‘Art is a Thinking to Enlightens the Future’: art as a brand, art as aspiration

Since the district’s official classification as a Creative Industries Precinct in 2006, 798 has spawned a range of cultural enterprises, many of which have taken on the idea of ‘art’ with which to brand their businesses. Walking around 798 today, the word ‘art’ is constantly flashing up before you, on billboards advertising galleries or design consultancies, on signs for gift shops, hotels, bars and cafes. Artopal, Artside, 798 Art Hotel, such and such Art Centre or Artspace … Visitors are repeatedly running into odd composite bi-products of the word ‘art’ – uses that suggest the term’s ability to ‘value-add’ to all kinds of entrepreneurial pursuits. In both English and Chinese, the word often looks raw and partial, slapped onto ventures and slipped into business titles in a way that suggests its newness – or even more so, its novelty – as a Chinese marketing category. At 798, the term ‘art’ has a faddish quality to it, a kind of hype and artificial freshness reminiscent of the thousands of so-called ‘Twenty-first Century’ housing developments, or many SoHos, under construction across the country.

To the extent that art is a brand at today’s 798, it is one that conflates notions of the global and the contemporary, and one that is consonant (or you could say ‘harmonious’) with national discourses of China’s economic development. At 798, the word ‘art’ occurs frequently alongside the terms ‘new age’ (xin shidai), international (guoji) or ‘contemporary’ (dangdai). Billboards advertising Coca Cola or Vitamin Water do so by situating 798 within a perceived pantheon of global and cultural cities (‘Available in New York, Paris, Japan, and now Beijing!’). In signs, advertisements and art-branded objects at 798, ‘art’ generally represents a component in a contemporary urban lifestyle, the latest in fashion and, by virtue, a hallmark of a Chinese cosmopolitanism.

‘Only Products, No Art’: honesty and irony in the new market

In the Beijing autumn of 2011, I saw the above billboard at 798, in which two images are accompanied by the slightly odd English: ‘Only Products, No Art.’ In Chinese, the sign is only slightly less mysterious, announcing that ‘Li Qing’s Products Are Not Art’, and then giving an email address, presumably as a contact for curious customers. At first glance it wasn’t clear whether the sign was supposed to be ironic or not. If it was it would contain an extra meaning, translatable to a certain audience; it would be a comment that cut both ways, both telling it like it is yet critiquing its own message in a coded language. If it wasn’t, however, it was simply a straightforward statement, upfront about its products’ social function and declaring plainly its lack of pretensions.

The context was what made it confusing. 798 is a collection of both local and international high-end galleries – a so-called ‘international art district’ – but it’s also a bustling commercial market selling contemporary art, furniture, homewares, art souvenirs and other dinky design objects. It’s already difficult at 798 to tell exactly where the art ends and the retail begins, the galleries blurring into shops and each often resembling the other. Was this a clever and Warhol-esque comment on 798 and its relationship with consumer culture – ala Chinese artist, Zhao Bandi, or American artists, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holtzer, all of whom have rented advertising space with which to exhibit similarly ambiguous works – or simply the advertisement of a local entrepreneur? In other words, was the sign deliberately ambiguous, or only so because of its situation at a crossroads of expectations of contemporary art, and of market and avant-garde definitions?

Yan Jun is a creative polymorph. Search on his name on the Internet and you’ll come up with a list of roles – from experimental sound artist, to critic, to curator, to performance poet – and stories of his pioneering in China’s underground music scene from the late 1990s to early 2000s. In 1998 he began the independent label, Sub Jam, initially to publish zines and later for music CDs; and in 2004 he established Kwanyin records for the release of more experimental works. From June 2005 to December 2010, Yan and his Sub Jam community organised a series weekly of performances called Waterland Kwanyin at the Beijing Bar, 2Kolegas, serving up rock, experimental and electronic music to an ever-morphing crowd of listeners.

Both Sub Jam and Kwanyin continue, supported by a regularly updated blog (see here for Yan Jun’s own), as do gigs, and the general greasing of communal and creative activities for which Yan Jun has become widely known. Meanwhile Yan remains one of China’s most important experimental artists, pushing the limits of sound, language and music in his own performances and recordings. Translator, Maghiel van Crevel once said Yan Jun makes things happen, and there is no doubt that Yan has this generative role. Raised in Lanzhou, but based in Beijing since the late 1990s, Yan is something of a creative catalyst, preferring the early and ambiguous stages of invention and putting a high value on the amorphous in artistic communities.