"The Sixth Ring Has One More Ring Than the Fifth" — That's Everyday Life in Beijing | 100 People With Ideas

The Sixth Ring Has One More Ring Than the Fifth is a social survey project — though some call it an art project. To that, the curator says: "Does it really matter?"

Curator Cui Cancan was born in 1987. He recently resolved to lose weight and bought an exercise mat online for his studio at No. 241, Caochangdi, Beijing, planning to work out whenever he had a spare moment.

He moved to Caochangdi more than a year ago — a planned studio district in Cuigezhuang Township, between the Fifth and Sixth Ring Roads. The compound holds 17 buildings, home to artists of every stripe, among them Zuoxiao Zuzhou and Wang Qingsong. They all share the same dark-gray brick walls; past the main gate, each one is fenced off with wooden railings. Cui Cancan works out of one of these courtyards.

We talked with him about The Sixth Ring Has One More Ring Than the Fifth (《六环比五环多一环》), the exhibition now on show at OWSpace in Huajiadi, Beijing. It looks at how people live between the Fifth and Sixth Ring Roads, and it has drawn a lot of attention. As the curator, and a friend of the people who started the project, Cui Cancan has been busy — fielding interview requests from every outlet, then talking in circles to reject what the media makes of the show.

The background: Cui Cancan and his friends Li Yifan, Ge Fei, Ge Lei, and Man Yu are all "artists" who live between the Fifth and Sixth Rings. Most days they work in their studios, and although they share the same ground as the locals, they have little contact with the villagers. The gulf between life in this in-between belt and life "inside the ring" became the thing they wanted to say something about.

Every morning, for instance, the bus stop in Caochangdi fills early with people waiting to ride into the city for work. They come out of their rented rooms one by one; getting up that early makes them drowsy, and the buses into town are strangely quiet. Once off the bus, most still have to transfer to something else, three or four hours of it, before they reach the center of the city and start the day.

Outside the Fifth Ring, inside the Sixth. Life out here is unknown to the people who live inside the ring. Hidden among these blocks are villas, private clubs, schools for expatriates, and city people's second and third homes — and also more than ten million villagers, migrant workers, and temporary residents. It is turf where packs of stray dogs fight over territory, and it is the first home in Beijing for many people trying to make it. From here they build every kind of tie to the world inside the ring, caught up each day in an enormous struggle.

Li Yifan, Ge Fei, Ge Lei, and Man Yu were struck by this contrast between inside and outside. On the one hand they wanted to record this in-between population through "art"; on the other, they hoped the project wouldn't come out too artistic.

Because they liked the same things, Ge Fei, Ge Lei, and Man Yu had set up a loose outfit a few years earlier called "Second Floor Publishing." Despite the name, it is not really a publishing house, and it was never registered as a company — just a small group for getting things done.

Over time they put together a string of small projects, such as Country Wash-Cut-Blow: 2014 New Year's Eve Party (《乡村洗剪吹—— 2014 跨年趴》) at an art museum, where they got villagers doing square dancing, head-shaking dance, crosstalk and acrobatics. Most of it had to do with fringe culture. At the start of this survey, "Second Floor" took its cue from Migrant Workers' Home and wanted, likewise, to use art to step into the daily lives of ordinary people between the Fifth and Sixth Rings. But after nearly a year of talking it over, they went with an open-ended survey instead — in Ge Fei's words, "We were thinking too much. The village doesn't need art at all."

Second Floor Publishing

The project started in September 2014. They set a few loose rules: anyone interested could join at any time, pick whichever village they liked, and choose their own subject to look into — everything, in short, was left pretty loose. The only requirements were to stay in the village at least ten days and to post to Moments once an hour while surveying. Money was tight. The first to join were artist friends from their own circle; in the end the project drew 40 participants — painters, artists, architects, and a good number of students.

The survey covered most of the area between the Fifth and Sixth Rings, with two exceptions. One was due west of Beijing: Shijingshan District had already been turned into residential compounds, and the idea of a "village" had died out there. The other was the Yizhuang development zone in the southeast, which no artist chose to look into.

The 40 of them each went about it in their own way, and no internal logic holds the 40 fragments together. But as an event meant to stir up public argument, it worked well enough.

At the exhibition

At the exhibition

At the exhibition

Q = QDaily

Q: Tell us about the background of the project.

Ge Fei: Just within Caochangdi village there's an area called "Little Hong Kong." Little Hong Kong is where the villagers live — it's the road you walked in on today. And this office we're sitting in is a fancy place, but it has almost no connection to the world outside it.

The area between the Fifth and Sixth Rings is in fact enormous. It has private clubs and villas, and it also has environmental problems and sanitation problems, a lot of complication and conflict. But to people outside the ring, this area is unknown.

We talked through plenty of formats beforehand, including inviting artists to come and work here. But for the villagers, the right to survive comes before every other right; what they need is mutual aid. The village doesn't need art at all. So in the end we went with a survey.

Cui Cancan: Everywhere in the world, people above the middle-class line have the same tastes in life. There isn't much more to say about it.

What goes on between the Fifth and Sixth Rings is really China in miniature: this belt in Beijing, the urban villages in other big cities, the shantytowns of Shanghai and Chongqing, the Foxconn factory zones in Guangdong — all of them made up of people who came from somewhere else. It's a problem you find all over China.

Q: Was anything especially hard while the project was running?

Ge Fei: Nothing especially hard. Participants couldn't get any direct benefit out of it — if they were interested, they came and joined. We never turned anyone away. People with the same interests gather on their own. As for money, our means were limited, so anything beyond what we could afford, we adjusted.

Ge Lei: Some of the artists came with a survey plan, but most had none. They'd pick a village, and what they ended up looking into came more from their first physical reaction than from anything else. There weren't many rules.

Q: Why hold this exhibition at OWSpace?

Cui Cancan: Working with One Way Street went smoothly — they're a bookstore with real influence in Beijing, and we know them well. OWSpace also fit this show pretty well.

Ge Lei: The other consideration was that we didn't much want to do this in a gallery or a museum. We count as part of the so-called "art world," but we didn't want to put this thing back inside it. This is about ordinary people, and we wanted more people to know about it; One Way Street gets more foot traffic. Show it at 798 and the same fixed crowd pays attention.

Q: What is the biggest decision you have made, personally, so far?

Cui Cancan: I wanted to be freer. Once "freedom" gets into your body, you start imagining all sorts of things — I want to spend this whole life free. Ha ha ha ha ha! (Am I writing a report here?)

As a kid I painted every day and wanted to paint well. Then I found it boring — do one thing a thousand times and it becomes a cult, like the eight model operas: make people watch them every day and they'll watch until they're sick.

I'm full of curiosity about this world; I want to know its truths and its stories. Back then I wanted to change how I lived, and while changing it I met all kinds of people. The great men you once worshipped get crossed off your list, one by one.

Q: If it weren't for XXX, you wouldn't have the work or the state you're in today. How would you fill in the blank? It can be a person, an idea, a personality trait, anything.

Cui Cancan: If it weren't for "if," life would certainly be wonderful.

Q: Of all your abilities, which is the strongest?

Cui Cancan: I have no concept of "ability." Maybe my greatest ability is seeing clearly that I don't think I've ever owned anything. The place I live in now is rented — the landlord can take it back any day he likes, and this furniture, put on the second-hand market, is worth about what it's worth. The old Chinese saying goes, the barefoot man isn't afraid of the man in shoes. I feel I've always gone barefoot: there's no reputation of mine to drag through the dirt, and nothing worth holding on to.

I love a work by an American performance artist of the 1960s, who hired a man to kill him. The killer came looking for him day after day; the artist had a gun behind his head and could be shot down at any moment. Now I feel I can end anything at any time, and start anything at any time.

Q: Why is the art world such a rotten scene?

Ge Lei: Artists are businessmen. Nobody is really making art; they're all doing business. The few of us used to paint, but there's a lot you can't express through painting alone. Take this project we wanted to do — if we'd just painted these people's condition and hung it on a wall, what the hell good would that do?

Ge Fei: People call art a "scene," but the differences between one person and the next are huge. Plenty of people work hard at painting, go to the art fairs; they're diligent, and that's fine too. Everyone is trying to live. It's just that the focus of their lives differs, their values differ, and all of them want to live well. Living well is our focus too.

Cui Cancan: There's no such thing as an "art world," fundamentally, because everyone is doing something different. And yet, fundamentally, everyone in this circle holds the same values — what you're looking at is a crowd with the same story and the same needs written on their faces. I find that boring. In fact people aren't doing it for art's sake either; as Ge Fei said, maybe it's about living this one life well.

My basic state right now is: when I'm bored I put on an exhibition, and when the exhibition gets boring I stay bored a while longer, then put on another one. I do a dozen or so shows a year, which tells you how often I get bored. To put it more concretely — look at America's Beat Generation, Britain's hippies, France's May Movement. One of the sayings of the May Movement was "Never trust anyone over thirty." That kind of stale historical experience, that homogenized logic and thinking, I find boring. I'd still like to make my own choices — but the choice shouldn't turn into a pose.

When you're doing something, you don't feel you're making art. You just want to do it; the urge to do it is intense, an urgent need that takes in liking and wanting, and so you do it. And then it's done. You've met your own need, here and now, and that is a personal matter. At the same time you wonder whether, while you're at it, you can bring other people a little change too.

Q: What do you make of artists who have lived abroad for a long time, or artists who once shone brightly?

Cui Cancan: They're alive, they're doing all right, and if they still have their loves and their hates and keep their capacity for curiosity about the world, I think that's very good. As Wang Xiaobo said, as long as you're alive you're still on the road toward wisdom. That's good enough.

Q: QDaily has many young readers, and they're curious about how you go about putting on an exhibition.

Cui Cancan: For example, anything has to start as an idea in your head — say, "I want to do an exhibition about food." Once the idea is there, you pick a scope: Chinese food, Western food, or local specialties? Once the scope is set, do you talk about the ingredients, the cooking, or how it looks on the plate? You have to pick one point. Then you find a space, and you have to ask whether you can do the thing well in that space. Once you can, there's when to do it and how to do it in that space. Once the exhibition is up you start dealing with the media, and you have to get your own meaning across. My exhibitions are my work.

Q: Are there any decent new spaces in Beijing?

Cui Cancan: My place, if you want to hold a show here. I'd recommend anywhere that isn't a space yet and could become one.

Q: Tell us what's been bothering you lately.

Cui Cancan: Whether exercise actually makes you lose weight.

Ge Lei: Lately people from the art world have jumped out to say that The Sixth Ring Has One More Ring Than the Fifth isn't art, and people from sociology say it isn't a social survey. I'd like to know why anyone is bothered by this at all.