Beijing: city of art, restaurants, and copycat bars

7/13

After work I went to a restaurant called Pure Lotus with Matt, Ru Shen, and Spring. This place is run by Buddhist Monks, and is pretty much out of control. There's no meat or alcohol on the menu, which mainly consists of items like "Red crane perches next to pond". Presentation and service are a big deal; the experience is supposed to be tranquil and encourage meditation. Some of the serving bowls are carved out of big chunks of wood, and our chopsticks seemed to be made by hand out of bamboo. The food was excellent. We got seaweed wrapped rolls of walnut, cucumber, mango, and sauce which combined to produce a vaguely Japanese, but unique, flavor. We got a clay pot of tofu prepared in different ways to imitate meat. The pot was over a flame, and the food simmered in hot oils and spices at the table while we ate. There were steamed vegetables in a light sauce wrapped in lotus leaf, curry vegetables, radish and some unidentifiable cucumber-like vegetable, barley stuffed dumplings, pumpkin soup, pickled apples, lichee served over dry ice, and fruit/vegetable juice. We'd heard that this place was expensive, and as we ordered we avoided the highest-priced items, and we got out for about 75RMB each, or maybe $10. It was by far the most expensive meal I've had in China, but also the best. Anyone who comes to visit me is going to be used as an excuse to go back. Here are some pictures.

After dinner we went to the Black Sun bar, across the street from my apartment, to see some of Spring's friends play music, but it turns out that there are two different Black Sun bars in Beijing. "Where are you?" "Black Sun. You?" "Black Sun." "Wait, where?" So we went next door to Souks, which has a Middle Eastern theme. They have shisha pipes, like almost every bar in Beijing following what seems to be a new trend, but they fit in here. We chatted with a random guy from MIT working on his PhD in economics at Tsinghua, and with the Reuter's reporters, who bought us a round of shots.

7/14
I went to the 798 art district on Saturday. It's a sort of neighborhood of art galleries all housed in an old munitions factory complex. The place has a dilapidated look, but they've been renovating some of the interiors to art-chic standards. One of the galleries still had the old, broken concrete floor covered in mud, though, so it's pretty varied. There's definitely no air conditioning, and the glass was shattered in some of skylight windows above the paintings in one gallery. I only made it to maybe 50% of the galleries, and they seem to rotate exhibits every month or so, so I'll have to keep going back.

There were a number of paintings I really liked.

There's a third, similar one I can't find copies of anywhere, but it's by a different artist. It's a fishtank on an ornate table, with aircraft carriers floating in it, a sub underwater, and one broken carrier that had sunken to the bottom. There was a squad of bombers flying overhead, bombing the table, fishtank, and the boats.


There were a lot of others in other styles that were good, but something about the real/toy military hardware in the living room appealed to me... I remember dragging my model battleships over the carpet at the Dayton Rd. house and building Lego armadas to duke it out.

This guy at the Pata gallery, Liu Chunhai, had some cool stuff. He's influenced a lot by old propaganda posters. I like the painting of the girl holding her jacket. She's wearing the communist uniform, but underneath it she's got a sort of bright hoodie with a tree, sort of a rebellion against conformity. When I read Wild Swans it struck me how significant some small bit of individuality, like brightly colored hair ties, was to young people growing up in a collectivist society, and this painting made me thing about that. The colors aren't very good on any of these online images, of course. I wish I had enough money to actually buy art... Some of this work is really neat, but I don't have $5k to drop on a big oil painting.