United colours of Beijing
The capital's graffiti artists have come out of the shadows and are finding the city surprisingly welcoming, writes Laura Fitch
On a sultry summer’s day, with thunderclouds hanging heavy above them, a team of street artists spray-paint murals across the walls of a gallery in Beijing’s Songzhuang Art District. Locals Biskit, Zyko, ANDC and Sack coat concrete slabs set up around the perimeter of G-Dot Art Space, alongside Tkid, one of the first graffiti artists to decorate the streets of New York, in the 1970s, Binho, a renowned Brazilian street artist, and Noe Two, a Frenchman whose works include funked-out portraits of the likes of jazz artist Erykah Badu.
A small crowd of people have been bussed in from the city centre for the exhibition opening and mill around the yard, sipping sake from cans and watching the artists criss-cross, add to and complete one another’s works. Bemused pedestrians stop to take it in.
The walls of Beijing are increasingly being subjected to the spray can. Colourful murals have migrated from the officially sanctioned 798 Art District to the sides of highways and walls near Renmin University, in the city’s northwest. Tags – spray-painted signatures – decorate the entrances to train stations and glow under the red lanterns of the capital’s most famous food street, Gui Jie.
By their own estimates, between 30 and 40 graffiti artists work in Beijing, some more regularly than others, in comparison with the thousands active in cities such as Los Angeles, Paris and New York. Most here have creative-industry day jobs: building websites or laying out one of the growing number of glossy publications that sit on the shelves of the capital’s magazine stands.
When graffiti first appeared in Beijing, in the early 1990s, it – along with much of the emerging contemporary art scene – was considered subversive. Today, graffiti is taking root in a culture that is much more tolerant, both socially and politically – one where government restrictions are playing less of a part and the public is becoming more accepting of a wider range of artistic expression.
When Zhang Dali picked up a can of black spray paint in the early 1990s and began outlining outsized profiles of his own bald head on the sides of buildings slated to be destroyed, he became the first recognised graffiti artist in Beijing. This simple outline was so unusual – at the time nobody painted anything on walls except party slogans – that he would regularly get arrested, beaten up, or both, by the police.