital” society. (Of course I would love this.) The entryway decorations to the exhibits pulled no punches – large tablets lit from within, etched in text on the one at left were the names of every Marxist organization and doctrine in the world, while stamped on the tablet at right were the symbols and logos of the world’s top 500 global corporations. Communism and capitalism, neatly framing your entrance. It was almost a little too cute, and the exhibits themselves also varied between being a bit trite and being fairly insightful. This even split made it seem that postcapital was all the more self-reflexively aware of its own potential fallibilites as an exhibit – which subtly pointed to both the fallibilities of communism (think too hard and you become trite) and capitalism (don’t think at all and you start trite). In places like this everywhere, postmodern hipsters are too cool for set ideologies and static symbols (excepting thick-rimmed glasses), so I am surprised that such an academically distanced flexibility could exist in the capital of Communist China.
Then again, while I have heard a lot about how artists in China are having their edges blunted by CCP censorship, I actually saw a pretty free and liberated art district at Qijiuba. Granted, yes ,the place still seemed mostly about revenue instead of art (in every gallery there were gift shops with exhibit-related trinkets that totally reduced and minimized their significance) – but I wasn’t sure whether this could also be another ironic, satirical backhanded slap at the way things are in China. That such a place exists here is, to say the least, interesting.
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The next night I went with the other teachers to a beer garden in the student district Wudaokou, then hopped across the street to a dance club glibly entitled Propaganda. Inside: dark lights, corner booths, open bars, and nationals of all skin colors pressing against each other to the rhythms of Eminem and Kanye. Not much to say about it as a club; I wasn’t there for long and stuck mostly to my friends. The fact that it exists in Beijing at all, and with that name, though, is weird. It is geared to the expatriate community, and as such represents a flippant attitude on the part of both the host nationals and the expatriates towards each other. But I’m not sure which comes out winning. I don’t think anybody in Beijing can really tell, either.
