Dashanzi

During my trip to Beijing Andy and I went with some of his colleagues to Dashanzi, a formerly industrial neighborhood that’s been converted into a hopelessly HOT-HIP-NOW international epicenter of contemporary art. It’s a surreal urban mix of stripped down warehouses turned into white space art galleries, painfully trendy t-shirt boutiques and then some actual factories manufacturing an assortment of the most inane products imaginable.

How inane? We peeked into a factory that was making automatic tennis ball machines shaped like army tanks. Oh yes, I have a picture.

The crowd milling about the streets of Dashanzi matched the environment. Benelux Eurotrash, nouveau riche Chinese and dollar-a-day factory workers. Everyone was smoking and looking at everyone else with the perfect mix of amusement, envy and contempt.

Luckily the quotient of obnoxious, ugly Americans in fanny packs was quite low. I tried to fill the void by loudly beginning every comment and observation with “Well in America, where we have FREEDOM…” I think the people in my group found this funny the first few times. I still find it endlessly hilarious. And I wonder why I’m single.

I found some of the artwork interesting – technically and conceptually. Most of it, however, simply defied parody and fell into the “I majored in semiotics at Brown and my parents never understood me when I was growing up in Darien so now fuck them I’m a video installation artist and my work is about the oppression of woman within the hyper spatial construct of contemporary neo-colonial cultures and blah fucking blah” category.

Indeed, I witnessed a performance by a man who made tea out of his own blood and then served it to the audience. He did this in a room surrounded by photos and paintings of his ass in various iconic locations around the world. Oh, and someone was playing a mandolin.

Call me a philistine, but mainly I just aspire to own artwork that matches my couch.

I’ve attached some photos of the “art” or art. I’ll let you be your own critic.