For anyone intrigued by the shape of the rough beast slouching this way, there is really only one word: China. As a harbinger of the future, China appears in myriad guises; most—from environmental degradation to cheap manufactured goods to the 2008 Summer Olympics—are well known. But if skeptical visitors were to turn down a nondescript side street in Beijing’s northeastern Chaoyang District, near an obscure sign that reads 798 Art Zone, the full extent of the transformation within China would soon leave them reeling. For there amid narrow, tree-lined lanes where donkey carts vie for passage with chauffeur-driven Mercedes, the old Bauhaus-style military factories of 1950s China have recently succumbed to an explosion of artists’ studios and contemporary art galleries. Where Cold War munitions were once made and a few factories still operate, today there’s a square kilometre of rebellion: abstract-art galleries; Mao satire; big-eyed cartoon characters; nudes and eroticism; political pop art; oversized, Jeff Wall–type photography; conceptual art; performance-art shows; video displays; bronze and ceramic production; welding, fashion, and interior-design studios; and a big bookstore, pubs, and trendy restaurants. It’s like Granville Island…only much bigger.

Until about six years ago, the 798 Art Zone didn’t exist. The area was an industrial wasteland, much like Vancouver’s False Creek prior to redevelopment in the 1970s. The site’s abandonment came about following Chinese leaders’ rejection in the 1990s of centralized command-economy principles in favour of semiprivate corporate development. Thousands of government factories closed, including Factory 798 and five of its cavernous neighbours. Into these buildings, first a few, then a flood of artists descended, drawn by the low rents, high ceilings, and vacant workers’ quarters nearby.

The liberalizing policies that altered the Chinese economy also altered the government’s view of what was permissible in a post–Tiananmen Square world. The strictures of 20th-century socialist realism were jettisoned, and the 798 Art Zone was born amid artist-run fetish nights, Mao-as-a-pig sculptures, photos of full frontal nudity, and shock-art performances. The artists waited for the authorities to intervene. Were there limits to self-expression in this new China?

As I wandered the 798 Art Zone, I found myself laughing at the gap between what I was seeing and what I’d imagined were current constraints on China’s artists. In one gallery exhibit, a vertically balanced, two-metre-high plastic fountain pen appeared to write on the floor in sensuous rivers of calligraphic and crimson ink/blood. In another gallery, massive brush-and-ink-drawn socialist-realist farm tractors melted into abstraction, as if the artist was both celebrating and mocking tradition. In a third, a cast-bronze statue of a young woman in a proper, Mao-
collared jacket and cap played golf while wearing hot pants and stilettos. Elsewhere, Joe Camel morphed into the Mona Lisa. Heroic and muscular workers stood with raised hammers and sickles, touting Coca-Cola. Gigantic suspended porcelain eggs cracked open, their Humpty-Dumpty fragments—in the air and on the ground—revealing people engaged in coitus. A synchronized brigade of nearly identical plastic statues of Chairman Mao wore the heads of sheep, or cows, or… no head at all. Nothing, it seems, is sacred in this new, ironic China. When I asked one artist whether the Art Zone could provoke a second Tiananmen Square crackdown, she replied, “Why? We’re just expressing ourselves.”

A few years ago, China’s artists were overlooked on the world stage, but today it’s a different matter. Glowing reports of what’s happening artwise in Beijing have appeared recently in Time magazine, Vanity Fair, and Forbes. The blossoming of the 798 Art Zone, plus other smaller art districts in Beijing—Caochangdi, Feijiacun, Songzhuang, to name a few—has lured the international art establishment into investing in China’s current art scene. New galleries, some foreign-owned, open almost every week. As well, China’s own nouveaux riches have in the past decade assumed western consumer values, and begun collecting—among other formerly “decadent” items—contemporary art. Business is booming. The sticker prices at some of the most prestigious Art Zone galleries were similar to those at upscale venues in Vancouver’s South Granville area. (In 2006, a painting by Liu Xiaodong, titled Newly Displaced Population and clearly critical of the government’s Three Gorges Dam project, sold in Beijing for over $2.7 million, the highest price paid for the work of a contemporary Chinese painter.)

The Art Zone is evidence that the enormous changes sweeping China today are not just economic. A cultural revolution is also occurring. While the country’s older artists, the ones who grew up under Mao’s repressive Cultural Revolution of the ’60s, continue to satirize former Chinese leaders and policies, a younger generation of Chinese artists has arisen under this second, unannounced, post-Tiananmen revolution. For them, self-expression, sexual liberation, consumerism, alienation, environmental destruction, and global art trends are the relevant issues today. There is, for these artists and intellectuals, no longer a need to bell the nearly comatose Communist cat.

As I explored the Art Zone’s laneways and chatted with artists, I kept hearing that the danger lay in the district’s success. Artists must now apply for space there, and rents are skyrocketing, as always happens when consumerism imbibes counterculture values. The place is, in fact, now a tour-bus stop. It has regular English-language art walks. There are rumours that—along with the Forbidden City and the Great Wall—the site has been designated an official destination for visiting 2008 Olympic athletes and press. The 798 Art Zone has become a symbol of what happens when a society’s artists are released from centuries of feudalism and decades of authoritarian rule.

Access: The Web site of the 798 Art Zone is at www.798art.org/English/. A good place to start exploring is the original Factory 798, which is open daily. The Art Zone is a maze, but you can’t get seriously lost. The writer travelled as a guest of the China National Tourist Office
(www.tourismchina-ca.com/ ).