California magazine

Xue Song used charred remnants of works destroyed in a studio fire for collages like Shape (Red Mao). "My works," he has said, "are born out of fire."

The vast complex called the Dashanzi Art District was originally built to house workers and to manufacture Chinese military electrical parts and, some say, munitions. Which explains its other name, 798: Designations beginning with 7 were given to all military factories in China, helping camouflage their identity.

Today, the decommissioned military complex teems with galleries selling paintings, sculptures, and mixed-media works of modern Chinese artists, interspersed with restaurants and cafes. Its many Western-owned gallery spaces attest to 798's growing reputation as a "must-see stop on the international modern art circuit," according to David Lei '72, member of the Board of Directors of San Francisco's Asian Art Museum.

The contemporary art scene, like so much else in China, is commanding the world's attention as the nation rockets towards modernization. The ascendancy has not gone unnoticed by the Western media,

Xu Bing's A Book from the Sky (below) at first appears to be a classical text. In fact, it's jibberish, the thousands of invented characters carved and printed with wood blocks.

though attention often seems focused more on the stratospheric prices than on the art. Since 2002, 798 has become the locus of a thriving art scene.

Entering the iron gates, past uniformed and armed sentries, once inside the Bauhaus-style complex, The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art offered a retrospective of 1985 New Wave artists. A Book from the Sky, an installation piece by Xu Bing, dominated a nicely lit two-story, warehouse-size gallery.

Through his plein air group portraits of ordinary people, like the subjects of Eating, Liu Xiaodong documents dramatic social change in contemporary China.

Asmaller version of Xu Bing's piece will be part of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive exhibition Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, which will open September 10, 2008, and run through January 4, 2009.

The Sigg collection spans four decades and is the world's most comprehensive. Uli Sigg began to track the growing contemporary art movement while he served as Swiss ambassador to China in the mid-1990s. The exhibit will feature approximately 120 works by 92 artists, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, video works, and two pieces by Xu Bing.

"To understand contemporary Chinese art, you must study the Cultural Revolution, the impact of Mao's ideas about culture," said Xu Bing, a MacArthur "genius award" recipient who recently spoke at the Institute of East Asian Studies and will return to Berkeley in Spring '09 as an artist-in-residence.

page 1 | 2