798 art zone brief in Foreignercn.com

1 Apr 2008

Beijing city/关于北京, China Travel tips/旅游提示 534 views

798 Art Zone

798 art zone is located in the northeast of Chaoyang District in Beijing. This district has a long history and grows up with the development of china. Factory 798 and the Dashanzi art district are both part of what was originally known as Joint Factory 718. Built in the 1950s with the help of East German experts, this factory complex was a state-of-the-art model of electronics technology and a flagship for Mao Zedong’s vision of socialism. There used to be a dream factory for the 20,000 workers who once labored and lived here with their families. What’s more, this factory has been very mysterious because people were not allowed to enter the factory without permit.

798 factory has the typical Bauhaus style of architecture which is rare in Asia and it also becomes the symbol of 798 art zone. With the development of Beijing, Dashanzi is no longer to be the suburb and Factory 798 loses its original function gradually. Since 2002, large number of artists and studios began move to Factory 798 and rent plants and spaces as the gallery, the Arts Centre, studios, fashion shops, restaurants and bars, and the cultural shop. Only with two years development, 798 art zone becomes the nation’s largest and most influential international art zone.
Nowadays, everything in China changes in excessive speed, both of the society and the young expanding age，which is the characteristic and multicultural weather of China turning into an opening society. All of these reflects in the quickly growth of 798 art zone and the Chinese contemporary art being present. 798 art zone as a complex gather with the old industrial architecture and fashion culture attracts numbers of visitors every day and brings tremendous domestic and international influence. Every vanward cultural element beginning from the new century can be found here, such as new media, cartoon, rock and roll, video and the folk. Under the aegis of the government with cultural creative industry，798 art zone has become a concentration area of cultural creative industry that features exhibition and trade of Chinese contemporary art.. It has been taken as a successful case that a traditional industrial enterprise transforms into cultural creative industry.