By Anthony Tao

The second annual PhotoSpring Festival kicks off on April 17 with six days of openings that aim to put 798’s quieter cousin on the map. Brainchild of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre co-founder Rong Rong and friend and curator Bérénice Angremy, the festival involves 27 galleries—including six in 798—and over 200 artists. It is bringing in curators and critics from 80 countries around the world to a small art district on Beijing’s outskirts that has flown so far under the capital’s cultural radar that few know the name, and even fewer know how to get there. It's a critical moment for Caochangdi. Facing threats of bulldozers and wrecking balls, Caochangdi's community of artists, designers, curators and gallerists hope that this new program of exhibitions can secure Beijing's most respected art district not only a position on the capital's map, but an un-chai-able one at that.

Enter PhotoSpring

A week after Three Shadows' grand opening in the summer of 2007, Rong Rong traveled to Arles in southern France to participate in Rencontres d’Arles, an international photography festival dating back to 1969. Immersed in small-town charm and surrounded by world-class artwork, Roman architecture and natural beauty, “my eyes went big,” Rong recalls, as he began wondering how he might import these marvels to his nascent gallery back home.

In Arles, Rong met with Bérénice Angremy, a friend of 10 years who was curating an exhibition there. Together they conceived the idea for an international art fair in Beijing’s Caochangdi.

Caochangdi, where Three Shadows is located, is a small urban village outside the Fifth Ring Road occupying less than a square kilometer. If not for its flourishing art scene, nothing about it would attract attention. As it were, the New York Times had dubbed it “a new frontier for Chinese art” in April, and according to many, Caochangdi had already supplanted its older cousin, 798 (located three bus stops to the southwest), as Beijing’s foremost art zone.

“Caochangdi is comparatively ‘boring’ and hopefully where more ‘serious’ art can be found,” says Meg Maggio, director of Pékin Fine Arts Gallery in Caochangdi. It’s not that 798 lacks good galleries; they're just becoming harder to find among the knickknack shops. “798 is for display, while Caochangdi is where artists actually work,” says artist Jiang Peng-yi, who lives in Wangjing.

In this ripe working environment, Rong and Angremy began pushing their project in the fall of last year, after receiving support from the French Embassy’s Croisements Festival. The culmination of their work—PhotoSpring—kicks off its second year and opening-week festivities on April 17. It involves 27 galleries (including six in 798), more than 200 big-name and up-and-coming artists, and curators and critics from 80 countries. Works on display include still-shots and films, stuff zany and beautiful, vintage and modern.

Through artists’ lenses, viewers will see places like Shenzhen (Yu Haibo, “Animal Ferocity”), Tokyo (Daido Moriyama, “Tono Monogatari – The Tales of Tono”), Madrid (Pierre Gonnord, “Under the Skin”) and New York (James Crump, "Black White + Gray") as never before.

Two awards will be handed out on opening night and a symposium will be held on April 18, open to the public, where curators will discuss the eternal “creativity vs. the market” question. Photofolio Review, April 19-20, gives aspiring photographers the chance to get their works critiqued by experts. The entire festival is “proof that Caochangdi institutions and galleries are devoted to contemporary art,” Angremy says, “to show their possibility and their future.”

If, that is, there remains a future to speak of. The specter of chai-qian—"demolish-and-relocate"—looms like a wrecking ball over Beijing's best contemporary art district.

Grassland to Art Center

Caochangdi—literally meaning “grassland”—was given its name during the Ming Dynasty and served as a hunting ground for the Qing aristocracy, then a burial ground and garden. Those who lived on these plains were the attendants to these graves, and it remained that way until 1949. After Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in 1979, the area again underwent a transformation, with residents, factory workers and farmers forming clusters of homes in the north and warehouses in the south.

In 2000, artist Ai Weiwei designed Caochangdi’s first art gallery, China Art Archives and Warehouse, and a compound of minimalist gray-brick buildings, which galleries like Pékin Fine Arts and many artists now call home. Here, the current exhibition at Pékin Fine Arts, “Three Video Projects” by Wang Qingsong, offers a glimpse of China’s rapid development and the stressful effects of modernity, rendered by blood and violence, on the mind and body.

Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray, professors at the Southern California Institute of Architecture who first arrived in China in 1993, established B.A.S.E. Studios in Caochangdi in 2006. Now they document Beijing’s urban villages. They estimate there are 1.5 million people living in nearly 500 urban villages in the city.

“The genius of Caochangdi is that it has the sort of DNA for a ‘vibrant city,’” Mangurian says. “It should be looked at and seen as a laboratory for the future. Caochangdi has the ability and energy to keep transforming itself and to keep evolving and accomplish what the city is really after.”

Chai Na’r?

The city, however, sees it differently. In a government notice circulated in June 2009, Caochangdi was included among 15 villages in Cuigezhuang Township slated for demolition. A later notice warned, “After August 4, new constructions, renovations, expansions to houses, studios, factories and warehouses are not subject to compensation.”

“Every door, wall and roof, each brick and tile they construct for themselves, creates value,” said artist Ai Weiwei in Mangurian and Ray’s book, Caochangdi: Beijing Inside Out. “[For the government], when dealing with old cities or ancient structures, there is only discussion regarding its commodifiable cultural value rather than dealing with true cultural issues.”

The bulldozers have yet to arrive, and some don’t believe Caochangdi will hear the rumble of wrecking crews anytime soon, but residents live constantly with that specter. “I think we are all quite prepared, psychologically, because such a situation is normal in China,” says Rose Jiang Wei, owner of Art Channel. “You don’t feel secure. Maybe one day things might change, but I think almost every [Chinese artist] has had the experience of moving from one place to another.”

“Commercialism will take over everything, right?” says Valerie Zhang, an art writer and teacher who lives in Ai’s gray-box compound. “Money talks.”

Some, like Pi Li, co-founder of Boers-Li Gallery, believe “positive movement” can come from relocation, as when artists moved from Manhattan’s Soho to Chelsea and surrounding neighborhoods in the 1980s. But New York artists have never faced eviction at as swift a rate as their Beijing counterparts. In the early '90s, artists battled to save areas like Suojiacun. A decade later, artists finally had a victory when 798 was saved. But areas without the commercial prospects and brand name of China's most renowned art district are easily wiped off the map. Currently, art colonies at 008, Zhengyang and Heiqiao are being torn down.

Plastered on fences and walls around Caochangdi are large poster advertisements depicting the Caochangdi of the future, an illustrative fusion of art and industry on grass under blue skies. The tagline reads, “Art Harmony Joy Justice Abundance Peace.” The character for “chang” of Caochangdi should be the character that means “field,” but it is misprinted as the character for “factory.”

In all likelihood, the sign was commissioned by the village leader, Zhang Gengqi, whom everyone calls Mr. Zhang. Earlier this year, he oversaw the printing of a five-volume set of hardbound books documenting Caochangdi’s past, present and future, circulated among bureaucrats in an attempt to save his village.

The hope is that at the very least, the art galleries in the south can be preserved.

The Future?

Angremy has experience hosting art festivals in places facing demolition. In 2004, in conjunction with artist Huang Rui, she organized the crucial Dashanzi International Art Festival (DIAF) at a time when 798 was within months of being torn down. It was saved largely due to DIAF, and within two years the municipal government officially recognized 798 as a “creative district and cultural park,” helping transform it into what it is now.

There is a very important difference between DIAF 2004 and PhotoSpring 2010, however. When Angremy and Rong began planning the first PhotoSpring, no one knew that Caochangdi was slated for destruction. PhotoSpring “was not done for saving [Caochangdi],” Angremy says. “I know it would be nice, but it’s not for that. And then again," she adds, “We don’t know what will happen with Caochangdi.”

Nobody knows Caochangdi's fate, and with that in mind, maybe the wrecking ball need not loom over the festival these next two months.

“We are not optimistic, but we can’t be passive,” Rong says. “We have to do things. The government doesn’t actually know what Caochangdi is about. At the top they only know that this is a village. But what’s actually inside? What’s its essence? We want to use this event to highlight these things. Through this, we hope to highlight our cultural value.”