Where to
begin? First, China was indeed an incredible experience. (The photo above was
taken late one evening heading back to our hotel while we were crossing
Tiananmen Square)

To start, we’re very sorry for not putting up any
posts while we were away. It turned out that access to the internet wasn’t much
a problem. But getting some software to edit the photos and dealing with
incredibly slow connections proved to be more daunting then we thought.

/>First, before anything else, Sara and I need to thank Bigmad, Mellow, DOM,
Katol, and Alex and their crew for being our incredible guides showing us around
Mongkok while we were in Hong Kong. We also need to thank Eddi and Julia from href="http://www.adfunture.com/">Adfunture who were incredibly gracious to
us while we were in Shanghai. We spent the last few days travelling around
Shanghai with Eddi and Julia and we will miss them alot. (More on both of these
cities in the coming days)

So where do we begin?....

We’ll
start with Zhang Dali.

One of the most memorable days for us was
while we were in Beijing. The afternoon we arrived was spent walking around an
amazing art district in the suburbs of Beijing called Dashanzi. In the 1950’s
Dashanzi (then known as href="http://omniknow.com/scripts/wiki.php?term=Factory_798">Factory 798)
consisted of a series of large factory buildings (built with assistance by the
East Germans and the Soviet Union) that were set up as a closed gated community
where the inhabitants built top secret electronics equipment. Today the
factories of Dashanzi are being redeveloped into one of the coolest art
communities you’re likely to find anywhere in the world. There are some amazing
galleries and cafes in Dashanzi that rival others in cities like Paris or New
York. We were particularly impressed by Factory 798 and the new href="http://www.chinesecontemporary.com/">Chinese Contemporary Gallery.
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While walking the galleries we came across a series of tags that each
showed the profile of a face. (The entire time were were in mainland China these
were the only examples of graf or street art that we saw)

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While checking out the art in the Chinese Contemporary Gallery, we were
blown away by a series of life sized figures that hung from the ceilings in the
Chinese Contemporary’s large warehouse space.

We learned from
the gallery that the artist who did the hanging figures was named Zhang Dali.
Dali, who also goes by the name AK-47, turned out the be the same artist who was
painting the tags on the streets of Beijing.

Through the gallery, we
arranged to meet Zhang Dali the next afternoon at his studio. It was an amazing
day and a wonderful conversation. Dali’s recent work (including the hanging
figures) are each portraits of Chinese migrant workers that Dali has met.
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In
the coming days we’ll write more about Zhang Dali. His work is truly amazing and
very thought provoking. But more on this later, as the jet lag from 30 hours of
travel is just now starting to kick in….

More in the moring
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Zhang Dali