After the Hutongs Were Sealed Up: What a Chinese Woman, a Dutch Woman, a French Woman, and a Malaysian Man Set Out to Do

"We never set out to change the world," she said, looking me in the eye. "What matters is that you acted."

Editor's note:

Every event is fragmented, trends in an instant, and is forgotten just as fast. In an age like this, the act of remembering has become more precious than ever.

We want to be the people who carry memory through this era. "Stories of 2017" is one of QDaily's most important series of the year.

If you don't look closely, you would never guess that No. 47 Yanshou Street is a temporary exhibition space. It sits right beside the Dashilar neighborhood's senior activity center, directly across from a small window selling pan-fried dumplings and boiled corn, half its shopfront hidden behind ivy. It looks no different from an ordinary home. The only giveaway is a white card by the door: "Lava & Neighbors."

This is a small show the Dutch graphic design firm Lava put on during Beijing Design Week. The space runs about 50 square meters, with most of the front hall left bare. In two small rooms at the back, posters, photographs, and booklets cover every wall, documenting the public projects Lava has run around the hutongs over the past four years. But the doorways to both rooms have been bricked up, and visitors can only peer in through windows cut into the wall.

Anyone who spends time in the hutongs will recognize the scene. The installation faithfully recreates the streetscape left behind after Beijing's district authorities cracked down on "opening walls and punching holes" — the practice of cutting doors and windows into the outer walls of residential lanes to make shopfronts. In the exhibition catalogue, Han Chang, a Beijing native who joined Lava in 2015, writes: "Since the start of 2017, the small shops in Beijing's hutongs have been closing one after another. Even some of the survivors have had their shopfronts bricked up, leaving only a small window. The hutongs are where we live and work. Seeing them remade like this, we miss the foot traffic and the life that used to be here."

Lava moved from Amsterdam to Beijing in 2013 and has four staff: besides Han Chang, there is Céline, who is Dutch; Joséphine, who is French; and Kekfeng, who is Malaysian. Their clients are mostly foreign cultural institutions — including the Swiss, Dutch, and French embassies — plus a few commercial brands, such as the used-car platform Youxin and the pet food brand Jujushou.

All four live in hutongs near Beixinqiao, and their studio is a few hundred meters away, in the No. 46 compound on Fangjia Hutong. The compound was once a Chinese machine-tool factory; converted into a cultural and creative park in 2008, it now houses dozens of design firms, creative studios, restaurants, and hotels of every size.

In March this year, the Andingmen subdistrict of Dongcheng District began a concentrated cleanup of 90 "wall-opening and hole-punching" cases along Fangjia Hutong. The No. 46 compound, where Lava sits, was spared; the shops elsewhere were not. No one has tallied the losses in full. Last September, Xia Liang, who runs Nuoyan Tavern, published a post titled Ten Small-but-Beautiful Shops on Fangjia Hutong on his official account. Of the ten shops on the list, the three inside the No. 46 compound are still open; all seven others now read "temporarily closed" on Dianping.

"Window Shopping" thus became the first public project Lava took on this year. Together with a visiting team from Amsterdam, a group of about a dozen split into small teams and spent two days cycling through the hutongs. Whenever they passed a shop that had been sealed up "leaving only a small window," they stopped and asked the owner whether he might like a free shop sign.

Some waved them off; others found it fun and harmless. The studio's website records at least nine shops that took up the offer. The whole process was quick and stripped down — ask, design, post, photograph. The signs were plain and direct, but playful too. Beneath the window selling beer, cola, mineral water, and Beibingyang soda, they simply hung four colored bottles to match. "Haircut, No. 15 Courtyard" became a pair of scissors "snipping" open a door. A tobacco-and-liquor shop got the two characters for "tobacco and liquor" pieced together from 24 Yuxi and Erguotou cigarette and bottle wrappers. "Gao's Mala Tang" was reworked into a couplet, trimmed with silhouettes of lotus root, enoki mushrooms, broccoli, and sausage.

The signs lasted only a few days before they vanished — to wind and rain, or to other causes. By the time we visited on October 2nd, most of the shops themselves had vanished too. The walls, uniformly coated in gray cement, carried only twelve characters printed on white A4 paper: "Hundred Streets, Thousand Lanes Project — Scaffolding Storage Area."

Céline had never expected the signs to last in the first place. "We never set out to change the world," she said, looking me in the eye. "What matters is that you acted."

This was not Lava's first design project tied to the hutongs. In four years in China, they have taken part in four editions of Beijing Design Week, each year's work building on the last.

In 2015, Lava designed the entire visual identity system for the Baitasi area. To get to know the place first, they roamed the community, gathering data on everything "from geographic form to historical context, from cuisine to literature" — data that might be "useful to future residents."

That data was eventually shown in visual form through photographs taken in the hutongs: leaving 16 of 24 yogurt cups in a row empty to show that "71% of Baitasi residents are local," for instance, or pairing dishes with numbers to spell out how many restaurants in the neighborhood serve luzhu offal stew versus pasta.

What stayed with Han Chang most, though, was 2016. Lava produced 30 issues of an independent zine for Baitasi called Lawaai, each only a dozen or so pages, printed on palm-sized sheets of colored paper. The team and its volunteers brainstormed the topics together. Some issues, like the Baitasi Guide, were drawn from interviews with local residents; others were lighter.

For the issue Baitasi Barbershop Chain, the designers wanted to find out what counted as fashionable in Baitasi, so they spent a day near the wet market visiting six barbers and asking them "what hairstyles are most popular with young people right now" — then had them try the cuts out on male models and photographed the results. For another issue, Fashion Line, several team members sought out the clotheslines strung up everywhere in the neighborhood and posed for forced-perspective photos beside the drying laundry.

The Chinese name, 《事儿多》— "lots going on" — was Han Chang's idea: "very Beijing, very down-to-earth, and it carries two meanings: lots of issues, lots of topics." The foreign name, Lawaai, came from Céline. The word means "noise" in Dutch, but it sounds uncannily like lǎowài, the Mandarin word for foreigner. The one regret: although plenty of people came to the show, the zines — 10 yuan each, or 300 yuan for the full set — sold fewer than ten sets.

"But the thing I love most about working here is that every year the team sets aside time for public projects. If you're always buried in commercial work — even though a lot of our work isn't all that commercial — you start to feel worn out," Han Chang told QDaily.

Kekfeng said the same. After several design jobs in Malaysia and Hong Kong, he chose Lava, he said, because he "didn't like firms that were too commercial." "I had something I wanted to pursue…" He scratched his head, searching for the word. "Ideals," Céline said with a laugh from beside him, finishing his sentence.

For Céline, the project that stayed with her most was the "Mobile Design Studio" during Design Week 2013. It offered free shop-sign redesigns to 18 businesses in Beijing's Dashilar area. It proved popular enough that the studio later took it to Chengdu and Xiamen as well.

Unlike Joséphine and Kekfeng, who joined later, Céline had felt no particular pull toward China before she arrived. Only after her boss sent her to set up a branch office did she find herself drawn to "the chaos and uncertainty of everything here," which struck her as far more interesting than the neatly ordered rhythm of life in the Netherlands.

In 2013, Céline bought an electric tricycle at a secondhand market in Beijing, slapped a large bilingual "Mobile Design Studio" logo on the side, and stuffed a few laptops and power strips into the cargo bed. She rode it through the hutongs of Dashilar, "looking for local merchants willing to try something new" — and with that, the pop-up design firm was open for business.

Since she barely spoke Chinese at the time, Céline and her team prepared a stack of preference cards filled with keywords. The merchants along the hutong could check off the impressions they wanted their shop to give — "modern / traditional," "cheap / expensive," "handmade / machine-made," "large / small," "service," "organic" — along with the elements they wanted in a new sign, such as "colorful / black-and-white," "lively / serious," or "simple / complex."

Dai Rong was struck by this foreign woman. "The whole street was full of Design Week exhibitions that year, and she's the only one I remember," she said, pointing to a photo album I had brought along. "Yes, that's her. Black clothes, medium height, a bit stout. Her hair was always sticking up in a messy tangle, and it was blond. She came back to the bookshop often, and her hair was different every time."

Dai Rong owns Neiguantang, a secondhand bookshop at No. 44 Tieshu Xiejie. After retiring from quality-inspection work, she turned her own home into a bookshop and has run it for seven or eight years. When we met, she was wearing a floral outfit, her glasses pushed up onto her forehead, her hands busy with needlework the whole time we talked. Inside the shop, barely 50 square meters, art books, translations, and travel writing are stacked together in no order, mixed in with old vinyl records and ceramic trinkets. In the notebook by the door, a visitor wrote on December 31st two years ago that the bookshop felt "a little like the culturally rich Xuanwu District I remember — a pity it was later merged into Xicheng."

The name Neiguantang was chosen by Dai Rong's younger brother; it means "to look inward and tend to one's heart." The lettering on the sign above the door came from the internet; the seal carving was her husband's work. The most striking object inside is a black-and-white photograph of the bookshop's interior, inscribed "Second Prize, Lu Yao" — a gift from the photographer. But the sign Lava designed was never hung.

Dai Rong remembered Céline so vividly not only for the sincerity she showed — calling on every merchant on Tieshu Xiejie one by one, even without speaking Chinese — but also because she offered to "do the design for free." Dai Rong had thought about replacing her sign, but when she asked around she found it would cost at least 3,000 yuan. Chinese design firms had reached out too, of course, though their fees were not exactly low either. Her only worry, during that 2013 conversation with Céline, was the weight of obligation — "if they design you a nice sign, are you supposed to put it up?" — and Céline laid that worry to rest at once: "Do whatever you like with it."

Working from the five keywords Dai Rong had circled — "traditional," "handmade," "service," "black-and-white," "simple" — Lava produced a black-and-white logo: books stacked upright, with the five traditional characters for "Neiguantang Bookshop" tucked among them. Dai Rong wasn't quite taken with it; she thought it was still a touch modern. But she kept returning to the same point: "That doesn't matter. How many people these days are still willing to do something for nothing? What matters most is that she had the heart for it — she came on her own to do this. You live a whole life, and in the end what are you asking of the neighbors? Just one line: 'She's a good sort. I remember her.'"

Of all the merchants she worked with, the one Céline remembers best is Boss Wang, who runs a northeastern restaurant. Boss Wang stands about 1.8 meters tall and keeps his hair cropped close. What caught her eye, Céline says, was the man's sheer charisma — "his presence brought the whole restaurant to life." The final logo took in a cross-section of an onion from the bunch hanging in the restaurant. When it was time for the commemorative photo, Céline asked Boss Wang to put out all the energy he could; he gripped the logo with both hands and pulled a snarling, furious face, the muscles bulging on his arm around a prominent tattoo.

Boss Wang remembered Céline too — he even remembered that she liked the second table straight in from the door. But the sign designed for him had long since disappeared. When we talked, his mind was more on the state of his business.

The hutong where Boss Wang's restaurant sits has been part of a key pilot project in Xicheng District's Dashilar area since 2010, one that has brought in "niche lifestyle brands" in home goods, coffee, Japanese food, and the like, mixing residential with commercial, old with new. In official language this is "micro-renewal," and food-and-beverage has become the most tightly restricted category of all. Judging by the tenants who have moved in, the authorities want to draw young urban middle-class residents and bohemian creatives, and to set the tone for the whole street — which makes a mass-market business like Boss Wang's northeastern restaurant exactly the kind they want to weed out.

The three fast-food stalls next to Boss Wang have already cleared out. His own trade has grown bleaker and bleaker; when we met at seven in the evening on October 2nd, there was a single table of diners in his roughly 150-square-meter restaurant.

"Back in 2013, just the dishes our cooks sent out could bring in a million yuan a year. Now it's not even half that. Since the renovation there are chengguan officers stationed at the hutong entrance, the shops in the hutong aren't allowed to put up side lightboxes, and the street lamps were torn down for some reason — after seven at night it's pitch dark, you can't see a thing. Who's going to come? The ones who do just look and take photos; they don't buy anything."

What Boss Wang finds most unreasonable is also the loss of foot traffic. He can't see why "the stretch of shopfront wall, 40 meters outside our door, cost 400,000 yuan to renovate," and he holds that the heart of the restaurant trade is not "design," "aesthetics," or "lifestyle," but value and honesty. "I've been in this business for over a decade. I've never cut the portion on a single braised-rib dish, never raised the price. A bottle of Tsingtao has always been ten yuan. I don't throw money at renovations either, because I owe it to my regulars. If things really get tight, I'll bump up the price on a new dish. You talk about design — that's a very, very small part of it."

Boss Wang has done well enough over the years — he has even bought a flat inside the Fifth Ring Road, though without a Beijing hukou, which means his children may have to go back to his hometown for school. Since the renovation, he has worried about where his business is headed. "It's not that I haven't thought about moving somewhere else — but with rents this high, where would I find a new place? And then I'd worry the regulars wouldn't follow."

A few hundred meters from Boss Wang's hutong, on Tieshu Xiejie, the other two merchants who received Lava's design work at the same time as Dai Rong have both closed up and gone home. One is Jiang Jianfeng, who ran a Tsingtao Beer outlet at No. 42; the other is Li Zhengrui, who ran a kung-fu training and massage shop called Wenwutang at No. 56. The only trace of their lives in Beijing survives in a few short lines in Lava's project notes.

For Jiang Jianfeng: "He was happy with our very direct approach to logo design, so he treated us to a few cold beers." For Li Zhengrui: "Rather unusual — morning or evening, pass his shop and you're quite likely to find him performing kung fu in the street, either wielding a blade or doing solo flips… He also has a second passion: calligraphy." Li Zhengrui had even left a crooked line in the "more information" field: "Hope to have a kung fu move on it."

Beyond their hutong projects, Lava's four designers prefer not to say too much: "We want to do interesting things, but we also want to keep a low profile." The curatorial line at No. 23 Yanshou Street perhaps puts their stance most plainly — "showing how to keep from going with the flow in a city that keeps developing and changing."

(At the interviewee's request, Dai Rong is a pseudonym.)

Images from the Lava official website and Lava's official account, "Lava 熔岩观."