Yesterday I got an invitation from a local internationally run hotel for a residency by a visiting British musician - media are invited to sit after-show with the musician, a travelling former session player for Mike Olfield. Board and a few weeks of gigs at the Intercontinental in pre-Olympics Beijing sounds like a good life. 

In another hotel on the otherside of town, for the past seven years at 5pm the resident Filipino crew plug in and play the first of three sets. It’s a tough beat: six nights a week, one day off. Musical and marriage partners Ramir and Kate cover everything from Johnny Cash to Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters. There’s some Green Day too: Time Of Your Life – for the younger crowd.

Ramir and wife Kate play at the Lido Holiday Inn, a Beijing institution in the days before China became a preoccupation of world watchers. Today a recently renovated Lido still serves the airline crews and the international salesmen who like it for the convenience to the airport. There’s also a fair spattering of art dealers, doing deals with artists from the nearby Dashanzi factory-cum art colony. Suede stayed in the hotel on their 2003 visit to China.  

Imagine playing four hours a night at a Texan steak house restaurant. Bars across town are replacing their foreign musicians with local talent. A classically trained Bulgarian pianist friend of mine was replaced with a local Chinese musician churning out soft local favourites with none of the soul of a professional with a track record playing concert halls around the old Soviet block.

American occupation of the Philippines meant that local musicians developed an ear and an ability to master American pop standards. Filipinos had a headstart on other Asian musicians and were ready to staff the bars of Tokyo during the post-War economic revival of Japan. And thus it has continued, only now Beijing is the boom town everyone wants to play.

The enthusiasm of the volunteers was the first thing that struck us on arrival last night at the Good Luck Beijing Weighlifting Inviational Tournament, a trial run for the Olympic event. We and our tickets and bags were greeted and checked at the entrance to the venue, the gymnasium of the Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics, by a gang of bilingual student looking volunteers wrapped up in large blue coats against the biting winter wind.

 

You couldn’t get this customer-driven dedication to service – “good evening, may I see your ticket please” “enjoy the competition” – if you paid someone in China. I never got not even a grumpy greeting in Chinese from the cashiers in our local state-owned supermarket.

 

The venue looked great. All shades of blue, with the flags of the competing countries hung nicely from the roof. The toilets were conveniently located and immaculately clean. There were attendants going around at the breaks with baskets offering drinks and snacks. Everyone wore neat tags with photograph and title. Inside the venue the volunteer helpers had smileys on the sleeve of their three stripe white-black tracksuits.

 

There were hitches. Several lifters had to take a second shot after a mix up among stewards over timing and the sequencing of the competitors. Olympic officials in uniform chino pants and blue blazers conferred amongst each other while a bilingual Chinese announcer explained results and decisions, on two occasions sending the lifter back to the changing rooms because he was called too early. Frustrating indeed for anyone who's gotten themselves psyched up to lift 220 kilos.

 

The medals presentation was as finely choreographed as the rest of the show. Riverdance-sounding Irish airs filled the hall while the attendants got the podium ready. Clean-cut boys in immaculate white penguin suits led a procession of flags while very pretty girls moved on to the stage to present bouquets of flowers. That was a bit surreal, enormous 140kg weightlifters in lycra receiving little bouquets. There was something of a First Holy Communion outfit about the attendants while university president Li Wie presented the bronze to local man Gao Le, silver to Poland’s Grzegorz Kleszcz and gold, by a mile, to Matthias Steiner from Germany. He put 423kg into the air last night, in three lifts.

 

The fans were well behaved, mobiles seemed powered off and aside from good humoured cheer most noise seemed to come from the plastic multi-coloured hands on a stick which clap when you turn a swivel. They were handed out by Bank Of China, a sponsor. It was a pleasant evening and a good demostration that Beijing is ready for the Olympic games. We were 30 minutes late arriving though. Taxis were impossible to find near the office in Sanlitun and the local roads looked like noisy parking lots, hence a 25 minute walk to Dongzhimen subway station, 40 minute subway ride and 20 minute taxi ride to the venue. Great venues, lousy traffic. Good luck Beijing.

Conceptual southerner Zheng Guo Gu, still blushing from the attention he got at Documenta 2007 in Kassel (Germany), is bringing a factory - dust, tools and oily vices - from his Yangjiang hometown in Guandong province to the Tang Contemporary gallery in Beijing this month.

 

Workers will travel too from. Real life and real-sized sculptures of workers will mingle in the show, a social commentary, which runs from January 19 to February 28. Zheng showed at the Venice Biennale and Documenta 2007 in Kassel, Germany.

 

Represented in galleries around the world, 38 year old Zheng, unlike most of his contemporaries, drawn to China's cultural capital, stayed away from Beijing after graduating from the printing school at the Guangzhou Art Academy and rather spent the 1990s in Yangjiang crafting a reputation for experimental photography, scrolls and installations.

 

His stay was made more bearable by the proximity to Hong Kong, purchasing centre for Chinese art before Beijing became the default Asia address of the world’s contemporary art dealers. Zheng’s solo work and collaborations with a hometown “calligraphy team” were duly recognized. Circumspect about modern advertising and materialism, the cropped-headed artist mused on the infinity of material objects with a collection of metal bottles he took to Saatchi’s London gallery The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art show in 2007.

 

The Saatchi curator’s notes said of Zheng: “The memory of the heaviness of the rice flour on the back that he carried home after queuing for hours in the early morning to buy in his childhood is mixed with his exhilaration over the endless supplies of goods and the unsubtle and constant bombardment of advertising today.”

 

Zheng’s work fits into the vein of recent shows at the Tang Contemporary, one of Beijing’s largest gallery spaces. Tang sells to a largely Asian customer base: the outsized installation style of exhibits preferred by the gallery are a challenge for casual buyers. “We do academic art shows,” Katherine, who runs the gallery, told me.

 

Heavily conceptual shows like the recent Border of Utopia are sponsored by the gallery. The gallery’s Chinese owners ran the parent gallery for ten years in Bangkok, showing mostly Southeast Asian artists, before opening the larger Beijing space in 2006. Thai artists shown at a recent group show were all Documenta/Venice veterans and have sold to MOMA collections. A new Tang Contemporary gallery set to open in Hong Kong will focus on Japanese and Korean artists.

 

An indication of how huge the instruments business has become here: At the weekend I was in Qingdao and sought out the plant of Sejung, a Korean firm with the world's largest production line for guitars and pianos. They say they are stretched to full to meet their order book, that's how heavy demand is for their Ibanez, Epiphone guitars and their own mostly entry level Sejung guitar line. 

It took us three hours to find the factory in the warehouse wasteland that is Qingdao's industrial belt. Sejung, a huge Korean American conglomerate with fingers in real estate and steel businesses in the town, is shifting its piano and guitar assembly lines into a new purpose built plant, abandoning the maze of blue tin and brick down the road where it's manufactured up to now. The cheap bicycles and scooters of blue-overalled workers stand in neat lines in the front yard while pick up trucks and Daewoo vans were searched at the main entrance by security guards.

The Korean management were not very helpful, telling us we'd have to be ordering minimum two 20-foot containers of guitars to get a hearing from their export sales department. "Everywhere! everywhere!" said sales manager Keith Lee in response to my question about where the guitars are selling. "We even sell in Africa!" 

Qingdao is home to dozens of musical instrument factories, many of them built by Koreans who take advantage of low labour costs, one aeroplane hour from Seoul. Jobs for locals aside, there's unfortunately not much of a pass-off in terms of knowledge or aftersales locally. If you go into a music store in Qingdao or Beijing the staff are generally incapable of talking you through the products, so , largely because all of this stuff is being exported. By contrast, I had a music store in Manchester explain the whole pheonomenon to me while I was home for Christmas: Chinese guitars are cheap because they're usually made of resin rather than wood and few people can resist a Yamaha acoustic for $80, when a wood-body Japanese made Yamaha costs $800 (but there's no difference in appearence).

Still, Epiphone guitars made in China are used by professional musicians. I tried to get a look at the company's Qingdao factory but my several emails and calls were unanswered by the press office at Gibson, the company which owns Epiphone. The press office was kept busy in 2007 explaining why seconds from Chinese factories were showing up in USA showrooms as the real product.

 

It’s the only gallery in Beijing’s art district that charges an entry fee (RMB30). I heard some people bitching about the fact yet the crowds were flocking to the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Dashanzi on both of my recent visits. The centre was built with the cash and connections of Guy and Myriam Ullens, a perma-tanned Belgian power couple (and owners of the Weight Watcher’s brand) with a long time penchant for contemporary Chinese art. 

 Easily the largest gallery among the many which have made the converted 798 factory complex their home, the Ullens Centre also has suited attendants and guided tours. There’s a café, an auditorium and a well-stocked gift shop. While most of the other galleries show a mish mash of local established and aspiring modern artists’ work for sale, the only work to be purchased at the Ullens are prints and reproductions on t-shirts, mugs and notepads.

The bilingual story-board introduction to the current show - appropriately an interpretation of how contemporary art began in China with the country’s opening up after the Cultural Revolution - is as succinct and well written as anything you’re likely to find on Chinese art inside or outside mainland China. The works of the 1985 to 1989 period, often juvenile but always brave, years are well explained, with references to political events that shaped the artists’ work. The Tienanmen Square period isn't ignored - the story boards describe how Tienanmen Square was occupied by the military and martial law declared in Beijing on those bloody summer days. More poignant though is what's said by the exodus of artists after the square was machine gunned clear.

Letters, sketches and personal effects in the exhibition cases alongside the main exhibition detail journeys to Paris and New York. Sad is the inevitable migration of many of the featured artists to Paris and New York – exhibition curator Fei Dawei has also spent much of his time abroad. Other artists like Zhang Xiaogang, have thrived off a current craze for Chinese art. Zhang lives in a Beijing villa from which he often appears on CNN and the pages of the New York Times. It’s not clear if he gets a cut from the RMB150 t-shirts in the gallery shop which carry reproductions of some of his signature works.

It's interesting to walk to the other side of 798 to the latest show at the Asia Art Centre, one of the newer galleries opened in the old factory complex. The new gallery, an outpost of a Taipei institution of the same name, is showing a cross section of more recent Chinese contemporary art in an exhibition titled Power of the Universe. The work on show is proof of how Chinese contemporary artists have improved their techniques on the raw, experimental days represented at the Ullens Centre. Worth paying for a look.

 

With talk of USD100,000 to USD200,000 being paid by national Olympic committees to rent venues during the Olympics, now's a good time to open a decent pub or club in Beijing. The latest place to open (in a location previously occupied by a failed club and bar) Song sounds special.

Described as a “contemporary Chinese style where the steps of the Paddy fields and soft contours of China’s south combine with the colour and flair of contemporary China,” Song “will be a physical home for creative people” goes the press blurb. The club/restaurant in the Place mall on 9 Guanghua Lu is run by local promoter and DJ Neebing. For people who like “lounging, talking and dancing” the whole thing looks very Scandinavian. Sure enough house DJ and Swede Nils Krogh will be there often on the piano and the decks – he’s billed as a “pioneering musician” who “heavily influenced the Swedish nu jazz” scene. The Swedish embassy are sponsoring his presence.

Chinastylus.com did the identity design and art direction. Looking like Rod Stewart, blond-haired Jonty Scruff from London has been brought in from London’s “coolest cutting edge clubs” for December 22 and 24 as well as New Year’s Eve. Pfadfinderei is a Berlin based design collective putting on a December 14 VJ/DJ session (Neebing on decks). That the group is more known for live installations for corporations like Louis Vuitton (Paris flagship store) says something about Song’s future plans and location – in the vast but soulless faux classic Place mall which opened in 2006. We wish them well, and hope they make it to the Olympic pay day. More later, we're going there tomorrow night.

Find Song at:

B108 The Place

song@songbeijing.cn

I reported some time back that there’s a Chinese singer doing a Mandarin version of Ride On, a mid-1990s hit for Irish balladeer Christy Moore. Well there may be more covers of the Kildare man’s in the East. Moore’s vaguely Pink Floyd-looking (the design is clean lines of primary colours on black) 1964 – 2004 box set is on sale at RockLand, a tiny pink-painted music store on Nanguangfang Hutong, run by the shaggy haired folk fan Xiao Zhan. You’re encouraged to choose the cheap version, neatly labeled CDs in rough brown envelopes burned on Xiao’s computer. So it’s RMB60 (about EUR6), compared to RMB300 (EUR30) he’s slapped on the original box.

One of the smallest, snuggest CD stores I’ve ever been in, Xiao Zhan’s cottage enterprise could mean that we’ll have Mandarin versions of Moore songs like Hey Paddy or the Enniskillen Dragoon – or the Knock song? – on Chinese radio soon. Xiao says he’s a fan of Moore – there’s also David Gray and Leonard Cohen, as well as lots of smaller singer-songwriter names on the shelves. Though CD factories in southern China manufacture batches of pirate copies of popular CDs the Rockland operation suggests there's also a counterfeiter and an audience in China for more obscure western artists.

RockLand is one of several music shops in Beijing’s old Houhai quarter, an increasingly bohemian/backpacker quarter sprouting out of narrow old grey-stone streets winding around the artificial lakes dug hundreds of years ago for the pleasure of the nearby palace. Several similarly tiny CD shops offer a slew of imported CDs, most of them the clearings of European music retailers. Details are very sketchy – one retailer said the CDs were part of lots manufactured in China for export before backtracking when I asked him about the price and promotion stickers of French and German shops. The CDs are possibly picked up along with electronic waste, paper and lots of other things Europe doesn’t want and put in the otherwise empty containers being shipped back to China.

Through some connivance at the ports the CDs enter China without being taxed – it’s unlikely cut CDs would be pass any country’s quarantine inspection procedure. Another CD shop owner told me his CDs were taken from a shipment of waste plastic. Whatever, there’s some great stuff here: among the pile I bought are Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, The Originals best of and Van Morrison’s latest. Prices were RMB40, RMB10, RMB10, respectively. I was charged extra for the Cardinals because it’s a double CD.

A t-shirt shop in one of Beijing’s recently chic old quarter is more proof of the flourishing of small, smart design shops across the city. The Grifted shop and design studio on Nanluoguxian, a narrow lane or hutong north of the Forbidden City, is doing something in the vein of the brilliant British-run Plastered shop nearby: coming up with cheeky designs that have something tongue-in-cheek to say about modern China. Their best designs are messages on some of the city’s embarrassing social habits, like spitting and overweight local men drinking beer with shirt rolled up to the nipples.

After four years in China I still can’t get used to the sound a spit. A local spit, the deep, long clearing of the nose, then throat, then everything onto the street in a final “thup.” Men and women do it and even though Beijingers blame it on the country bumpkins coming to the city for a job, everyone does it. A pot porri of spit marks dot the flagstones in the exercise areas in my local park, frozen in neat balls during the subzero winter.

Its fitting: it was for a period, the city's major commercial street, during the Yuan Dynasty 750 years ago as part of the back court of the Imperial Palace. In later years members of the imperial family lived here, so too revolutionary leader Suan Yat-sen. Then came the Communists settled the old houses with working families and today, bursting at the seams, many houses have bought up and converted into boutique shops and cosy cafes. Elsewhere the former residences of the likes of painter Qi Baishi, and writer Mao Dun have been converted into olde world apartments for local and foreign yuppies.

Nanluogu Xiang was classified by local government as a cultural heritage zone and got a facelift from the city last year. But all the paving and painting and hype have brought their own problems. Nanluoguxiang was hitherto a street for bicycles, tricycles and pedestrians. Now China’s yuppies drive and honk their cars down the narrow street. My head was nearly knocked off by an SUV tearing past as I walked out of a café. The price of 'progress'...?

Lately we had the pleasure of a tour around the most widely circulated and influential newspaper in China, the People’s Daily. Established by Mao in the early 1950s the newspaper has remained the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China ever since.  More than 3,000 staff produce the newspaper and most live on site in a massive compound right in the heart of Beijing’s business district. There’s a hospital, a barber shop, two restaurants, a post office and a school. There's even a park with cute pagodas and pavillions.

 

We got a tour of the older offices but were not allowed into the nerve centre, a shiny new building opened a few years ago houses the main production centre. There’s a fancy drive up and a musical fountain for whenever Party top brass such as Hu Jintao come to visit. The other modern building on site is the only place foreigners are allowed to work here, subediting the online edition of the paper, which is published daily in English and several other foreign languages. 

There’s nothing fancy or imposing about the offices we saw. Rather a threadbare East bloc kind of offices with bare concrete corridors and bare, fetid bathrooms. There are however shiny new computers on the desks. One is for surfing the World Wide Web, the other for the Intranet. There’s a feeling of paranoia and stiffness to the extent that we have to break into two groups, one of the Caucasians and the other of the Asians in the group, to diminish suspicions of the various soldiered checkpoints. On leaving, some stern looking young soldiers stood at the gate and warned us that once out we couldn’t come back in.

 

None of the dozen Chinese (of various ages and professions) I polled last week said they read the People’s Daily because it’s too “boring” and “serious” they variously said. The People's cadres must envy the more colourful, flashy tabloids and more news-driven papers like Beijing Times and Beijing Youth Daily. Both run oceans of adverts, sold on the strength of readership. There are taboos too for these papers – politics – but they make up for it in stories of lurid divorce cases, food scares, ripped off tourists and Internet fraudsters.

 

The People’s Daily overseas edition is slightly less stiff than the national edition but still a tough read. Amid verbatim chunks of Party speeches there’s photos of token foreigners dancing with smiling minorities. In a recent edition an English woman is photoed visiting heritage sites in Guizhou province. She and another foreigner, visiting Chengdu, are both full of praise for the country’s development.

 

There was a nice slice of irony was when we sat down to eat in a private room in one of two cafeterias on site. Our host is the newly appointed editor of the environment pages - environmental sustainability is currently all the rage in Chinese officialdom – and then we were served the centerpiece dish, shark’s fin soup. Sharks are being hunted to extinction for their fins, a cruel trade where the rest of the big fish thrown back into the sea to die a long, slow death. The dish we were served may or not have been the real deal but was described as “very expensive” by our host I can only assume it contained at least some shark’s fin.

 

You wonder how long the old organ can survive these brashly capitalistic times. Certainly there’s plenty of real estate developers salivating at the prospect of building a forest of skyscrapers on the site. The People’s Daily may already be in on the act itself: long term staff got the chance to buy their own apartments in several beige-coloured apartment blocks built overlooking the paper’s private park several year’s ago. They’re a major improvement on the cold, blackened concrete of the original digs, built in the 1950s and which, we were told, now house extra workers hired to run the print works: the People’s Daily has begun publishing newspapers on the country's auto and real estate industries (read: loads of advertisements).