Archives » Thursday, July 10, 2008
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Melinda Liu
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Jul 10, 2008 10:47 PM
What Soho is to
New York and Chelsea is to London, 798 is to Beijing. Four years ago
Jessica Au studied the art community's struggle to survive demolition.
With the Olympics just around the corner, authorities decided to give
the expat-friendly enclave a reprieve.. Recently Au returned to find
798 undergoing another kind of transformation; here's what she found:
I was in Beijing during the sticky summer of 2004 when the fate of the city's
798 art district hung by a thin thread. Beijing's equivalent to London's
Chelsea art hub was facing the bulldozers. Rumors that the owners (Seven Star
Group) were on the brink of selling the hive of artist's lofts and studios to
make way for an electronics multiplex had been circulating for months. Then
something quite unprecedented happened. At the beginning of this year, China's
leaders announced that the area, also known as Dashanzi, should be preserved as
a "cultural landmark."
Four years have rolled by since I'd last visited 798 and I was curious to see
what had become of it. Just like every trip that I've made to China over the
last decade, I prepared myself for the inevitable feeling of shock
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