Beijing art scene "798" gallery district

Beijing art scene "798" gallery district

The beijing art scene is quickly becoming famous. beijing artists are having huge NY shows and it's thanks to places like 798 in beijing that these artists are getting exposure. 798 used to be a factory area and now its all gallerys, tons and tons of galleries. i went there 2 weekends in a row and feel like if you like art you really need to go there every day for a week, 7 days to see eveything. because you could spend one day just browsing all the books in the various book stores and buying cool stuff! there are 4 or 5 really long streets of galleries and buildings with more galleries inside. Everyone says it is a very lucritive business right now. I love it!

i saw one of this girls paintings in a gallery and a lot of her products for sale, she is really up on the product licensing thing. A lot of her stuff looked like it would be at home in the jonathan levine gallery and in the low-brow art scene.

i refrained from taking pictures of the millions of things painted red, and things incorporating mao or mao suits, or things with mao bodies.

this is my friend's gallery. they are taiwanese and she said that most of these paintings sold already. sounds like they are doing very well.

i love these for some reason. they remind me of jim flora, tim biskup crazy paintings

this artist is very famous

these were my favorites out of anything i saw. they really spoke to me. that is they spoke to the depressed pessimistic jason that can still laugh at his sad sad situation. this pathetic sad little creature in all these depressing situations goes about 270 degrees to the point where i find them a little funny.

posh opening party. i need to hit some of these soon.

the area around this train was popular for photographers and their stupid looking models. I jumped in there with my little powershot sd1000 and snapped some shots.

this thing rotated every 30 seconds to reveal a differnt olympics athlete. Nike has really come a long way. and of course they would have a gallery in 798 in beijing, everyone is doing it.

I found the book that ripped off like 20 of my illustrations from my blog. 2 double pages spreads like this! It is an art book with lots of illustrators work in there. i was contacted a while ago by some illustrators about this so i knew that the book was out there i am just amazed that i found it in beijing on the street! they already tried to take legal action but the company ended up being fake and untraceable so Hong Kong fake publisher 1, Jason 0

i've never seen a lotus in person before

little girl lickin' shots

another stolen portait. not really into nara's work though

a famous guy i dont know. this gallery had all super famous work by worhol, koons, yue minjung, nara, basquiat, etc...

later that night we would pass by the russian olympic party at houhai and see this car there.

warhol in china in the 70s i think

this guy also very famous

i think these are propaganda photos. how awesome are these? don't you wish that woman at the top with her daughter with the guns was your mom? and don't you wish you were a high cheekboned, grizzly, grenade packing daughter with a bayonet strapped to your back ?

lots of cool textures to be had in china. i will use this in one of my illos sometime.

if you look closely these are photo manipulations. they are shots of construction around beijing altered to look like old chinese landscape paintings. pretty cool.