Looking back at Arrow Factory, Beijing's hutong storefront space

“This work sums up my life in the hutongs. Before, everyone was very relaxed. Now it’s not so free. Everything is forbidden, ‘No, No, No.’ Negation upon negation upon negation.” This is how Kan Xuan describes the impetus for her animated video Walking, Walking (2019), of cucumbers moving across a white screen to chants of “不许放油!不许放蒜! 不许放醋! 不许放盐!” (No oil! No garlic! No vinegar! No salt!), as a “negation of the most authentic, average Beijing dish.” Kan created the video for the Beijing alternative space Arrow Factory, where it was shown beginning in July 2019 for two months, during the space’s final summer. She placed the screen in the corner of the tiny space so that it was only visible when a passerby peered through the street-level window, echoing how “the entrances of many Beijing’s shops were blocked and there was no way to know that a shop was in there.”

A neighborhood resident herself, Kan shared her reflections in Arrow Factory: The Last Five Years (2020), a publication produced by the space’s co-founders Rania Ho, Wang Wei, and Pauline Yao to mark the closure of the 15-square-meter premise, which hosted artist projects at 38 Jianchang Hutong from March 2008 until September 2019, when the local housing office required that its street-facing window be closed or curtained off. For the space’s founders, who had originally envisioned Arrow Factory as a space where its exhibitions would be viewable to passersby at any time of day, and who had already endured new Beijing “beautification” regulations that led to the replacement of the glass storefront in 2017 with a small window, this was the final straw that made them realize it was impossible to continue. On September 29, 2019, after a 24-hour karaoke send-off—organized by artist Lu Ming, as part of his ongoing project Xiao Ming’s Room (2017– ), which featured a giant painting of a tropical beach on the back wall and the phrases “the sun rises” and “the sun sets” painted on adjacent walls—Arrow Factory faded into the sunrise.

“In a perfect world, an independent space closes when there is no longer a need for it,” Ho reflects. “The impulse to make this type of space comes from the idea that there is something lacking. When artists do not find what they are looking for, they make their own.” In the case of Arrow Factory, as Ho explains to the book’s editor Zian Chen, its origins date back to the early 2000s when new art galleries and real-estate developments using art as promotional spectacles overwhelmed Beijing, and local artists were creating bigger artworks to fill vast spaces. As Ho describes, a 2007 performance at the newly developed 798 Arts District’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (now UCCA), where dancers suspended by harnesses on the building’s exterior became stuck due to a mechanical failure, led to the thought that “maybe there is another way.” Yao notes that alternative spaces generally emerge “when the art market in a given locale is going strong . . . because they find meaning in going against the current and offering a different way of operating.” During a California road trip in January 2008, Ho, Wang, and Yao decided they didn’t want to create a space in an art district, and didn’t want it to be large-scale, nor to “spend resources on lavish opening events.”

Once back in Beijing, they found a former vegetable shop just inside the second ring road, in a historical area that once produced arrows. The early projects of Arrow Factory, catalogued in 3 Years: Arrow Factory (2011), included Wang Gongxin’s It’s Not About the Neighbors (2009), which replicated the bing (pancake) shop next door so that the two storefronts were identical, except at night when Wang screened a video of the original onto the glass window. In an essay in 3 Years, artist Ou Ning observes that Arrow Factory had the “ambition to intervene in the space of urban reality” and open a dialogue with society. This desire was epitomized in Nie Mu’s community television project Channel Me (2010), which tapped into grassroots energy, as neighbors signed up to perform musical acts, stand-up comedy, magic tricks, and other talents.

The second volume of the platform’s self-published chronicle, Arrow Factory: The Next Four Years (2015), covered events held at the space between March 2011 and May 2015, and what it means to be a good institution. Ho, Wang, and Yao note in the introduction the “shift in China’s cultural climate” in that period, with a “tide of micro-initiatives all across the country,” including other hutong art spaces, and an impulse for new creative autonomy. This era saw He An install a switch outside Arrow Factory that turned off a streetlight in the space as well as lights in a shop 300 meters away and in a nearby hutong, in Wind Light as a Thief (2011). For Void (2013), Liu Wei fixed lights on the glass exterior that transformed the interior space into a black hole at night.

Knowing that it could be shut down at any time, Arrow Factory adhered to a “low-key, modest, flexible and spontaneous” approach with an “aversion to institutionalization.” The founders never made long-term plans, and focused on working with artists. As Wang explains, “We set up a particular scenario from the beginning, designing a particular way to encounter artwork. This type of experience emphasizes a sense of equality and openness, concepts that are relatively scarce in today’s society.” This spirit led to events like “Hairdo! A Festival of Hair” in 2014, which was billed as a “one-day celebration of physical and mental transformations” with “onsite hairstyling for lucky draw winners; special hair-themed snacks and music; a self-help therapy board, and more.”

Along with site-specific projects, Arrow Factory began a partnership with two other shops turned street-level artist-run spaces. In 2011, they teamed up with PiST///, in Istanbul, and Collective, in Edinburgh, for the year-long project “How to Turn the World by Hand,” which looked at historical ideas of cultural and material exchange. In the same year, they hosted Shanghai-based Museum of Unknown, which transformed Arrow Factory into an art-lending space, and later, in 2013, Art Lab OVA (Kuri Suzuki and Zulu Kageyama) created Yokohama Paradise Hall, offering Japanese tea service and a mini flea market.

As Arrow Factory’s founders realized from the beginning of their venture, the space itself conditions the kinds of projects shown there. He Chi’s Next Door, initiated in March 2016, for instance, embodied the modesty and spontaneity of what only a small alternative space could do: the artist continuously re-painted the interior to match the color of the leaves belonging to the big elm tree behind Arrow Factory. That winter, Hu Yinping’s project Xiao Fang filled the space with 65 unique woolen hats hand-woven by the artist’s mother—a project that came about after the artist learned her mother and friends were being exploited into making hats for a company during their leisure time.

The mood significantly darkened for Arrow Factory when it lost its glass front in 2017. In its place, Yang Zhenzhong installed a two-way mirror in a window framed by bars, with a security camera behind it recording the passersby who watched themselves, combed their hair, took selfies, or flexed their muscles in the reflection. The footage was live-streamed in the café Wu Jin, Arrow Factory’s sister space, a few doors down. While this project might have saved Arrow Factory from a total bricking over, the bing shop next door did not survive. Yet Arrow Factory bounced back from despondency with projects in 2018 like the second chapter of Xiao Fang, which featured Hu’s mother’s and friends’ comical designs for a “French Bikini Competition.” Others utilized the new window, like Matt Hope’s Arrhythmia (2018), which transformed the aperture into a recessed cavity (like an arrow slit) that captured ambient sounds and generated flickering light and new tones.

In every project at Arrow Factory, the conditions of the space became intrinsic to the artwork. Artist Lee Kit reflected on his 2012 show: “I realized that many of my works could be exhibited once, and then were meaningless to show again elsewhere.” In this way, Arrow Factory, miraculously surviving for nearly 12 years with a minuscule budget, became irreplaceable to artists, and to the city and its context as the anti-white cube, an organic and independent venue for art. Though the times have changed—Lee recalls that he started going to Beijing around 2006 because he found the city “so accepting of these alternative spaces; there was so much life there . . . now it is really broken”—and Arrow Factory, in Ho’s words, ended up closing after it was “forced into a corner,” the team are looking forward to what comes next. As Yao writes at the end of their book, “The ambition and creative spirit that exists in China makes me believe future generations will find a way to continue the work we have started.”

• Arrow Factory