Caochangdi 335 Art District

This guide to the Caochangdi 335 Art District opens with bulldozers arriving unannounced at an artist's workshop on the morning of August 3, 2018, then rewinds nineteen years to when that artist, Ai Weiwei, built a plain grey-brick studio on what was then a sleepy farming village. It follows how other artists, galleries and collectors followed him out, turning Caochangdi into a patchwork of red-brick lanes that kept its village grit even as it grew, and how by 2006 Ai Weiwei was working from a second building here, a converted socialist-era factory. Listen while walking the lanes themselves, past the chickens, barbershops and gallery doors that still stand side by side.