Chinese activist artist Ai Weiwei. Photo / AP file
Chinese activist artist Ai Weiwei. Photo / AP file
Chen Lan's new home wasn't anything fancy but it had high ceilings and big windows.
Most importantly, she could afford it. And she and her husband were surrounded by other pioneering artists, among them the edgy and famous dissident Ai Weiwei.
Chen had been priced out of Beijing's 798 Art Zone, a gallery and studio complex carved from abandoned military factories.
"When we moved there in 1999, it was us and the workers," she said. But over time, the community gentrified. Studio costs spiked to about US$150,000 a year.
So in 2015, Chen and her husband moved to an old automobile factory sprawled across several overgrown suburban blocks that Ai and others had turned into an artists' colony. The new place cost about US$4000 a month. Chen signed a 10-year lease.
She poured herself into decorating, artfully deploying heavy concrete vases and long-stemmed flowers throughout the open floorplan.
Then a few weeks ago, her landlord told her they were being evicted. So were the other artists. The area will become a high-tech hub, or maybe a protected wetland. No one is quite sure.
"I do not know where to go," she said. "Everywhere is too expensive."
Beijing, a city with more billionaires than New York, is in the midst of a crushing housing crisis.
By some estimates it's the world's least affordable city, where the average rent is about 1.2 times the average salary. Those spiking rents, coupled with ambitious redevelopment projects, have crowded out many artists.
"Artists - like most of the working class - [have been] pushed to the city's fringes," Michael Meyer, author of The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, said in an email.
The Left Right Art District, where Chen lives, was a reaction to that economic reality. The suburban space was all but abandoned decades ago. It got a second life in 2005, when Ai moved in. Eventually he was joined by other artists, who hosted exhibitions and regular events.
Though Ai left China three years ago, after being detained on tax evasion charges for 81 days, his work remained. Then last week, a wrecking crew came through, knocking down one wall and shattering several windows. The rest of the building will be demolished soon.
"Farewell," Ai wrote on Instagram. "They started to demolish my studio 'Zuoyuo' in Beijing with no precaution."
Workers film the demolition of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's studio in Beijing. Photo / AP
In interviews, Ai said he was planning to leave the studio anyway, since his lease was up. But he was surprised the demolition happened without warning. Reached by phone, Ai's landlord said only that Ai wasn't telling the full story.
Around Beijing, other artist spaces face the same fate.
Caochangdi, for example, is home to more than a dozen galleries and artists, the biggest arts district after 798. In the past month, the de Sarthe and X Gallery, have been told they are being evicted. Others say they expect they'll soon be asked to go, to make room for a new building project.
At another artist collective outside Beijing, many worry that their livelihood is at risk. In one studio, Tang Tizhen houses several paintings of Chinese characters and flowers. She's been painting her whole life, she said, though mostly as a hobby.
She moved to the collective five years ago because she couldn't afford the rent at her old place in the city, she said. She likes the atmosphere, and the chance to meet other artists who have studios on the same block. But she worries this neighbourhood is also becoming too expensive.
It's a constant struggle, she said. There's little government support, and it's hard to draw art buyers so far from the city centre.
If she has to move again, she's not sure what she'll do.
