Beijing: Made in China Part 7

As Beijing expands, its artists move farther and farther from the city center. Those whose work is selling look for bigger studios and (marginally) cleaner air; the ones who are just starting out simply look for the cheapest possible rent. I visited the international art communities of Feijiacun and Suojiacun, where Chinese painters and sculptors work alongside visiting and expatriate foreign artists. Laetitia Gauden, a French curator who started the Imagine Gallery in Feijiacun in 2003, took me next door to Suojiacun to see the new live-work space she shares with her husband, a musician in a Beijing hard-core band, and their son. Gauden was tremendously excited about the potential for Suojiacun, which was attracting artists with its large, warehouse-like studios and low rents—it's significantly cheaper than Factory 798's. She showed me the border beyond which the community had recently expanded. "People kept coming," she explained. Soon after I returned to New York, however, the police gave the residents of Suojiacun a warning: because the developer lacked "proper authorization," their homes and studios were technically illegal. Although the artists and curators lobbied for the compound, the bulldozers arrived last November. After only 24 hours' warning, they began demolishing the buildings, leaving residents scrambling to remove their possessions.