I Live in 798 Now

Just kidding. I only wish I did. I’m there so often that I might as well say I do…

(This post is going to be mainly pictures because I already talked about 798 a bit over here.)

This is a picture of my friend’s mom vandalizing a wall in 798, as we all did all over the place.

It’s encouraged there, it’s not like we were being jerks. The picture above is of our Chinese names. The pictures on this post were taken across different days, though, as I went back once with Jessica, once by myself, and once with Jessica, Neil, and Jess’ mom.

A collaborative art project between the three of us. When I had gone to 798 in the beginning of the school year, back in September, I barely scratched the surface of the area, so we’ve been going back to uncover more and more of it recently.

For example, the disused railroad surrounded by relics of the old industrial park.

If you cross the tracks you end up in the D-Park, which doesn’t have many galleries or shops or cafés (actually it’s dominated by corporations like car companies, which is disappointing on a variety of levels), but it does have a lot of old bits of the factories and an elevated walkway across the whole eastern side of 798.

You can climb on all kinds of things from the paths leading off of the walkway.

You’re probably not supposed to climb on some of them, but if it’s not expressly forbidden…

There’s some good architecture to be seen from up there as well, like the Audi R&D center.

Audis are probably the biggest foreign cars in China; they are to this country what Toyota is to America. Also, Audis are the official cars of the Chinese government. I suppose Chinese cars aren’t quite good enough and the only alternative would be Japanese cars, which would be… awkward. To say the least.

We came across this thing, where people were setting up some lighting rigs and putting together a stage inside, so either there was a concert or another show of some kind. We weren’t entirely sure what this was, but it’s definitely worth looking into because a concert inside of a water tank would be so awesome.

We were also part of an interactive art piece.

The idea is to stand in the metal figures and then you email the pictures to the artist, who will put them all together in one exhibit sometime next year.