Beijing's 798 Art District

Today I went wandering around the north-east of Beijing. To be honest, it’s pretty hard to consider the area I was in “Old Beijing”. The city has exploded in size, with the Chinese government building ring roads named with ever-increasing digits every two or three years. The place where I was at happened to be around the fourth ring road, which encompassed both faceless apartment blocks as well as patches of agricultural land which have somehow managed to survive the onslaught of economic development.

I got off at the Wangjing stop. A pretty romantic name for a characterless area, covered in smog and devoid of human warmth. However, it is here where much of Beijing’s population lives, so if you want to complete your picture of Beijing, you have to visit one of these concrete slabs. I really wonder what they look like on the inside. 

A half-hour walk away from Wangjing, you stumble across the 798 Art District. You would be forgiven for thinking you were in Soho in New York City, for the vibe there is exactly the same.

There were cafes, bars, galleries and bookshops squeezed together in a bunch of disused factory buildings. It was all rather pretty; the galleries had some cutting-edge art which, although not to my taste, had plenty of artistic merit. The cafes were really well done, avoiding the easily-made mistake of 中西掺杂, mostly by throwing out all Chinese elements and achieving a recreation of a New York coffee shop in Northeastern Beijing. I stopped for a while to have a club sandwich. It was pretty pricey, but I liked the vibe. My first Western meal in China for the past five weeks!

Hipster cool has arrived in Beijing, along with the corresponding irony which New York artists try so hard to achieve. There was nothing more ironic than eating an expensive club sandwich in a disused factory, bearing authentic Cultural Revolution-era "The Chairman's Instructions" plastered on the walls! Talk about good fun.

It was raining really heavily, but I really didn’t mind. In fact, it was the heaviest rain that Beijing had seen in 61 years, but I only found out the next day; probably a good thing! The rain forced me to spend longer than I had planned in individual galleries or cafes, which allowed me to appreciate them better.

The place was very comfortable and authentic. However, something is biting at my thoughts.

In the midst of Soho, where is China?

It seems that in their attempt to create a cutting-edge, avant-garde area of the city, Chinese artists have successfully rebuilt Soho, or Greenwich Village. Sure, the art in the galleries was Chinese enough, as in it successfully blended Chinese and Western influences into a complete whole. However, in the whole area, I counted only one Chinese restaurant. One Chinese restaurant! Just one! For a civilization which places an extremely strong emphasis on food, this seems surprising.

There was no shortage of Westerners walking around, doubtlessly comfortable that they were in a mini recreation of the bohemian district of New York. To be honest, I quite liked the place myself. It’s just that I think that it exists in an alternate world. The place is very real and very grounded; it’s just that it is grounded in a reality which does not conform to its immediate surroundings, but rather New York and San Francisco.

It’s telling that I didn’t notice any Chinese flags fluttering in the breeze. It really felt like a different China from the one which I am used to; but then again, the so-called conception of "China" is not as simple or stereotypical as people think. I had an interesting discussion with a professor of Chinese culture about this. But let's leave that for another day.