Today I visited an up and coming artist, Yan Bo, at his studio near Sanlitun. He makes art about “first experiences”: his first girlfriend, his first time swimming, his first nap beneath clouds. He likes when things feel new, and his paintings are filled with experimental touches that provide the viewer with that same “newness.”

After talking to him for half an hour, I realized that he was one of the very few people I had encountered who spoke only the truth and seemed to know exactly what I meant when I asked him about the “there must be more than what we can see in the relationship between artists and the government” dilemma. He told me that the government clearly supported Factory 798 despite the many controversial and political paintings it housed because it knew that they were created out of a desire to make money, and not out of true dissent.

For example, a queer art exhibition I heard would be happening tomorrow was canceled at the last minute by the government with threats of punishment if they continued as planned. Sounds like the Chinese art world isn’t as free as almost everyone I talked to told me.

Yan Bo was optimistic though. When I asked him about the continued commercialization of the art world, he said that people with money will pay for things they think are good, whether it’s good because they think of it as an investment, or whether they are truly touched. He said that we can’t expect everyone to act from the heart and that even things that are seemingly bad can become something good. For example he said that nuclear energy used to be equated with evil and tremendously devastating powers, but 50 years later, it’s used as a cleaner method of creating energy. A slightly exaggerated parallel, but still, I see his point. Pouring more money into art will only help artists and the cultivation of truer art in the long run. I mean what would many of the famous Western artists we praise now have done if they didn’t have rich patrons or the newly rich interested in investing in their art? As much as I’d like to wish that the art world consisted solely of artists who created from the heart and of patrons who bought the art with pure intentions without greed and dishonesty, such a desire is like hoping for an entire world without greed and dishonesty.

–Miyuki

Today I went to the artist village of Song Zhuang. It took two and a half hours (Yes, it was a real village far from the center of Beijing). Anyways, a little background info on the village is that the factory 798 (refer back to my post about 798) used to be filled with artist’s studios, rather than the galleries that fill the big factory. After a few years, the rent became too expensive because of the commercialization of 798 that a whole bunch of artists moved the whole gig to Song Zhuang.

At first I just visited a few random studios and talked to the artists that were working. I asked questions about the commercialization of art, the difficulty of staying true to their visions, and the tightly-knit artist community. I learned that rent was amazingly affordable at Song Zhuang (probably because of the aforementioned distance from the center of Beijing)–$4,000/year was the most expensive I heard but it was for a spacious building with two floors and a lot of wall space. An artist who just graduated only pays $1,500/year and made me contemplate if I should try this lifestyle.

I was further enticed when Li Xianting, a contact that I was extremely fortunate to have invited me into his palace. That really isn’t an exaggeration when you consider how he had numerous beautiful paintings, sculptures and decorations tastefully placed around his Chinese courtyard shaped home. Li Xianting can afford this all because he practically founded Song Zhuang, built several art museums he now curates for and has supported many of the currently famous contemporary artists. When I brought up the Cultural Revolution in many of younger artists’ works, he suggested that perhaps it was because the Cultural Revolution has yet to end in China. A disturbing thought, but what if it’s true?

Later, when I casually asked him where all the women artists were, he laughed and told me I should talk to his wife who recently curated a show solely for the women artists of Song Zhuang. She was equally full of insights and told me I had to meet a certain woman artist who’s home she drove me to. Her art which focuses on the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution was raw and experimental–I was moved. While looking at her art though, her husband came in and invited my interpreter and I to join them for a dinner party they were throwing. We stayed of course, and met several artists who progressively got louder and more opinionated as the hosts poured more alcohol into their cups. There was poetry recitation, folk singing and other party activities.

(like this “Let’s see if I can twirl you around” activity)

It’s late now, and I can’t believe all the generosities I encountered today. The people were making challenging art, questioning the status quo but nevertheless enjoying life with like-minded people. Really, I would become a Song Zhuang resident if it weren’t for college..hmmm…

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!

–Miyuki

The other day I had the chance to visit the Yanjing Theological Seminary, the only Protestant seminary in Beijing.

A seminary by the river, in relative isolation, framed by roads and dust.

Once Fan (my translator) and I arrived at the gates of the seminary, the security guard pointed out the office building. As we approached the building I heard a voice calling from above; it was the seminary dean, Pastor Wang, calling us from the second-story window. We climbed up the stairs to a room which walls were decorated with photographs of famous visitors, gifts of goodwill from churches around the world, and cloth scrolls of characters I didn’t understand. There was a photograph of Hillary Clinton shaking hands with a pastor, and a few triangular banners with names of churches in the southern U.S., which reminded me of those banners sold at college bookstores, you know, SWARTHMORE, AMHERST, and the like. The floor was clean tile, the chairs wooden and straight-backed. Pastor Wang spoke with me for about an hour and a half, a conversation mediated of course by Fan, probably riddled with misunderstandings but illuminating nonetheless. It was noon when Fan and I left the seminary, taking with us a few issues of theological journals and an invitation from Pastor Wang to return anytime. We made sure to check out the statues on the lawn as we left.

A statue outside the seminary which integrates the traditional symbolic uses of fish in Chinese culture and in Christianity, and look, the Olympic sign, too!

Another statue on the seminary lawn, between trees, before the gate.

Chinese power outlets are 220v, not 110v like standard American ones. Be smart and buy adapters like we did! The Chinese voltage is twice as high and is also much more likely to kill.

To save energy (and costs for the hotel), Chinese hotel rooms require guests to stick in their room key into a special slot that activates the power to the room. This prevents people from wasting energy by leaving their lights on while away from the room. The Freeman Swatties found a loophole — just stick your Swarthmore ID in instead! We still try our best to be environmentally conscious though.

No trip to China is complete without some awesome Engrish. Before you laugh, let’s see YOU say “Forbide All Use Of Fire In Field” in Chinese.

The two women self-identified as feminists and seemed confident, independent and?knowledgeable about the topics I raised. Despite the fact that they were both appointed to their current jobs twenty-some years ago, and haven’t changed jobs since, they seemed to feel passionate and invested in the current contemporary art climate. However I couldn’t help but think that they, as workers who have always benefited as government officials, were overly forgiving and unconsciously unaware of the biases that existed in the current art world and the suppression of controversial paintings in academic institutions.

Something I’m still trying to grapple with as an outsider is that what I see daily is great disparities between what might be a developing nation and the facade of happy, peaceful and problem-less society that the academics, officials and students tell me about. It’s a topic I try to tackle with every interview that I conduct.

That’s all for today!

–Miyuki

Today was the first day of the National Higher Education Entrance Examination, commonly referred to as the gaokao(1st tone, 3rd tone).
We hear a lot about the Chinese version of the SAT in the U.S., and I decided to test the rumor that anxious parents will wait outside the gates of the testing centers in solidarity with their children taking the examination.
Cannie (my translator), Amanda, and I chose two high schools located in the Haidian district: Beidafuzhong (High school connected to Peking University) and Renminfuzhong (High school connected to Renmin University) to visit. We arrived at Renminfuzhong about half an hour before the morning session of the exam let out, and did indeed find dozens of parents congregating outside the gates. We also found several ambulances, security guards, volunteers providing free water to parents, and several people with fliers sent to advertise their wares to nervous mothers and fathers.

We managed to interview representatives of all of these groups, though we focused on the parents.

This delightful photo has nothing to do with the Gaokao

Our first interview of the day was with a father leaning on a fence by the gate. We introduced ourselves and asked some questions in Chinese about his daughter’s education. We then felt slightly foolish when he provided a lengthy answer to a question in perfect English; he had lived in Canada for many years, and his daughter had spent much of her life there. When the interview moved on to his hopes and anxiety for his daughter, we were surprised to learn that she had already been admitted to the University of British Columbia! Clearly, this man was a far cry from the stereotypical super-stressed Chinese parent; he went so far as to imply that he did not care how his daughter did on the test, and asked her to take it “just to see”.

Our second interview was closer to what we had expected. We approached a mother standing on the sidewalk in the shade of a tree (we stalk our prey very carefully: good candidates for street interviews are alone, not outwardly preoccupied, and do not appear to be urgently needed somewhere else). She had high hopes for her daughter, who would certainly be going to school in China. She did not appear too concerned, and had only positive things to say about her daughter’s preparation for the gaokao.

“Positive” is the one word that best summarizes the responses we received during every interview, at both schools, with all groups. Even a woman at Beidafuzhong, who felt that her son was of mediocre academic ability and had no real talents, believed that her son would still gain admission to a university.

Of course, this is both good and bad. The good part is that the growth in China’s higher education system has provided much more opportunity, greatly reduced the stress levels, for students in today’s Beijing. The bad is that there is a great deal of data that shows that not only is this progress not affecting central and western China at nearly as significant a level, but that much progress in Beijing and Shanghai comes at the expense of that of the central and western provinces. The mediocre son in Beijing will be able to go to university, but he is arguably taking the place of a brighter student in Hebei that will have no choice but to study at an inferior university (or not even that), due to admissions policies that highly favor the people of the eastern cities.

Nor does this photo

I feel that I have learned what I came to learn about education in Beijing; now it is time to learn more about the central and western provinces. Hopefully I can meet with students at universities in Beijing who come from these provinces and are willing to discuss their experiences. Cannie and I actually did meet such a student several days ago when we walked around the Beida campus conducting intervies.

All right, that is it for now. Sorry I don’t have photos of the gaokao sites, I didn’t want to jeopardize our chances of finding parents willing to speak with us.

Best of the day:

(In Chinese)
“Every student is unique, and may have abilities or skills in addition to those measured by the gaokao. Do you think that there are additional measurements that could be taken into account in college admissions that would help your son?”
“No.”
-An amused mother informs us that her son is untalented and does not put much effort into his studies.

(Below is a view inside the Century Gallery)

Something that I noticed which has not so much hindered but has been a minor obstacle is learning to work with a middleman, or an interpreter. While I am completely appreciative of my interpreter and her talent, I feel like an intruder coming in with my English questions. Most times, the body language with which my interviewees respond however indicates that they’re very willing to tell me about their lives. In fact, the two facts I first provide them with: 1) I barely speak Chinese and 2) I’m making a documentary, actually puts me on a pedestal. So I’ve noticed that at least in the field of art, Western interest and attention is valued–a definite advantage I have while conducting my research because people want to talk to me.

As a result, specifically in reference to today’s trip, I learned a lot about the business side of the art world. I learned about the ratio of foreign and domestic art collectors in the 90s and now, the way that some galleries supply the demand (which is and has been for a while, controversial political paintings) while others try to create a demand with what they have because they believe in their artists. I learned that entering the world of galleries is a step that college graduates must consciously take, that it is a step outside the realm of academic painting that they have learned at school.

-Miyuki

We then spent an embarrassingly long portion of the afternoon researching remote places in China to move to on Expedia. Apparently there is a Super 8 motel in Xinjiang that goes for $33/night with high speed internet access, a fitness center, AND easy access to the entertainment street in Urumuqi. Crazy. Then, on the way back from dinner (Korean food! mmmmm), we discovered a big-kid playground, and spent a good half hour bouncing around on the equipment.

Unproductive days like this make me wonder why Freeman decided to fund us. It’s kind of a problem. Except not really, because I LOVE bibimbap.

(Was that a nonsequitur?)

xoxo, amanda ling

—-

Person of the day:

The artist formerly known as Estella

(Miyuki)

1. Pizza Hut is a fairly high-end restaurant in China, with a very nicely decorated interior and proud declarations that their pizzas are “interesting and exotica”.

2. Having a street name is sometimes not enough to get to your intended destination. After taking two different cabs, our group got separated, confused, and lost. It turns out there were two streets with the same exact name.

3. “Western-style” toilets [see above] are getting more and more common, although travelers to China should still be prepared to use the occasional stoop toilet in public facilities. Pictured above was our bathroom at the lovely Piao Home Inn, where the bathroom floor flooded every time someone took a shower because there was only an one-inch high division between the shower and the rest of the bathroom. After two weeks we decided to move to the XiJiao Hotel, which was not only more conveniently-located but also featured actual shower doors.

The single-ride train tickets here cost about fourteen cents. They’re flexible and plastic and about the size of a credit card, hard to lose, easy to find in a pocket. Since they contain an electronic sensor, you can press the card against a scanner at the ticket wicket without having to stop and impede the current of human traffic. Also, the subway system reuses the cards, so you have to relinquish yours (sad) before you leave the station unless you have a rechargeable train pass. The greatest thing about these cards is that each one of them has a map of the entire subway system printed on the back, so as long as you know where you’re going, you’re never lost.

And buses are good, too.

But so far I’ve found taking taxis and riding buses from church to church on Sunday mornings and afternoons to be the best way to go. A few buses run up and down Di’Anmen Dajie, the long road that passes by the Kuanjie church. My translator, a linguistics graduate student at Tsinghua University, and I hopped on a yellow bus after leaving the Haidian Christian Church early Sunday afternoon and chatted about the service we’d observed, and in particular about the woman sentry posted outside of the elevator on the third floor. The petite older woman was sitting on a chair outside of the offices, probably to spare the church officials and preachers from curious visitors like me. I didn’t understand much of what she was saying to my translator, but eventually she led us to the office and introduced us to a preacher.

As we were leaving the Haidian area on the bus, my translator, who is not religious, turned to me and said that the first thing the woman had said to us when the elevator doors opened and we stepped out was, “Do you believe?”He remarked that she and other religious people that he’d met in Beijing had a mystical or secretive aspect to them, which I find to be true about religious people anywhere. In any case, looking for the Kuanjie church, we’d taken several wrong buses and retraced our steps over and over again on the sidewalk in the heat.

A bus traffic guide pointed us in one direction, a passerby in another, and the address I’d jotted down in my notebook wasn’t much help either. According to my translator, these bus traffic guides tend to be people who were laid off from their jobs and hired by the government, whether temporarily or permanently I couldn’t say. They tend to know their way around the area fairly well, and it turned out that the address I’d found on a website was wrong. Following the guide’s directions we finally made it to the church and found that, sadly, the wrought-iron gates were locked.

But the food is better.

It was about six in the evening by then. My translator introduced me to a narrow restaurant hidden in a small lane by Beihai where we were served a huge bowl of white fish marinated in la-yu, a red, hot spicy oil, and a dish of woodear mushrooms [photo to come], the combination of which redeemed an otherwise slightly unproductive afternoon.

-Mary