Beijing 798 art zone

I visited Beijing 798 art zone on the 22nd of June.Those photos above were taken by myself during my visiting.

Precursor and genre:

The area occupied by Beijing 798 Art Zone was once the place for Beijing North China wireless joint equipment factory (namely, 718 Joint Factory), which was designed and built by the experts of former G.D.R in the 1950s. The designing task of the 718 Joint Factory was in the charge of a German architectural institution in Dessau, which lied in the same city with Bauhaus school , at that time and they two shared the same architectural spirits whose main characteristics are meeting the practical demands,that is the genre what later called Bauhaus.

Function:

In 798 Art Zone, there are nearly 400 organizitions including galleries, artists’ private studios,cultural companies like animated cartoon, television media, publishing, design and consultation. 798 Art Zone has become an exhibition center of Chinese culture and art, an influential cultural creative concentration area home and abroad.

This painting is of a caricature style.

The first line says: Thinking is dangerous, take care!
The second line says: One penny, biannual exhibition.

This sort of humor in language is quite popular in Beijing, young people like to play with words to generate a sense of humor and to arouse thinking back.

Critics:

In my point of view, the 798 art zone nowadays is getting too commercial, and its getting into tourism somehow. There are so many people visiting all the time, holding SLR cameras, shooting the artworks, making self portraits together with the outdoor sculptures, the shops are always crowded etc. It has lost its original appearance when the first artists came to settle here, with a persueing for art itself. However, in another perspective, there's not a big fault if art is connected with business, as it is called" art industry", they have to be commercial if it is industrialized.