Culture Capital: Beijing's Artistic Legacy

Editor's Note: We're celebrating tbj's ten-year anniversary all month by looking back at some of our favorite articles from the past decade. Forgotten City, which ran in the magazine from 2004-2008, was written by sinologist and history buff Ed Lanfranco, a California native who lived in Beijing from 1989-2009 and now resides back in his home state where he is researching Chinese food safety and security issues.

Like other great global capitals, Beijing has long been a patron of the arts. For centuries, artists in the northern capital have sung, written, sculpted, painted and shaped the soul of the Forgotten City in countless creative ways. But when you consider Beijing’s artistic tradition, it is important to analyze the essential link between art and its audience: connections between art and commerce are indeed ancient, but examples of individual expression that break the boundaries of convention are a relatively recent phenomenon.

There was traditionally a narrow bandwidth of what defined ‘high art’ i.e. paintings, calligraphy, porcelain, ivory, jade and bronzes. This was the domain of a miniscule elite group: prior to the mid-twentieth century, the genius of Chinese artistry was collected privately by the privileged few of power and wealth – a pyramid with the emperor at the apex that extended down to a base of affluent merchants.

But when you expand the definition of ‘art,’ the city’s legacy comes alive: Believers at Beijing’s Buddhist temples were able to view religious paintings and sculpture, while guild halls and theaters sponsored ‘pay-per-view events’ in the performing arts. The streets around Tianqiao throbbed with contortionists and storytellers vying for the coins people would toss.

The old name for the city is synonymous with artistic excellence in several spheres: Textile makers, performers and culinary artists are still judged by critics on how well they weave Peking Rugs, perform Peking Opera renditions and the taste of their Peking Duck.

Beijing did not have an art museum until after the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The country's great educator of the Republican era, Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), founded the Academy of Fine Arts of Peking in 1919, but it did not have a permanent facility. The earliest record of a venue housing art is the Art Exhibition Hall of the Union of Chinese Artists, located in Shuaifuyuan Hutong, east of Wangfujing. The National Art Museum (Meishuguan) on May Fourth Street (Wusi Dajie), a great example of ‘Mao-haus’ architecture, was started in late 1958 and completed in 1962.

Although ‘high art’ was not made for consumption by the laobaixing, the quest for investing in good artifacts seems universal – the evolution of space at Liulichang and Dashanzi is a fascinating example of parallel art economies. In the 15th century Liulichang was a factory outside the first Ming city wall that produced glazed ceramic tiles for palaces deemed worthy of the rooftop honor. These kilns were cold by the 18th century, and Liulichang’s workshops – now in the center of the expanded city – were converted into an area renowned for selling artwork and books.
A similar process has happened in the last five years with the conversion of 798 and other defunct state-owned electronics factories in the industrial complexes that were built by East Germans 50 years ago. Nowadays the galleries at Dashanzi, an exit off the airport expressway, have been placed on the mental maps of the art world. Beijing’s artistic legacy is now more alive than ever.