IN TO CHINA with Carl Janes: The Wheel Rolls Over
Our reality moves in cycles. Through the right lens you can see waves of creation and destruction moving through everything. The creation of art seems to be a magnet for a subsequent devouring, an energy that is craved by the machine. After a couple times around, you know it’s coming. But these days the cycle seems to be in hyper-drive.
Over the course of the last eight years in my studio space in Atlanta, I saw the cycle transpire. For a couple years, I was just off the map in what was considered an abandoned building. People that walked by just didn’t see my building. It was a non-place, somewhere in between places. People would pass by going from one place to another lost in their thoughts or distractions. I enjoyed being invisible for a while, getting to know the context, observing. I was exploring myself and my art without being scrutinized or judged. And then I decided to begin actively expressing myself with the building. It was exciting to slowly be discovered by passersby.
I made friends with the entire community and enjoyed being a part of the neighborhood as it started to thrive. But I slowly started to pick up on another type of voyeur. The type that pulled up in big white trucks and parked for periods of time in the near distance, facelessly observing from air-conditioned interiors and buttoned-up collared shirts. Eventually, I lost my creative space to the capitalist driven phenomenon that has been commonly identified as gentrification. I was uprooted, un-stuck, and floating so I decided to move halfway around the world to explore a context as far removed from my own as I could.
I was accepted to be a resident artist with Red Gate Gallery, a 27 year old contemporary art gallery in Beijing founded by Brian Wallace (Australia). It was the first private gallery for contemporary art in Beijing and is ranked in the top 500 galleries in the world. The gallery inhabits a Ming Dynasty Watchtower, one of the few remaining remnants of the original wall that surrounded Beijing.
Red Gate nurtures an ongoing international artist community. I am in residence with three other artists that represent Belgium, U.S.A. (Harlem), and Austria, seen here with the Residency Director, Jen Lindsay (USA, NH). When we are not creating art, we spend a lot of time with each other, getting to know each other, where we come from, exploring and engaging with Beijing.
The surprise that I found was that although Red Gate Gallery continues to be incredibly successful, it was also in the midst of being uprooted. The Chinese Bureau of Cultural Relics was reclaiming the 550 year-old Watchtower and the gallery was being put out on the street.
Meanwhile the established Arts District, referred to as 798, has gone through it’s own cycles. Located in a former electronics warehouse district, 798 became the area that artists started moving to in the early 2000’s. It was the perfect place to get low rent and large spaces, the ideal formula for young artists to commit themselves to their art. As the energy built, people started flocking, galleries followed, then more people, lifestyle shops, coffee bars, and tourists. As all-things-chic started taking over the spaces, rent went through the roof.
Goodbye artists, and goodbye to the energy that made it happen. But as the cycle comes full circle, Red Gate has found itself in an unusual position as it has kept it’s heart close to the street by working with emerging artists and continually supporting and engaging with what is happening. Red Gate now finds itself presented with the opportunity to return to this district with a space that it sees as having the potential to re-inject an authentic vitality to a context that has become diluted.
All of Beijing is witnessing intense growth. Residents of entire neighborhoods are being put out on the street. Entire blocks are ripped up inside of a day, making way for high-end development; the Chinese equivalent of yuppie-condo multi-use living that is blanketing cities in the United States.
There is a particular texture that is targeted for extinction, areas that have an organic nature and are not legally classified. Areas that tend to house a “poor” class and are typically filled with what are referred to as migrants, people that have moved to Beijing from rural areas. My studio is in such an area, and there is an exciting energy to the state of lawlessness. This is the context that is my natural habitat, that inspires me, sets me free, and that, unfortunately, doesn’t last.
My art here became a response to this impermanence. I created artwork that I could carry out into Beijing and place directly in the city. A type of moving installation that travels with me on foot, slung over my shoulder to be set up for a period of time and then to move on. Art that claims a place as its context, both blending and standing out to create a moment of timelessness.
Art that moves on, staying ahead of the onslaught of the wrecking ball, evading the tip of the claw.
In the midst of my time creating art, I caught the first hint of an imminent armageddon. On my way to eat with a new friend at a favorite restaurant, we stepped out of my studio in to what was typically a 24-hour buzzing ball of chaotic energy only to find a ghost town. Restaurant after restaurant was closed and as we neared our destination we slowly discovered that the doors of every single restaurant in the entire village were locked. White pieces of paper stamped with red stars were glued to the glass double doors. And then a couple days later the emptiness was filled by unrest. The entire village had been slated to be razed.
Art will survive. It is in the spirit. It is a part of our nature. It is a part of the flow. From the first scratches on rocks and marks on cave walls, art is an act that speaks to the metaphysical, a conversation about an ever deeper reason for being. It acknowledges The Self as woven in to an expanding universe that is built out of the unknown. As art continues to be labeled and commodified, harnessed and used, bought and sold, it will continue to evolve, evading the confines that a world places on it. Art will continue to break its bonds within reality as it perseveres to witness the world continually devours itself.
