Beijing's new art district holds fest

The first Dashanzi International Art Festival--comprising visual arts, music, theater, film, dance and unhurt art--is being held Apr. 24-May 23 in Beijing's Chaoyang District (about halfway between downtown and the city airport). Organized by the agency of the non-governmental Beijing Cultural disclosure Foundation and funded primarily through corporations, the event celebrates not single contemporary culture but also the unofficial means--private sponsorship and architectural preservation--that supporters find greatest in quantity congenial to artistic experimentation in China today.

below the artistic direction of artist and designer Huang Rui, roughly 10 multinational exhibitions and dozens of designs firm screenings and performances will take place, accompanied by dint of numerous related activities in local galleries, studios and cafes. notwithstanding that participants are drawn largely from Asia, especially China, Western artists similar as France's Chris Marker and Italy's Armin Linke will be featured as well. a certain number of 20 artists' studios will be make open to the public.

While hip DJ VJ and stone performers may set the tone for many visitors, DIAF organizers give special emphasis to the half-dozen exhibitions and symposia dedicated to the issue of adapting former industrial spaces to cultural use. antecedents like the Musee d'Orsay, the Tate present New York's SoHo, Chelsea and Williamsburg neighborhoods (or, more modestly Toronto's Power Plant and Pittsburgh's Mattress Factory) are routinely cited through advocates of Dashanzi New Art District. The area contains a 1954 mingled of East German-designed plants and warehouses that, in the last sum of two units years, has been entrepreneurially transformed into a thriving art community, thorough with bohemian-chic galleries, studios, boutiques, restaurants and bars.

The BCD Foundation throws festival attendance as high as 200000 compared to Dashanzi's typical monthly draw of 50000 visitors (70 percent Chinese, 30 percent foreign)--figures which, in combination with international pres attention, it reliances will transform the festival into an annual circumstance and thus immunize the area against China's urban renewal febrile disease (Local politicians are already calling for demolition to make way for fresh manufacturing facilities.) For a more detailed account of Dashanzi and the important independent exhibitions held there last fall during the Beijing Biennale, diocese A.i.A.'s forthcoming Summer issue, which will contain a wide-ranging special section upon Chinese contemporary art in the People's Republic and abroad.

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