A work on display in the Beijing Tokyo Art
Project gallery. Photograph: Jonathan Watts
Jonathan Watts reports from the opening day of the Dashanzi International Art Festival.
I hit the wrong tone in my first post yesterday. It was more like a piece of newspaper reporting, with the emphasis on the outlandish. The real motivation for this blog about the Dashanzi contemporary arts festival was to offer a personal take on a place that has inspired me more than anywhere else in China, and at the opening of the festival today, I was reminded why. In a single word: openness.
Almost anything seems possible here because it is a meeting place of so many different ideas, cultures and styles. Starting with the setting - a weapons factory-turned- art hothouse - there is a gloriously chaotic mix in Dashanzi that I have never felt anywhere else. You can see it in the work on display - ranging from the pathos of Wu Jialin's incredible black and white photographs of Christians in the countryside, through the ingenious play on visual and historical perspective in Wang Pang's oil paintings of the big communist figures of history, to the absolute junk that some galleries are trying to sell off for thousands of dollars.
You can see it, too, in the interaction of famous artists and curators with the public, and in the international flavour of the festival, with its Brazillan drummers, Korean films and Chinese Dragon dancers in khaki camouflage rather than the traditional red and yellow. This is also one of the few places in China where anti-Japanese xenophobia is largely absent: one of the most highly praised exhibitions was the work by Nara Yoshimoto and Miran Fukuda in the Beijing Tokyo Art Project gallery.
Commercialism, bureaucracy and censorship were more evident in the mix this year and they may yet stifle the energy of this place (more on this later in the week). And of course, this avant-garde art district is anything but the norm in China; among the tens of thousands who attended today at least half were foreign, while the rest were an affluent and well-educated elite.
Yet, Dashanzi's embrace of chaos, possibility and change is entirely typical of the country as a whole. In more than two years in the country, it is one of the best reasons I have found to be hopeful about the future of China. I'll cast a more critical eye on the district in the week ahead, but today, at least, I left the festival with this belief intact.
