Recently, while reviewing Wang Gongxin’s installation piece at the Arrow Factory, I thought I would publish here all the additional thoughts that wouldn’t fit into the print version (but please keep an eye out for April’s ArtForum). The Arrow Factory is a small storefront space located in the “arrow” hutong near the Confucius Temple at Guozijian, it was founded by the artists Raina Ho, Wang Wei, Weng Wei and curator / critic Pauline J. Yao.

According to Pauline in a recent phone interview, they were looking to create a counter-dialogue to “art with a capital ‘A’” and to “engage in a different way with audiences”.

The Arrow Factory’s central location indeed is a deviation from the norm. Beijing’s exhibition spaces and galleries are mostly clustered far from the city center and often in factory ruins, they run from enormous to mind-bogglingly huge in size. The distance we travel to see them can put the average viewer at a disadvantage, and perhaps endows the act of viewing art with an unnecessary pretension or the element of a “castle on the hill”. Likewise, the enormity of these spaces presents the inevitable problem of filling them. Art, in tandem to the growing size of these colossal spaces, has also become monumental in size, scope, and this has become an incorrect signifier of implied importance. Thus, the mission of the Arrow Factory is apropos to our times.

When these three were looking for a space to realize their ideas, they wanted a location with good foot traffic and a youngish audience. Pauline said they were looking for a space that could be a counterbalance to the “art spaces that exist in Beijing, how they are so monumental, and put art in a context that is increasingly removed from daily life.”  They found it in this quickly gentrifying hutong neighborhood, foreign faces live out their version of “old Beijing” darting in and out of the coffee shops on their bicycles. The trendy and overpriced nostalgia store “Lost and Found” is just down the road. There is perhaps no better place to reach an audience that is a mixture of international and local, tourists and locals.

Arrow Factory is completely independent and self-funded, allowing them the freedom to do whatever they like. And happily, after nearly a year in operation, they have proven some of Beijing’s skeptics wrong––non-profits can exist in China, and they do impact the community. By cutting overhead and using a minimalist approach to organization, in this case meaning fewer people and direct artist involvement, the Arrow Factory is making meaningful exhibitions for a growing audience.

What kind of response are they getting from their community? “Most of the neighbors think we are strange because we don’t sell anything,” says Pauline, “Some people associate it with art or 798, or realize that it is ‘related to 798’. We are very different from the neighbors.” But the community has warmed to the idea, “sometimes regular residents ask what’s coming next.”

The current exhibition in the space is my favorite to date, in which video artist Wang Gongxin has copied the exact dimensions of the bakery next door in a work titled “Its not about the neighbors.”

In the daylight, his work is an inconspicuous sculptural work of mimicry, but at dusk the windows come alive with a looping, two-minute backlit projection of the bakers at work in their own space just besides.

The artist, a native Beijinger, lives in a similar hutong, and is familiar with the surroundings. He is also no stranger to site-specific works, and has similarly used video in installations such as “The Brooklyn Sky––Digging a Hole in Beijing” (1995), where he dug a well in his home and placed a video of the Brooklyn sky at the very bottom. This work is a clever play on common sayings in both American and Chinese cultures: “digging a hole to China”  [I tried when I was 6 yrs old––hit rock at about 1.5 meters], and the Zhuangzi idiom, 井蛙之见, meaning any frog living in a well has a limited outlook.

This work plays with the dual meaning of “neighbors.” There are the actual neighbors, the bakery, and “neighbors” in the more general sense. According to Pauline, “It is intended to have a disjunction, visually, throw people off, make them reconsider. A blip in the junction.” And it succeeds with eerie undertones.

When questioned, and over a tasty 馅饼, the bakery’s proprietor expressed some dismay at his own ghostly presence next door (apparently they were worried the neighbors were going to start their own business). The work has likewise raised eyebrows in the community, and discussion in artistic circles about the artistic “worth” of such an installation.  This is just one aspect of the work’s success.

The installation will be up until April 2.
www.arrowfactory.org.cn

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