RAW CHINA - THE RED GAS STATION - PART 1

by Jocko Weyland

Photo courtesy of Nico y Katiushka (nicoykatiushka.org)

When I asked Henry where to catch the 988 bus from Dawanglu he gave me a skeptical look and asked “Why do you want to go all the way out there?” For a lifetime Beijinger, the 988 meant going out to the undesirable hinterlands. Henry seemed suspicious that someone who’d been in the country for less than a week would want to venture out there, but I ignored his doubts and rode the 988 for an hour before it came to the Sinopec station, which I assumed was “the red gas station” where you were supposed to catch the 944. Along with the other passengers I walked past a ditch giving off a strong scent of raw sewage to the other side of the road where, eventually, the smaller, van-sized 944 bus pulled up. My instructions were to “ride for about ten minutes until you see a big sign that says ‘SOAR’.” After bumping along for a quarter of an hour the bus came to a stop and the driver turned around and joined the tips of the fingers of one hand to the palm of the other in a “T” gesture. The end of the line. Once ejected I was assaulted on all sides by a rumbling convoy of cement trucks trailing plumes of dust in the evening murkiness. Breathing in the diesel fumes, I headed back the way the bus had come, walking past choked, emaciated trees until I arrived at a conglomeration of half-finished fake-Bauhaus concrete buildings. Surreptitiously checking out the workers’ makeshift living quarters where they were cooking dinner on jury-rigged stoves, I wandered around looking for Elisita Balbontin, a Chilean artist who was supposedly somewhere in the vicinity. We’d never met, but our mutual friend Allison had told me Elisita was in an art show in Beijing and that’s why I was climbing up staircases to nowhere and peeking into half-completed buildings around a pitch-black courtyard way out by the Fifth Ring Road.

After some fruitless searching I crossed the road and walked past a guard into the building with the unlit “SOAR” sign I hadn’t seen during the first drive-by. Inside a guy was hammering away on some curved pieces of wood. “Building a ramp?” “Yeah.” “Cool,” and then he went back to work. I climbed to the top of the stairs by the acrid bathrooms and then went down a hallway past closed doors with “Vice-President” and “Chief Officer” plaques on them, soaking in the abandoned office building’s haunted atmosphere. Coming to the end of the hall I encountered Elisita “Punto” Balbontin and Liz Nelson in a room full of canvases leaned against the walls, cans of paint and other art supplies, and an amazing neo-primitive Constructivist work table made of tape, scavenged wood, and cardboard, which I later found out had been made by Brooklyn artist Alfredo Martinez. There was also a dirty little white dog with pink dye-tinged hair running around, a stray from the neighborhood. Three Chinese guys appeared on the scene, pointed at the paintings, and excitedly, incomprehensibly talked at Liz and Elisita. Workers from the nearby village, they were fans that had been coming by every day for the last week. After they left, the ambience took on a strangely nonchalant, familiar aspect, as if the situation weren’t at all that odd. We drank some beers and Liz and I talked about the brown bear overpopulation problem in New Jersey and corrupt politics in her hometown of Jersey City. Something about those exchanges summed up the bizarre, disparate amalgamation of elements, people, and geography that was the result of a trajectory stretching from Allison Busch of Awesome Color to the 988 to the 944 to Punto and Liz in an abandoned helmet factory across the road from a not yet-completed complex of galleries in an as yet-unrealized and hoped-for (and wholly speculative) “art district” on the far outskirts of Beijing.

A week later I was on the 988 again during rush hour in an intimate press with my fellow travelers, smelling the garlic, heading for the opening of SEWN. From the bus I saw five guys carrying skateboards walking in the wrong direction. When I saw the SOAR sign I implored the bus driver to stop but he just laughed and dropped me off a mile and half down the road under a highway overpass. Upon entering SOAR I found a large Puerto Rican man with his face and arms covered in soot and grease surrounded by tools and pieces of metal assembling what looked like a very real machine gun mounted on a tripod. Surmising he was Alfredo Martinez, I nodded, and then walked across the street and through the throng into SEWN, which was the first real art exhibition I’d seen in Beijing and the opposite of the usual schlock-fest endemic here. Without going into too much detail, the awfulness and lack of any discernable artistic merit on display at most shows in Beijing is almost awe-inspiring. Though SEWN, a group show of Chilean and Chinese artists curated by two Chileans named Nico and Katiushka might have been less than perfect, it was an intelligently installed, aesthetically cohesive exhibition, which made it a total rarity.

TO BE CONTINUED
RAW CHINA | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

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