Media Art in Beijing

A dispatch on the arts, technologies and cultures in the metropolitan community served by the Beijing airport.

The complex and diverse history of media art in Beijing parallels the free and random growth of new political and economic models in China. It used to be said, "Beijing will no longer be Beijing without the Hutongs. Today's skyscrapers could be from any city in the world." Whether or not the radical alterations of the city's skyline and neighborhoods will render Beijing anonymous and unrecognizable is not yet known, but the development of media art in the city has risen in tandem with these sweeping changes.

© Yao Bin

© Yao Bin

Media art began to develop as an important trend in contemporary Chinese art after the 1996 exhibition Appearance and Reflection: Chinese Video Art, organized by Qiu Zhijie and Wu Meichun. In 2000, media art departments opened one after the other at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the Chinese Academy for Fine Art and Tsinghua University's Academy of Art and Design, and increasing numbers of young people took up studies in programs that moved toward combining technology and the fine arts. The 2002 Multimedia Art Asia Pacific (MAAP) Festival [1] in Beijing brought the newest developments in international media art to Chinese artists and audiences for the first time. At the time of MAAP, interaction in Chinese media art consisted solely of physical interaction; pieces such as Jeffrey Shaw's Web of Life, with its complex interactions of viewer, technical devices and randomly generated images, presented the importance of the latest interactive technologies for media art. In addition, numerous other works were exhibited that combined art and philosophy with all sorts of methods enabled by new media. Thus Chinese audiences and artists alike began to accept media art; this led in 2004 to the International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium, a collaboration between Academy of Art and Design, Tsinghua University and the China Millennium Museum of Art.

There is now a growing trend in Beijing toward the conglomeration of private art spaces, artists' studios and gallery spaces. After a genuine artists' district emerged in 2001 in Fei Jia Cun (outside Beijing), 2003 saw the emergence of 798 Factory in Dashanzi, a new hot spot that concentrated developments in the local art world much more systematically. In 2004 the artists' district Cao Chang Di emerged around the China Art Archives and Warehouse, and the Song Zhuang Art Museum also made some important first steps in concentrating the art scene in Tongzhou. This kind of geographic concentration should not be overlooked in the development of contemporary art in Beijing. The establishment of artists' districts in the suburbs and area around Beijing, such as Tongzhou in the east and 798 Factory, Cao Chang Di, Hua Jia Di and Jiu Chang to the north, followed the 1994 dissolution of the artists' village in Yuan Ming Yuan (Old Summer Palace). With the introduction of the notion of "creative industry," a great deal of private capital and forces came together in Beijing. In 2006 a center for creative industry was established to mark the start of a new era in which state and non-state elements could collaborate, come together and announce the beginning of Chinese media art.

© Qiu Zhijie

The Beginnings of New Chinese Media Art

To date there have been no shared presentations of Chinese media art, with the exception of the first Digital Art Festival, organized in 2001 by Qiu Zhijie, Wu Meichun and Li Zhenhua, and held in Loft Art Space. As an independent discipline, media art still lacks autonomy and acceptance; many artists still consider new media technologies more or less as tools, rather than an independent art form. The 2005 exhibition GET IT LOUDER, curated by Ou Ning, Ji Ji and Jiang Jian, whose viewpoint, with its emphasis on how designers react to and influence contemporary art, brought a fresh perspective to the art scene. The exhibition exerted a direct influence...