798 Art District – Explore Modern Art in Beijing
Dashanzi Art District Popular Home to Chinese and Overseas Artists
© Yahan Wu
Oct 16, 2009
Since artists first set up studios and galleries in Dashanzi in 2000, the East German-built industrial compound in Beijing has become a world-famous center of contemporary Chinese art. By January 2008, over 400 cultural organizations coming from France, Italy, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other countries and regions, have settled down in the zone.
The Dashanzi Art District, also known as the 798 Art District or Factory 798, is named after the 798th factory built in the 1950s in a part of Dashanzi in the Chaoyang District of Beijing . The art zone covers an area of 0.6 square kilometres.
Beijing’s SoHo: Transformation from Industrial to Creative
The area occupied by Beijing 798 Art Zone was once the Beijing North China Wireless Joint Equipment Factory. When the plant shut down in the 1990s and started to lease plants (798 factory being one of them), the area began to transform into a neighbourhood of gallery owners, artists and visitors and has often been compared with New York's Greenwich Village or SoHo
The walled compound of red brick factories, warehouses and offices are set on a tree-lined grid of streets and lanes and a large number of the buildings were left vacant, some the size of football fields, with many of them flooded with natural light. This opened the door for officials from the Central Academy of Fine Arts who were looking for an inexpensive factory site for its sculpture department.
Numerous art organizations and independent artists were soon also drawn to the area not only by its low-cost space, which they began to convert into studios and live-in lofts, but also to the site's location in Beijing's Chaoyang District. The region became home to foreign embassies and institutions in the mid-1990s.
Today, Beijing’s 798 Art Zone is a major center for creative arts and has attracted a great deal of attention from the media and is a popular tourist spot. The area frequently hosts major international art exhibitions, art activities as well as fashion shows and holds the annual Beijing 798 Art Festival and the Beijing 798 Creative Art Festival.
Bauhaus Architecture Plans
The Dashanzi factory complex began as an extension of the "Socialist Unification Plan" of military-industrial cooperation between the Soviet Union and the PRC. By 1951, over 150 factory projects were up and the architectural plans left to the Germans, who chose a functional Bauhaus-influenced design featuring simple designs and varied compositions.
The design required large indoor spaces designed to let the maximum amount of natural light into the workplace. The roof’s characteristic sawtooth-like appearance is a result of a repeated pattern of large rooms having arch-supported sections of the ceiling curving upwards then falling diagonally along the high slanted banks or windows. The windows all faced north because the light from that direction would cast fewer shadows.
Interesting Spots in 798 Art District
- 798 Space: The first gallery to open in Dashanzi, 798 Space remains at the heart of the district. It is worth visiting for the spectacle of the cavernous main hall with its curious multiple-arched roof.
- Maoist grafitti: When many of the abandoned factory spaces were being converted for use as galleries, the artists instructed the decorators to leave untouched the giant Maoist slogans that had been lettered on the walls by the former workers.
- AT Café: A fashionable café whose notable feature is a bare-brick dividing wall punctured by massive holes, AT serves as the unofficial canteen for the artists and gallery staff who work in the area.
- White Space: Foreign art dealers are already present in numbers in 798. The striking White Space was one of the first such galleries, a branch of the Berlin-based Alexander Ochs Gallery.
- Timezone 8: Established in 2001 by Texan Robert Bernell, Timezone 8, which occupies a former factory canteen, is one of Beijing’s best art bookshop. It also incorporates a gallery that specializes in photographic art.
- Public sculpture: Throughout the 798 compound large pieces of sculpture stand beside the lanes, pathways and in courtyards. They are “in storage,”, awaiting proper homes or buyers.
- South Gate Space: Though not a gallery, the South Gate is an exciting, small performance space, used for theater, dance, and music. It fills the gap between club and full-scale theater auditorium, and is a favorite with visiting international acts.
- 798 Photo Gallery: The gallery hosts regularly changing exhibitions of both Chinese and foreign photographers, and also has a couple of mezzanine levels where a selection of photographic prints for sale are displayed.
The Studio Trust, Studio International
Dorling Kindersley, Beijing: 798 Art District
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