The other day got to 798, a huge and active place full of lots of galleries, towards the north west of the city – on the way to Bei Gao and all the artists’ villages out that way. Met Eileen Zhang and Tiger [who had helped me set up ADSL for the mac in the flat] at 798/Red Gate. The show there is Jiang Weitao’s abstract paintings – interesting work that he names ‘Art Documents’. In the catalogue Tally Beck, the manager of 798/Red Gate, discusses Chinese and Western abstract traditions, which is very interesting [my background is as an abstract painter]. Chinese abstraction emerges from the “philosophical link between Chinese calligraphy, painting and poetry. This trinity of expression, known as san jue, or the ‘three perfect things’ is a concept acknowledged…as one of the keys to understanding Chinese artists’ approach to abstraction” [Tally Beck – The Harmonic Abstraction of Jiang Weitao – catalogue essay].
Also found the Long March Space, which has some great acoustics and is a great looking space. Did a number of recordings here – the cicadas were top volume – deafening. At least two types singing. Before I got any further I bumped into Denise with Qu Zi Jian, an engineer here for a few days from down south near Hong Kong, and Sun Yu Ming, an artist who has settled here in Beijing to promote his career. Denise has some Chinese and Qu Zi Jian has some English, but Sun Yu Ming and I do not have either so we had some laughs communicating via drawing in my sketch book, not to mention the obligatory Tsing Tao beer.
Also got to the Natural History Museum the other day, in the pursuit of local cicadas and crickets. Kind of disappointing really, though a fair few specimens, hard to tell if they were local. Will try to contact an entomologist via this institution who could identify the species in my recordings. Came across my first experience of the wholesale destruction of parts of Beijing that we hear about – it was quite horrific. I was looking for Qianmen Dajie, a shopping street south of Tian’anmen Square and all that was left was rubble surrounded by billboards – shocking! I followed the crowd past this and found some hutong still in existence but surrounded by rubble on each side with the constant tap tap tapping of the manual destruction of all the buildings around. What happens to the people whose businesses are destroyed? Presumably they are ‘relocated’ but I can’t imagine there is a lot of compensation handed out.
