The 798 Factories Dashanzi Arts Festival is going on at the moment, and for those of us who can’t make the trip to Beijing there are two new books (and a t-shirt) to go with it. The first is Beijing 798: Reflections on Art, Architecture and Society in China edited by Huang Rui, and the second 798: A Photographic Journal by Zhu Yan with contributors Yin Jinan and Li Jiangshu.
Beijing 798 is a study in contrast, one location, two milieu, fifty years apart. Reflecting on art, architecture and society, the images and texts in this book offer a microcosm of the radical social and cultural changes that have swept through Beijing (and for that matter China) over the last 50 years. East German designed military factory turned contemporary art and culture center, Beijing 798 is captured in the 200 vintage black and white images of the industrial space and its programmes at the height of the revolutionary milieu of the 1950s and an equal number of color photos of a radically different milieu, 50 years later in the present. In the contrasting images of model workers, Great Leap Forward parades, East German state visits and Big Character Posters on the one hand and today’s images of contemporary art exhibits, rock and roll concerts, artist studios, galleries, restaurants, this book bears witness to the birth and becoming of China’s new society without losing sight of its past.
Beijing 798: Reflections on Art, Architecture and Society in China
798: A Photographic Journal by Zhu Yan