DDV in China

The 100 Artists studios, built in 2004, currently house about 126 artists: as both studios and live/work spaces are being destroyed! Many of Chinese leading contemporary artists have studios in this complex. Several of the artists are considered as living treasures! The first studios have already been destroyed with less then 12 hours notice! Artworks have been damaged and artists and their families have been displaced.
We need your help now to save this community and to protect the artists, their families and their artworks!

Where:
BIAC - Beijing International Art Camp- Suo Jia Cun, the artists village. West of the airport highway, north of the 5th Ring Road, is facing eminent destruction.

Background:
In May of this year, the Government informed the landlord/developer that the construction was illegal and about to be torn down. The developer had received a land lease from the District Mayor, but the district Mayor did not have proper permission from the central government. Interventions on different official levels as well as the public attention resulted in the Government allowing the landlord more time (which was understood as being one year) to try arrange the paperwork and register the development.

Action:
Last Monday police informed the landlord/developer that the buildings would be destroyed on Tuesday. Yesterday, Tuesday, at 08:00 a.m., a police force arrived at the compound, together with several trucks of removal companies and an ambulance.
One row of buildings was broken open, all furniture removed. After lunch the entire line of buildings was torn down. The landlord has now received notice that the remaining 90% of the studios, have 10-days to move out before destruction of the buildings.

The artists of Suo Jia Cun are working around the clock to reverse this decision and are counting on the international press to make the situation known.

We are also calling out to friends who have connections in the Central Government to speak out on behalf of protecting this development.

For more information, you may get in touch with:

Brian Wallace – Red Gate Gallery – 13701078721 – mail: Redgategallery@aer.net.cn

Laetitia Gauden – Imagine Gallery – 13910917965 – mail: laetitia.gauden@imagine-gallery.com

Li Gang – Pickled Art Center - 13910652494

Bradley McCallum, ConjunctionArts - New York -718-875-0373 or 917-418-3516 - mail : brad@conjunctionarts.org

Pascale Geulleaume - CAAW (China Art Archives Warehouse)

Beijing International Art Camp – Suojiacun – Chaoyang District – Beijing. November 15th 2005

At 8:30 this morning we discover that police are encircling BIAC (the complex with more than 100 artists studios and in which we are living in one). By order of Chaoyang district all of the artists’studios are to be destroyed today. The entrances are closed and the D street is barricaded by security tape, only the occupants of the street can enter the barricade with a maximum of 4 people of their choice to help them evacuate their artwork and for some of the artists all of their belongings. A woman with a husband who has a cardiac problem asks the police for more time and the police answer that whatever they have of their belongings they must take as the bulldozers are ready to destroy their home. Less that one hour later an ambulance arrives. As artists want to photograph and film the destruction they say “because you police are dedicated to serve the people and are going to do something illegal then let us take the photos”. Throughout the day permission to photograph is said to be totally forbidden but at other times during the day artists are not stopped from photographing. In the middle of the morning an unknown exit to police is slightly open and journalists are able to enter the compound and film the events. Other friends and journalists come later to film but surprised by the police they are forced out. Early in the afternoon two bulldozers start to demolish the homes: all the artists studios of the D street are destroyed with windows and doors exploding into the street. Some artists have just time to put their belongings onto the other side of the street. Then around 2:30 p.m. the whistle blows and the police leave. We hear that we have only 10 days to evacuate.

Martin & Priscilla Salazar

Tuesday 15th November 2005

Today my home at Suojiacun was threatened for demolishment. My neighbours at Beijing International Art Camp are also under threat of their homes being destroyed. I woke to find barricades in the streets of BIAC. Many police came to our compound and our gates to the outside were closed. We were unable to go out and others were not allowed in. Homes in the next street to me had the locks on their doors cut and the peoples belongings removed. While trucks came to load the belongings, all of the residents of BIAC were kept behind the barricades. Two large bulldozers then came into our compound and destroyed the homes. While I gather my belongings, not knowing when my home will be destroyed, I am devastated that this unreal event is taking place. BIAC is a significant site where artists working in all media live and display their work. Professors, academics, International artists, galleries and art curators also live and work from the BIAC site. I am currently showing my artwork in Imagine Gallery at Feijiacun the village next to Suojiacun. The gallery director Laetitia Gauden lives at BIAC. Delegations of art patrons visit BIAC to view and purchase art works by Chinese artists. Within one week two delegations from America and England visired and enjoyed a unique environment that does not exist elsewhere in the world. Why this place is being destroyed is beyond my comprehension, for the opportunity to live, work and visit this place focused on art making and Cultural Exchange should be encouraged by all in Beijing.

Denise Keele-bedford

For two years I have been working in Beijing International Art Camp-Suojiacun. I was one of the first to move in and since then I have enjoyed this very strange but unique situation. As far as I can remember artists’communities, mostly in Europe, are mostly people gathered together by the urban squatters culture, which has its own goals and its own “unwritten” rules. Here in Beijing I accepted and enjoyed working in an artist’s community because the spirit and the situation were completely different. BIAC Suojia Cun studios are rented and used by Chinese, Asian and Western artists of very different age, background and formation – Old masters, new contemporary risin’art stars, artists-in-residence, visiting professors and teachers of various academies and independent travelers. The styles and the kind of art in Suojiacun are multiple and not representative of only one approach, ideology or school of thought approaching art. Working, walking around, exchanging ideas in this place has been a very interesting and rich experience. Artists come to work regularly or live in their workshops and even if it’s possible to spend time together for lunch or tea, nevertheless everyone manages his own privacy and working space independently. Suojiacun is NOT A PARTY-ALL-THE-TIME PLACE, it is a silent, calm area where artists mostly work and spend time together in small groups of friends for an interesting chat or to visit an exhibition together. Anytime that visitors, curators and journalists are visiting the place, a sort of unwritten and unspoken solidarity links the artists who introduce each other to their own friends and contacts naturally. I’ve been often involved and invited to work and exhibit with my Chinese and Western collegues and I have the chance to get to know them both professionally and on a human plane. I always had the chance to approach them early and directly and our relationships have been sincere and respectfull. My art and my human experience have both improved and developed in such a simple and rich way during this time. I believe this kind of art community represents a unique artistic reality and that its existence and activity should be protected and encouraged by the local and central authorities and government. The authorities together with the artists should work to find a way to legitimate completely the Suojiacun art village and preserve its value as a symbol of international artistic and cultural cross-over and as a means to allow Chinese art to grow and become well known and appreciated all over the world.

Alessandro Rolandi
November 16th, 2005

The Artist is an outsider. Outsiders are vulnerable. Vulnerability is loneliness. Artists have, most likely, the loneliest profession in the world. History describes the artist as a free spirit. May so be, but this freedom has always been oppressed and the free spirit has been regarded as madness. Creativity is, to many people, a madness. What you can not understand, you neglect, or even worse, you try to get rid of. In China, some 300 years ago, the great painter Bada Shanren was regarded as mad. But was he really, or was it not possibly so that it was the society that could not understand him that was mad, and thus branded him as crazy. The important American poet Ezra Pound was crazy. Possibly true. But then again, artistry is madness, a sickness and because of that, the artist is a soul outside the society, souls inside the secret world of energy, creativity and imagination. To stand alone is to be strong we hear. Yes, but to stand alone is to be vulnerable. And the stronger, far too often, disregard the vulnerable, because it is such an easy target. At least it seems so. But the artist is also something far more dangerous than just villain. For people outside the creative process, he or she is subversive. And the society that refuses to accept these madness will try to protect itself, its insularity, by stating that the outsiders are mad and therefore dangerous. History was made in the art village Suo Jia Cun Tuesday the 15th of November 2005. Riot police accompanied by bull dozers concretely stopped the possibly most vibrant art experiment in the history of China through knocking down a handful of artist’s studios. The vulnerable, the creative, the outsider had, once again, to be regarded as mad and as such, unnecessary for a society that can not understand that the only thing history, has taught us, is that history has taught us nothing.

Lennart Utterstrom

The events of Tuesday 15 November 2005 will remain etched in the memory of all present for a very long time. The sight of giant yellow bulldozers entering the gates of the Artist Camp and proceeding in the destruction of the many studio residences in D Block filled many with horror. It was almost too difficult to comprehend! How is this possible in a place so full of potential for creativity, cultural exchange and human interaction?! The act of violence should be condemned by both the local and International Community. Amid the chaos, as the dust settled, it was a very poignant moment when an international artist paused to pick up a tree which had been torn from the ground and replant it in the recently dislocated soil.

Liliana Barbieri (Australia) Ri Williamson (New Zealand)
Artists in Residence BIAC.