Yantai: Three Romantic Projects and a District That's Supposedly Being Remade

Architects and artists have stepped into an old-city renovation project, but everything about it looks surprisingly piecemeal.

The artist Ou Ning's newest title is "Chief Planner and Academic Director of the Guangren Art District."

Guangren Road has two identities. One carries a glow of history: it was the first street Yantai opened as a treaty port. The other is a familiar picture of decay — more than a decade ago the residents were moved out, leaving a coastal boulevard, a plaza, dozens of historic buildings, a scattering of tenants, and run-down bars and restaurants. In Ou Ning's words, "This 'bare' place can't hold onto anyone. Whether they come to sit in the shade or to eat, everyone here is just passing through."

The property, known collectively as the Guangren Road Historic District of Zhifu District, Yantai, is run by China Chuangyuan Company. Before they found Ou Ning they had wanted Qian Xiaohua, founder of Nanjing's Librairie Avant-Garde, to open a bookstore there, but for various reasons it fell through. Ou Ning and Qian Xiaohua are old acquaintances — the two once worked together on the Bishan Project, a rural-construction effort in Huangshan, Anhui — though whether Qian recommended him to lead the renovation has not been confirmed.

When a public building thick with history is put in front of you, almost everyone wants to dig up its past and, at the same time, hopes that reworking the space will pull life back into it. But as with so many renovation projects in China, they run into complicated administrative approvals and a complicated social reality at once.

From July 29 to 30, Ou Ning convened a forum called "The Guangren Project: A New Zhifu Summer." It served as the opening ceremony for the whole Guangren Project and as a way to build momentum for it. What follows is everything of the renovation you can actually see so far.

Suochengli and a Community Library

Suochengli is an old walled quarter not far from Guangren Road. It has since become an urban village, and its residents have not been moved out.

Ou Ning thought back to San Yuan Li, the documentary he shot in Guangzhou in 2003, and to the Dashilar renovation plan of 2005: "From the ecology and the sense of community down to how different people live, these dense, poor urban districts share a similar, unyielding reality."

Suochengli was first built in the Ming dynasty. To strengthen coastal defenses against Japanese pirate raids, Zhu Yuanzhang approved the founding of the Qishan Garrison, a thousand-household coastal-defense post. Back then Suochengli had walls and four gates facing north, south, east and west, with a temple atop each gate tower. By the Kangxi reign of the Qing, coastal defense mattered less, and the soldiers laid down their armor and went back to farming. The moat was filled in; the walls vanished long ago.

Today, one street away from Suochengli sit a busy Wanda commercial district and its star-rated hotels. At some point a row of enormous billboards went up along Suochengli's streets. This year Suochengli was designated a historic and cultural district, a state-level zone of integrated heritage protection — yet the entire 161-mu site (about 11 hectares), along with the 242 immovable cultural relics inside it, stays trapped behind sheet-metal hoardings, dimming year by year. The single-story houses here are still heated by burning firewood in winter, and there were two fires this past March.

Ou Ning's team surveyed Suochengli: a third of the people living here are old-time residents, elderly; two-thirds are tenants who came from elsewhere for work. "Demolition" is a rumor that resurfaces every few days. On the website of Jiaodong Online you can still find a long post from as far back as 2007 spelling out why the vast majority of people want the place torn down. In the past month alone there have been five more posts asking about Suochengli — when the relocation will happen, complaints about the safety of houses left unrepaired for years and about sewage running across the intersections. The official reply on relocation came from the Yantai Municipal Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau: "The municipal party committee and government have made the renovation of the Suochengli district a key urban-construction project and are actively advancing it. Plan design and background surveys are under way, and the timetable for renovation will be announced publicly once the municipal government has fixed it."

For residents who don't know whether their homes will be torn down or kept, or whether they themselves will be moved, repairs are not cheap. Most choose to make do and keep living there.

In fact, as early as 2002, Professor Ruan Yisan of Tongji University drew up a preservation plan for Qishan Suochengli. Like the plans that came after it, it came to nothing.

The operators of the Guangren Project leased a rear courtyard of the Zhang Family Ancestral Hall in Suochengli. The hall is more than three hundred years old; the rear courtyard, originally used for storage and back-of-house work, covers 323 square meters and was cramped and cluttered before the renovation.

Ou Ning invited Vector Architects and its founder Dong Gong — who designed the "loneliest library in China," the Seaside Library, a free public library run by Sanlian Bookstore — to rework the courtyard.

Single-story buildings on three sides, together with the north wall of the ancestral hall's main room, enclosed a yard. Vector Architects tore out the middle of it and left it empty, then inserted a new steel-frame corridor system linking the different spaces: a reading room, a children's picture-book area, a lecture hall, an exhibition hall and a café.

Dong Gong explained that the specially designed bent steel plates become beams in their own right once folded, and can also carry rainwater on wet days: the water runs along the channels the folds create toward fixed outlets, then drips underground down chains.

"An architect is never answering a single question. I think good design always answers many questions at once," Dong Gong said in his talk. That, he added, is the intelligence of design.

With the space finished, Ou Ning brought in Xie Huanxin, who works on local Yantai history, to run the Suochengli Community Library.

"He's a local researcher I ran into by chance while browsing bookstores in Yantai. He studies Yantai's folk customs and vernacular houses — for instance a building type particular to the Jiaodong Peninsula, the seaweed house. I asked him to draw up a reading list, all of it on the history and culture of Yantai and the Jiaodong Peninsula."

Xie Huanxin and Ou Ning agreed that the library would go on archiving Yantai's historical record, collecting folk customs, and doing research and publishing: the history of the treaty port, the story of Yuhuangding Hospital, oral histories taken from Suochengli's elderly residents.

Ou Ning treats the Suochengli community library as an early experiment for the Zhifu Academy. In the future, he says, the Zhifu Academy will send out similar community libraries to neighborhoods across Yantai.

If all goes well, the Zhifu Academy will settle into two old Western-style houses at the very core of the Guangren Project — reworked with Vector Architects' involvement — and become an academic institution.

"This is not simply a bookstore," Ou Ning stressed in an interview with QDaily. The newly founded Zhifu Academy will study Yantai's local history and run publishing and educational programs. The operators hope it becomes a distinctive brand, one that can carry on the legacy of the famous Chefoo School in Yantai's past — it was from this missionary school that Henry Luce, the publisher who founded Time, Fortune and Life, came.

But the much-anticipated Zhifu Academy has been slow to move. Vector Architects' plan is still in its third round of government approval.

Suochengli and an "Online Photo Studio"

Set into the bookshelves Vector Architects designed are several light boxes of different sizes. At a glance they look like the high-saturation pages of a tourist souvenir album, and when unlit they can hide among the spines and covers. A woman who came to hear a lecture found one of them too glaring and tried to cover it with a piece of cardboard — then suddenly realized the person in the photo was her neighbor.

This is a work called Suochengli Photo Studio, by the artist Zhang Xiao, whom Ou Ning invited to take part. Zhang doesn't actually photograph anyone; he composites images. For this he wrote a simple program: visitors scan a QR code, upload a portrait of themselves and then pick a place they'd like to go. Zhang offers 12 options — the sea, a forest, a grassland, a desert, a waterfall, a glacier, outer space, the countryside, a mountain, a city, a lake, a scenic spot. Choose one, and out comes a picture of "me" arriving at "the place I want to go."

Zhang Xiao is from Haiyang, in Yantai. The idea came to him at a village market fair back home: the village photo studio had set up at the market too, a tricycle hauling a computer and a printer, touching up photographs for the people at the fair. Looking at the pictures themselves, Zhang says bluntly, anyone can see the garish taste and the frankly crude retouching running all the way through them. But the studio he wanted to open wasn't about taste, and it wasn't meant to supply the library with a few decorative pictures.

Old-fashioned salon portraits used to try to build a lovely dream for people; you could pick and swap backdrops — a grassland, a modern city, a desert. This online photo studio has the same aim: "Who are you," and "Where do you want to go."

Zhang Xiao went looking through Suochengli for his first "subjects," with a set of standard questions ready: What year did you come to Suochengli? What's changed in all the years since? Where do you most want to travel? What's your ideal way of living?

His first plan was very optimistic — three minutes of talk with each person, and he could finish shooting the whole video in a single morning. Only later did he see that this "three minutes" was hardly reasonable. The video still keeps his first few interviews, awkward and dead silent. Even though he's a Yantai native himself, in Suochengli he was a complete outsider; the conversations that failed showed plainly that the two sides were not on the same frequency, and that people had no idea what this man was there to do.

This is very unlike Zhang Xiao's usual photography and art. Starting in 2009 he spent several years shooting Coastline up and down the shore. In his frames, bathing beaches are carpeted with people in every color of swimsuit; uniformed guards at an amusement park line up for morning drill; a bicycle stands on a weedy lot not yet open to the public, two Shih Tzus sitting in the baskets front and back. Behind those images he is a relatively detached observer. He photographed many "coastal boulevards" and "scenic plazas" before they were tidied into their finished forms, catching construction pressing steadily toward the shoreline, cranes putting up high-rise sea-view apartments not far off, sand, garbage and broken stone piled right at the water's edge — and always, in the frame, people wandering into these not-yet-finished spaces.

By his own account, the coastline is the front line of reform and opening up, and also the area hit earliest by foreign culture and headlong economic growth. Nobody knows whether the shock is good or bad, but the changes get set down in front of you in a blur, before you can react.

Another project, Alive, began in the summer of 2014. For the year that followed, wherever he was on a given day, he would find a local newspaper from that day and photograph himself with it — because he had learned that many elderly people living long-term away from the place where their household registration is held must do exactly this to prove to the social security bureau back home that they are still alive, and so keep drawing their pensions.

Unlike that work — some of it watching silently from behind the camera, some of it turned in on himself — this time Zhang wanted to drum up customers for a photo studio. It isn't hard to picture how often he was turned away. Zhang remembers the barrier: "There's this thing in China. It's nothing, really, but the moment someone doesn't know what you're trying to do, it's frightening, and no matter how you explain it you can't make it clear." Nobody wanted to be photographed.

After watching him get refused all day, a friend put him in touch with an "old hand" who lived in Suochengli, and with that man leading the way he finished the whole video in under two days. Some of the old people held onto Zhang Xiao and talked for hours. The old hand chose the Leshan Giant Buddha; a Sichuanese man who runs a calligraphy-supplies shop in Yantai chose his hometown; one woman knew exactly what she wanted — Zhangjiajie — and in the finished picture she "stands" above the peaks and rivers of Zhangjiajie. What surprised Zhang was how many people named Suochengli itself, or Yantai, as the place they wanted to go.

This time Zhang Xiao was no longer a detached bystander. He simply handed the authorship over to the residents and to the retoucher, whom he had recruited at the village market back in Haiyang. He set the retoucher up with a stall at the mouth of an alley, where people could say to his face exactly what they wanted the final picture to look like. One man wanted a beach shot but broke the retoucher's usual formula for composition: unlike most of the pictures, where the portrait is blown up as large as it will go, he asked for the figure to be scaled down.

The retoucher looked up, baffled: "You sure you want it laid out like this? You can't even make out the face."

A Coastal Plaza and a "Courtyard House Plugin"

People's Architecture Office has been going for seven years, and it is best known for the Courtyard House Plugin — a house inserted inside a house, in the old courtyard homes of Beijing's hutongs. Some of their installations are wildly inventive and have won over commercial clients; both K11 and Lane Crawford have worked with them.

The Courtyard House Plugin looks like a romantic idea. Technically, after an on-site survey, panels are custom-made at a factory and shipped in. Each specially designed panel has bolts built into it so the panels lock into one another. You don't even need a professional construction crew: buyers can follow the drawings and assemble new interior walls, ceilings and floors much as they would IKEA furniture, at relatively low cost.

People's Architecture Office first thought that renovating this kind of old house could be reduced, through measurement, to a set of panels needing no special design — which would save on design costs and allow mass production. In practice every old house is different, and so is every need. On top of already-tight floor space per person, one owner wants an extension, another a mezzanine, a third has to deal with structures already built without permits. "Once demand gets that varied, we have no way to bring our design costs down, no way to make it a real product."

More important, commissions from private owners are rare in old-city renovation. In old districts full of unpermitted building and tangled property rights, design costs are enormous, while a private owner can usually afford a pitifully small fee.

People's Architecture Office once tried an online service: enter your ceiling height and floor area and it would generate a Courtyard House Plugin solution and a price, which you could order on the spot. The channel never matured, and it has since been taken down.

Work of this kind was on show in Yantai too. At the forum, people kept asking how much it costs to line the inside of an old house with one of these shells.

Beyond commercial spaces, they also designed an installation for Beijing's Baitasi, the White Pagoda Temple, called Tubular Baitasi. Six sets of periscopes were built into it, dropping all sorts of fantastical viewpoints into an ordinary walk down the street: you could see the White Pagoda Temple as it stood 700 years ago, a socialist-era building from the 1950s, pedestrians on the street, and a 3D printer at work.

At Ou Ning's invitation, People's Architecture Office reproduced the installation in Yantai, though the result is a little odd — all you see is the sea and the green mesh fence around a basketball court. The piece sits on the Guangren coastal plaza. Peers in Beijing and Shanghai raised some criticism, the core of it being: "It's a design that looks good and isn't good for much, and it has nothing to do with the people who live in the old city."

All of this is the Guangren Project, under way since the middle of 2016. It remains an obvious distance from what China Chuangyuan Company promises in its official material: a "cultural cluster for Yantai," one that will "raise the banner of Yantai's cultural landmarks and become a window onto the city's vitality." More to the point, no one seems to know how that goal is supposed to be reached.

Cover image from Vector Architects and the Guangren Project.