Beijing: Made in China Part 8

The scene wouldn't have been unfamiliar to many of Beijing's more established artists, like Wang Qingsong, who lived in Songzhuang, Beijing's oldest surviving artists' village, in the mid 1990's. Because artists weren't allowed in the area at the time, he was constantly hiding from the police: "I moved five times in one year," he told me, when I visited him and his family at their home. Wang, whose strikingly beautiful large-format photographs at once criticize and celebrate the "global" commercial culture of today's Chinese cities (his work often includes a Coke bottle or McDonald's golden arches), now lives with his wife, Zhang Fang, their son, and Zhang's parents in a spacious but casual apartment in the eastern district of Tongxian, a neighborhood known for the number of artists living there. (The noted performance artist He Yunchang has an apartment downstairs.) A Donald Duck bicycle was parked underneath one of Wang's most famous pieces, China Mansion, a scroll-like photograph in which naked female models play out famous scenes from art history against a background of banquets and orgies. The work refers simultaneously to contemporary decadence and the excesses of imperial China. The only decoration aside from Wang's art was a drawing scribbled in pink and green crayon directly onto the wall. Its creator, the couple's four-year-old son, Ruyang, practiced writing characters while we talked. "His non-Chinese name is Michelangelo," his mother said, looking approvingly at her son's work. "I like the sound of that Italian name a lot."