After Art: Precarity and Expulsion in Songzhuang

Wang Chunchen’s 2010 monograph on the changing role of art in Chinese society opens and ends with accounts of the forced resettlement of artists and the sudden demolition of their studios in Beijing’s Chaoyang District between December 2009 and February 2010. In what this prominent art critic and curator viewed as the continuation of a struggle that had begun in the 1990s, artists responded to these events with a series of protests and performances that became known as ‘a warm winter’ (暖冬). ‘It is obvious,’ he concluded, ‘that the organic, spontaneous formation of cultural and artistic ecosystems has never been valued, and their existence is not considered meaningful or valuable for society’ (Wang 2010: 8; my translation). As art studios, galleries, and artists are repeatedly expelled from previously ‘undesirable’ areas to which they have contributed to increase real estate values—echoing the process of gentrification-through-art that Saskia Sassen (1991: 336–37) observed in New York’s Soho district between the 1960s and the 1980s—contemporary Chinese art ‘is forever drifting in search of its dreamland’ while ‘bearing the scars of social progress’ (Wang 2010: 8).

For a short period in the first decade of this century, contemporary Chinese art appeared to have found that dreamland in the town of Songzhuang, on the outskirts of Beijing. The history of Songzhuang Art Village as a slice of the intellectual and art history of postsocialist China remains under-researched. Its history defies clearcut distinctions between the official and the grassroots (民间), and cannot be subsumed under the categories of an artist-led alternative to institutional urbanism (see, for instance, Cornell 2018) or a government-led, policy-based establishment of ‘creative districts’ (see, for instance, Liu et al. 2013).

How has Songzhuang gone from representing ‘a well-institutionalized location for contemporary Chinese art’ and ‘a model for developing cultural industry’, as Meiqin Wang (2010: 188, 196) described it, to its current state of decline and even ruin? Based on field research conducted in Songzhuang and Beijing between 2014 and 2024, this essay tries to complicate both narratives, as it sheds light on how changes in local leadership, the role of international galleries, and cultural narratives of nostalgia and struggle weave the precarious conditions of life and creativity in this town where thousands of artists continue to work and live.

The Firstcomers

Songzhuang is a township comprising about 30 villages on the west side of Chaobai River, which marks the border between Beijing’s Tongzhou District in the west and the City of Yanjiao in Hebei Province on the eastern side. When the first members of Beijing’s avant-garde art scene moved to the area in 1994, they found locals willing to rent or sell vacant rural homes and other buildings, and turned them into studios. Their initial contact was Zhang Huiping, an artist from Tongzhou, who lived in Yuanmingyuan Painters’ Village (圆明园画家村) at the time. Fang Lijun was the first artist to settle in Songzhuang, and was soon followed by Yue Minjun, Liu Wei, Yang Shaobin, Shao Yinong, and Muchen, among others; before long, they were joined by critics and curators of contemporary art Liao Wen and Li Xianting. In the second half of the 1990s, Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun established themselves as key exponents of an artistic current that Li Xianting (1993) had theorised as ‘Cynical Realism’, which was embraced enthusiastically by international collectors and critics. Renowned artist Huang Yongyu also moved to Songzhuang, in 1997. However, while his residing in the town was later publicised to increase the prestige of Songzhuang Art Village, Huang rarely interacted with the local art community.

The first artists moved to Songzhuang before the forced disbandment of Yuanmingyuan Painters’ Village in 1995. Nonetheless, that event—together with cheap housing and the presence of well-known figures of the contemporary art scene—contributed to the growth of the new art community in the following years. Furthermore, as I will discuss in this essay, the marginality vis-a-vis both the state and the market embraced by the Yuanmingyuan residents and their forced expulsion from that area in the name of urban redevelopment would later become a cornerstone of the identity of the Songzhuang art community.

Most artists who moved to Songzhuang in those early years established their studios in the low-rise brick houses and courtyards of Xiaopu Village. Songzhuang remained a predominantly rural environment of fields, farms, a few factories, and almost no amenities, restaurants, or shops—let alone art galleries or museums—with only unpaved roads connecting it to urban Beijing. As later developments would show, the Songzhuang of those years was about to enter, following Tian and Guo (2019), what may be described as a ‘peri-urban’ phase of mixed agricultural and non-agricultural land use and ambiguous property rights.

A dearth of art galleries further increased the influence of figures like Li Xianting, who could introduce art from Songzhuang’s studios to galleries and collectors in the city, as well as the importance of Beijing-based art traders who would connect Songzhuang-based artists with potential buyers. At the time, according to reports (see, for instance, Wu and Han 2019), the Public Security Bureau would not allow artists who lived in Songzhuang to stay or gather in Beijing, thus forcing them to rely on intermediaries.

In an essay for the catalogue of ‘Made in the Village’ (2003, cur. Chen Qiuchi), one of the first exhibitions dedicated to works by Songzhuang artists, art critic and curator Pi Li (2003) wrote:

The rural village—or rather, the village close to the city—provides these artists with an almost self-enclosed artistic space, where they can focus on their emotions, nightmares, and bodies. Even though they extend their artistic feelers into the outside world from time to time, they do so in a way that is entirely subjective and stubborn. Their art is just like the place where they live—far from the hubbub of the city, but unable to escape its nightmares.

Visions of Utopia

By 2004, between 200 and 300 artists had their studios in Songzhuang, while remaining dependent on the art market infrastructure in central Beijing. In that year, the new Communist Party secretary of Songzhuang Township, Hu Jiebao, who was allied with then-party secretary of Xiaopu Village, Cui Dabai, initiated the transformation of this scattered community into ‘Songzhuang Art Village’. The central government had ordered the clearing out of inefficient and redundant township-and-village enterprises (TVEs), leaving factory buildings empty and slashing the revenue sources of local authorities. In 2008, Hu said that as he looked for a way to revive Songzhuang’s economy, he found inspiration in the example of Soho, New York (Meng 2008).

In Hu’s vision, Songzhuang would become a cluster of creative industries where art festivals and exhibitions would attract domestic and international art buyers, and its closed factory buildings would reopen as galleries and studios. One of the first galleries to be established and host an art festival in Songzhuang was Sunshine International Art Museum (上上国际美术馆). The gallery is owned by painter Li Guangming, who moonlighted in the construction business before acquiring the former building of a TVE furniture factory and transforming it into a vast exhibition and studio space in 2005–06. While Songzhuang’s authorities were neither the first nor the only ones in China to spearhead institutional support for the ‘creative industries’ (see, for instance, on Shanghai, He 2016: 57), Hu’s initiative pre-dated the launch of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2006–10), with its emphasis on developing the creative industries and homegrown innovation, and came years before its slogans were translated into nationwide policies.

Because published materials recording the numbers and names of the artists who moved to Songzhuang in those years were often compiled under the direction of Hu Jiebao, the data may not be entirely reliable, but it is generally accepted that, between 2005 and 2008, more than 2,000 artists moved into the town. Hu Jiebao is credited with not only helping artists settle in Songzhuang, backing the creation of galleries and events, and improving basic infrastructure, but also playing a role in shaping the identity of Songzhuang Art Village by personally overseeing the publication of books collating the work and thoughts of artists, critics, and curators (see, for instance, Hu 2005; Yang 2007), as well as initiatives such as the Songzhuang Art Festival. Hu was also responsible for introducing the Songzhuang Art Village logo (Figure 1), which is still ubiquitous in the town, as local authorities encouraged businesses to incorporate it into their signage to promote the Songzhuang brand.

In this phase, Songzhuang exemplified how, as Sasha Su-Ling Welland (2018: 71) succinctly put it, ‘state surveillance of artist villages shifted to culture industry incorporation of them’. In terms of living conditions and opportunities to exhibit their art, however, this represented an improvement for many artists. When conversing with those who settled in Songzhuang during that era, the irony of the fact that many boundary-pushing, critically minded artists and curators owe so much to a representative of the Party-State is not lost on them.

An undated promotional booklet produced about 2007 by the Administrative Committee of the Songzhuang Cultural and Creative Industry Cluster and preserved at the Centre for Visual Studies of Peking University displays how Hu and his consultants imagined what Songzhuang would become by 2020. Alongside reproductions of Fang Lijun’s paintings and a photo of Li Xianting, who in 2013 would admit—with some regret—to having advised Hu on the creation of Songzhuang Art Village (Li 2013), it shows renderings of the monumental exhibition centres that were to rise in Songzhuang and the future look of the neighbouring Tongzhou business district. Already home of ‘the best contemporary Eastern art’ (ACSCCIC 2007[?]: 2), Songzhuang would develop its ‘art ecosystem’ while also becoming a hub for China’s animation and design industries. The booklet’s cover reads: ‘Songzhuang, China. The holy land of contemporary art.’

Sino-Bohemians and Salvage Accumulation

It is in the writings of local artists and curators from that era that the identity of Songzhuang Art Village as the offspring of Yuanmingyuan Painters’ Village crystallises. The experience of that community of ‘drifting’ artists and writers that formed around Beijing’s Fuyuan Gate starting from the mid-1980s emerges from such documents as Wu Wenguang’s 1990 documentary film Bumming in Beijing and Wang Jifang’s 1999 book The Last Romance. Wang’s impressions from her first visit to the village in 1992 capture the lives of those ‘Sino-bohemians’ (Barmé 1996: 148):

What caught my eyes was a group of malnourished and pale-faced painters. They did not complain about their hardships, nor did they mention their condition of ‘three-without’—without household registration, without public employment and without family. They were satisfied with being able to fill their stomachs and paint every day. (Wang 1999: 17)

The area was forcibly cleared by the authorities in 1995 and many of those artists moved to Songzhuang, carrying with them the memory of that community and its premature disbandment. Yuanmingyuan Painters’ Village came to represent a certain ideal—namely, the choice of independent creativity and artistic experimentation at the expense of professional stability, material comforts, and, especially, the acceptance of, and co-optation by, official cultural institutions.

As the story that it had been founded by artists who moved there from Yuanmingyuan Painters’ Village became a leitmotif, Songzhuang also came to be imagined as a new haven where artistic experimenters could aspire to a degree of independence from the forces of the Party-State and the international art market. Introducing an exhibition dedicated to the ‘Songzhuang Generation’ that featured art by Lu Shun, Pang Yongjie, Piao Guangxie, and Zhang Donghong among others, curator Ma Yue (2007) described Songzhuang as a reincarnation of Yuanmingyuan Painters’ Village. Songzhuang artists had ‘no intention of creating a Songzhuang School of Painting’, observed Ma, but were united by their refusal to participate in the speculations of the art market and their distance from the art establishment. Evoking Zhou Dunyi’s flower metaphors, Ma wrote: ‘If the China Artists Association is the peony of Chinese art, then the Yuanmingyuan [Painters’ Village] is the lily of Chinese art, and Songzhuang is simply the margins outside the margins—the wild lily in the ravine’ (Ma 2007).

Looking back in 2016 at the history of Songzhuang Art Village, Beijing-based art curator and historian Wu Hong emphasised how, contrary to most art districts, Songzhuang was not the result of planned design and financial investment, but ‘was formed spontaneously by artists who pursued artistic and creative freedom’ (Wu 2016: 4). Wu compared Songzhuang artists to James C. Scott’s ‘barbarians by design’, who deliberately placed themselves at the state’s periphery and whose practices were permeated by ‘state evasion’ and ‘state prevention’ (Scott 2009: 8). According to Wu (2016: 4), Songzhuang artists

distanced themselves from artistically complacent mainstream modes that did not allow for independent thought, as well as ossified academic styles … [T]he group gradually shaped rules for how to avoid being governed, which seems to have influenced the ways that many Songzhuang artists speak and act. They treat art like life; they are warm with people and feel a responsibility to society. However, there is also a sceptical spirit that seems to have become subconscious habit, which can manifest as cynicism about social interactions or as the deconstruction of the intellectual inertia of power.

While references to Yuanmingyuan Painters’ Village abound in essays and interviews on Songzhuang published during the Hu Jiebao era, and its connection to Songzhuang Art Village was all-important to the self-understanding of Songzhuang as an art community, the contrast between Songzhuang and the 798 Art Zone was almost equally important. Once the home of many art studios, 798 had come to symbolise art market speculation and the distorting influence of the superficial tastes of foreign curators and collectors (see, for instance, Shen 2007: 4).

Like Songzhuang Art Village, the 798 Art Zone had also grown on the ruins of past waves of industrialisation and represented another ‘district’ where local authorities had facilitated the concentration of art-related businesses. However, following sustained investment in improvements to local infrastructure, art galleries, design agencies, and even high-end restaurants moved into 798, and, by the mid-2000s, most artists had moved their studios away from the area because rents had become unaffordable. Mario Cristiani, the co-founder of the international art gallery Galleria Continua who was responsible for the establishment of its Beijing branch in the 798 Art Zone in 2004, describes the operations of many other foreign galleries in China at the time as almost akin to ‘colonial’ extraction: acquiring artworks at low prices from Chinese artists and selling them at highly inflated prices to foreign collectors (Cristiani 2023).

In her influential ethnography of the globalised trade of matsutake mushrooms, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015: 62) defines ‘salvage accumulation’ as ‘the process through which lead[ing] firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced’, thus ‘taking advantage of value produced without capitalist control’. While Tsing’s examples of salvage accumulation included ivory and whale oil, this concept can be applied to the operations of international art galleries in sites like the 798 Art Zone, which may be described as ‘simultaneously inside and outside capitalism’, or ‘peri-capitalist’. After all, as Tsing (2015: 63) notes, ‘all kinds of goods and services produced by peri-capitalist activities, human and nonhuman, are salvaged for capitalist accumulation’. Chinese artists created contemporary artworks as a non-capitalist value form under conditions largely defined by party-state policies over which international galleries had no control, and often far from sites like 798—such as in Songzhuang. Thanks to the peri-capitalist function assigned to 798 by government authorities and global interest in new art from a rising China, which brought this site into capitalist supply lines, international galleries were able to translate that art into capitalist assets, thus allowing accumulation (Tsing 2015: 301).

Uncontained Precariousness

Since about 2011, with the end of Hu Jiebao’s tenure as Songzhuang party secretary, the condition of many artists, galleries, and art institutions in Songzhuang has significantly deteriorated. In that year, the new party secretary, Li Xia, vowed to continue the development of Songzhuang into a creative industry cluster in a way that would emphasise culture and industry equally (Sina 2011). What followed in 2013–14 was the first wave of forced expulsions of artists from Songzhuang and the large-scale demolition of studios, homes, and even galleries and exhibition halls in various parts of the town. The demolitions damaged and scattered a community already hit by the impact of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–09 on the art market. The reason given by the authorities for the demolitions was that these buildings stood on land that was still designated for agricultural use and were therefore illegal, as was the artists’ purchase of housing permits.

Local artists dismissed these reasons as insufficient to justify the sudden demolitions, and some protested the evictions. They reasoned that the value of real estate in Songzhuang had risen thanks to the development of the art scene and the new local leadership was eager to redevelop the town—just as Wang Chunchen had witnessed only a few years earlier in Chaoyang District. Rumours circulated as to whose studio would be demolished next; at one point, even the home of Li Xianting was said to be at risk. Extensive redevelopment plans fuelled a rise in rents. Artists who had not been evicted made plans to leave as a sense of precarity and decline spread. Hu Jiebao himself—who still chaired the Songzhuang Art Promotion Association—reportedly criticised the modus operandi of the local authorities, but to no avail (Wu and Song 2013).

That feeling of precariousness and rising rents have been increasing further since 2015, when the Beijing municipality revealed plans to turn areas of Tongzhou District adjacent to Songzhuang into a subcentral administrative centre, which will involve the relocation of several agencies of the municipal government and hundreds of thousands of workers with them. Today those areas are characterised by half-empty skyscrapers and high-rise apartment buildings. Songzhuang, however, because it stands on the sandy soil of the ancient course of the Chaobai River, is said to be unsuitable for such structures.

The predicament of post-2011 Songzhuang reflects what it means to experience precariousness in contemporary China, particularly with reference to the issue of expulsion and the limitation of citizens’ rights—a question explored through a range of cultural phenomena by Margaret Hillenbrand in On the Edge (2023). As the case of Songzhuang shows, the risk of seeing one’s rights and belonging stripped away (Hillenbrand 2023: 20) is not limited to wage labour and specific social cohorts. In this case, it affects self-employed artists and art professionals who had elected to maintain a modicum of independence from the cultural establishment and who had hitherto been pivotal to the legacy project of the local party leadership. They, too, share in the condition of ‘civic zombiehood’, which, as Hillenbrand explains, ‘symbolises the fear—the fact—that no-one is safe from harm in a system where both the spirit and the letter of the law are applied inconsistently’ (Pia et al. 2024: 227).

A striking example of such ‘uncontained’ precariousness was the forced eviction in 2017 of Shen Jingdong, an artist who had moved to Beijing in 2004 and settled in Songzhuang in 2009. Originally from Nanjing and active in the avant-garde scene since the late 1990s, Shen’s art had already achieved critical and commercial success and was collected by the National Art Museum of China. On the morning of 29 March 2017, Shen posted on WeChat that his house and studio in Songzhuang were being demolished without any prior notice and asked his friends to come out and protest the demolition with him. As Shen and other Songzhuang artists did so, they were thrown to the ground by private security guards and some were injured. A photo taken by a bystander shows Shen and another protester being pinned to the ground with anti-riot forks—a ubiquitous policing tool in today’s Beijing (Artron 2017). Shen has since relocated his studio to Yanjiao and created artworks that comment on that experience (see Kim 2020: 26–31).

It is clear that one factor behind the precarious condition of Songzhuang’s art community is the personalised nature of the project that propelled its growth. Nonetheless, since Hu Jiebao stepped down from his position and a new leadership took over, what Songzhuang has experienced can hardly be described as the consequences of a policy reversal, but rather reflects the authorities’ change in attitude towards contemporary art. The party leadership in Songzhuang still appears to be pursuing the development of the town into a creative industry cluster—just one in which they see the presence of a vibrant community of contemporary artists as unessential and maybe even undesirable.

Paradoxically, it appears that the new leadership’s implementation of national policies and harnessing of copious funding for the development of China’s creative industries may be contributing to the decline of contemporary art in Songzhuang. For instance, in a 2013 article entitled ‘Nightmare Songzhuang’, Li Xianting described how the Songzhuang Art Festival, which had enjoyed the support of the local authorities for seven years, was replaced in 2012 with a ‘China Songzhuang Art Industry Expo’ that involved massive investment in urban redevelopment projects. At the event, Li wrote, ‘security was tight and the atmosphere unprecedentedly tense’. In addition, the main exhibition during the event consisted entirely of expensive ‘traditional’ art, with no contemporary works.

It may be added that the forced demolitions and expulsions, as well as the relocations caused by rising rents, generate insecurity while pruning social ties within the community, thus reducing the potential for solidarity among local artists—something the authorities may consider an added benefit. Finally, those who settled in Songzhuang earlier are said to be relatively less at risk of being evicted than newcomers. As the rumour about the eviction of Li Xianting shows, however, no-one can be said to be entirely outside the condition of precariousness that newcomer, poorer, and younger artists experience most acutely.

The Ruins of Art

The decline of the art community and collapsing support for contemporary art in Songzhuang also affect the built environment. Not only have ruins been obsessively represented and utilised in contemporary Chinese art, but the ruins of art—such as demolished art studios and academies, ruins in which artists settled, and ruins from which artists were evicted—occupy an important place in the history of contemporary Chinese art (Strafella and Berg 2023: 296–97). Songzhuang’s decline risks adding new examples to that illustrious lineage of artistic ruins.

Alongside vacant galleries and condemned studios, art institutions are also at risk of accelerated decay. An especially worrying example is the Songzhuang Contemporary Art Archive (SCAA), a non-profit institution dedicated to the study and documentation of contemporary Chinese art that includes an archive with materials from approximately 100 artists, a library, exhibition spaces, and a publishing house. Its academic advisors include such prominent figures as Guan Yuda, Jia Fangzhou, and Wang Chunchen, while Wu Hong served as its inaugural curator. The creation of the SCAA started in 2011 with the backing of Hu Jiebao and the support of artists such as Fang Lijun and Wang Guangyi, but the stylish building that houses it was completed only in 2015.

Due to lack of funding for repairs and maintenance, several rooms of the building are already suffering from water damage, part of the external cladding has fallen off, and some areas are not safe to access. The central courtyard, which had been paved with bricks of unsuitable quality, crumbles under the feet of visitors. As of 2024, most of the original curatorial staff has left the SCAA. Among the few art-related businesses that seem to be thriving in Songzhuang are schools that prepare art students to sit the entrance exams of state-run academies. During one of my visits, the archive’s exhibition area was being rented out to one such school and displayed the type of stale academic paintings that students must emulate to succeed in those tests—resulting in a disheartening contrast with the original mission of this institution.

It must be mentioned that travel restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic, declining interest among foreign collectors in contemporary Chinese art, and the deterioration of diplomatic relations between Beijing and some Euro-American capitals have also negatively affected art galleries and institutions in Songzhuang and elsewhere in China.

Not an Epilogue

In spite of the decline and transformation experienced by Songzhuang during the past decade, it may be too early to announce the demise of the ‘grassroots’ dimension of contemporary art in Songzhuang. I can attest that ambitious art students still move from far-away provinces to Beijing and establish their studios in modest rural homes on the outskirts of this town. New galleries were established by young curators even during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Chinese masters of contemporary art still live and make art in Songzhuang, while some up-and-coming contemporary artists have built a successful career from their studios in Xiaopu Village. The uncertainty looming over the question of how long this will last is the measure of the precariousness in which they all partake to some degree.

Work for this essay was supported by the OP JAC Project ‘MSCA Fellowships at Palacký University I’, CZ.02.01.01/00/22_010/0002593, run at Palacký University Olomouc.

Featured Image: A closed “painters’ park” in Songzhuang. Photo by the author, 17 May 2024.

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