Beijing's 798 Art District occupies a sprawling complex of decommissioned Bauhaus-style factory buildings in the city's northeastern Dashanzi neighbourhood — a place where Cold War industrial history and contemporary Chinese art have fused into something genuinely unexpected. The factories were built in the 1950s with East German assistance and once produced military electronics for the People's Liberation Army. When production wound down in the late 1990s, artists and designers began quietly colonising the cheap, cavernous spaces, and by the mid-2000s, 798 had become China's most internationally recognised centre for contemporary art, attracting galleries, studios, design firms, and cultural institutions from around the world.
Neighbourhood