From 798 to GBD, Huang Rui once again finds himself at the helm of a major move for China's contemporary art scene.

If Huang Rui was central to the development of Factory 798, he has been perhaps more central to its mythology. "As a child in the 1960s, recalled Huang Rui, an artist, nothing seemed nobler than to become a worker, and no workplace seemed better than the 798 Electronic Components Factory," wrote Beijing bureau chief Erik Eckholm in a 2003 story in the New York Times. Huang, who had by then spent 17 years in "self-exile" in Japan before returning in 2001, was the perfect long-haired mascot for what was seen as an alternative cultural formation. Because before 798 became 798—before the numbered Sichuan restaurants and the pushcart art DVD vendors and the Nike Space—798 was imagined as another frontier of resistance to state and society, the East Village come anew.

And now, as Huang is being forced out of 798 by the landowners, he looks forward to leading Beijing's artists to a new creative community in Gaobedian, and looks back at the factory blocks he helped transform.

Huang was, conceptually speaking, the perfect front man for 798. Born in Beijing in 1952, he did not train as an artist, but caught the wave of the Stars Group as the art scene was re-awakening post-Cultural Revolution in 1979. The iconic group, which also included Beijing notables such as artist and architect Ai Weiwei and CourtYard Gallery director Zhao Gang, made the point that "every artist is a star" by hanging works guerrilla style in outdoor venues including the patch of trees just east of the National Art Museum. Huang, with his ties to the Today Poetry Salon, then also in vogue, was among the more literary members of the group. He was also one of the more outspoken: When the group decided around the time of the National Holiday in 1979 to march down Chang'an to protest the closing of its exhibition, it was Huang who kicked off the festivities by reading a declaration on behalf of the Stars formally indicting the Dongcheng District PSB to the Highest People's Procurate for having shut the thing down.

The early 1980s were Huang's first golden age as he spent these few years traveling around the country meeting his poetic and artistic peers. "It wasn't like it is now," he recalls, "with so many people everywhere. Anywhere you went, you could meet the most interesting people." Still, deciding there was life beyond China, he ventured to Japan in 1984, supporting himself for the next decade and a half as an independent artist. From his perch in Tokyo, Huang was able to travel elsewhere, going to New York in 1987 where the Stars held their de facto third exhibition.

Factory 798 had housed peripherally artsy things throughout the late 1990s—like the CAFA for-profit sculpture workshop—but 798 as lifestyle was dreamed into existence over the summer of 2002. Huang was crucial to this process, shepherding the scion of the Tokyo Gallery family Yukihito Tabata through the vagaries of setting up the factory's very first gallery. The contested home and studio ("huAng Rui sTudio," the door placard reads), situated next to the gallery, was renovated that summer. On October 12, 2002, more than 1,000 people showed up for the opening of "Beijing Afloat" at the Tokyo Gallery's new space. Huang's piece involved models dressed in elaborate Qing qipaos to greet guests.

For Huang, who had just moved back to China a few months earlier, Dashanzi was a perfect way to begin a new Beijing life. He was suddenly Mr. 798, a position that he recalls as more fun in those days before that meant so much. When he opened the At Café in early 2003, the idea of getting an espresso inside an old factory seemed novel beyond belief. The late critic Jonathan Napack called it the "Cedar Tavern" of 798, a reference to the dive bar on University Place where the New York School painters used to hold court in the 1950s. The analogy was apt: Before the auction houses had jumped into the game, back when every visiting curator seemed to bring the promise of a new career, it was the only place to see and be seen. Back then, in the window after the first Beijing Biennale and before the first Dashanzi International Arts Festival, in the early months of the "Year of China in France," Huang was mayor.

The current hype surrounding the Seven Star Corporation's refusal to renew Huang's lease—commemorated in a performance piece in which Huang spent his final week in the compound drinking tea with some of its more notable residents last month—was a long time coming. Tension between entrenched factory management and upstart artists has been the central theme of 798's history as an art district, and Huang, as spokesman, organizer and entrepreneur, has been at the center of that tension. Huang is rightfully upset about the often vulgar directions in which an artists' community has developed. And while another 17 years of self-exile seem unlikely, Huang knows that sometimes, one just has to move on.