798 Art District

This guide to the 798 Art District in Beijing opens with the artist Huang Rui signing a lease on an abandoned factory hall in 2002, knowing the whole compound was slated for demolition. It traces the building's own hidden past first, a classified 1950s military electronics plant built with Soviet money and Bauhaus design by East German architects, then follows the wave of artists the cheap rent and factory light drew in through the 1990s. Look up at the sawtooth roof above you, angled the same way those East German architects planned it.