How a Few Villas in Hangzhou's Xixi Became Home and Studio to More Than 20 Illustrators and Comic Artists

"Hidden away in a small building, a world unto itself" — what does Qingwu She mean to the creators who live there?

In 2013, not long after Xiaocai graduated from the animation department at South China Agricultural University, he and a few friends scattered around the country began talking about where to go next. They wanted to pool their resources and start a studio, and they put Guangzhou, Chengdu, Lijiang, Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Shenzhen on the list. Shanghai and Shenzhen were "too expensive" and dropped out fast. Xiaocai wanted Lijiang; the others vetoed it unanimously, saying it was too cut off from the world — even though everyone dreams of some hidden paradise.

They settled on Hangzhou. Besides the lower cost of living, this city, known as China's "animation capital," had some industry behind it. Xiatiandao, a studio that flourished for a decade, sat in Hangzhou's Binjiang district. The comic artist Yao Feila founded it, and at its peak it drew in top Chinese comic artists such as Xia Da and Zhu Letao, becoming a kind of "utopia" for comic creators in China.

Young creators seem born with the urge to cluster together, and Xiaocai and his friends wanted to try something similar. In 2015 he founded Qingwu She with the illustrators Sinan and Feixinghou, and together they recruited 40 freelance illustrators and comic artists, online and off. The young studio put out one interesting work after another: A-ju the Deadbeat Fox (《废柴狐阿桔》), Red Skin (《红色的皮》), A Chronicle of Demons (《与妖记》).

Qingwu She went on to rent several villas near the Xixi Wetland, and more than 20 illustrators and comic artists became the new tenants there, eating, living, and drawing together.

The villa compound, Huali Jiangnan Water Town, was built in 2005; the market price today averages 32,000 yuan per square meter. Coming from Hangzhou East railway station or the city center means heading west the whole way, through long stretches of traffic.

In 2013 the first phase of Alibaba's Xixi campus was finished, and the area gradually turned into a fairly self-sufficient neighborhood, with established malls, hospitals, schools, and wet markets. Five kilometers south is Dongxin Hechuang Yuan, a new creative park converted from old factory buildings — something like a Hangzhou version of Shanghai's M50 — where design brands such as Fnji and Mumo keep showrooms.

"But we don't go there much. Most people in our line of work are homebodies," Xiaocai told QDaily. "Working from home cuts out the commute; a freelancer's day comes down to sleeping, eating, cleaning, and creating." The illustrator Yu Wuyang, known as Laoyu, was among the first to move into Qingwu She. She drew a short comic about it: "My mom says I look like a retired old auntie."

Apartments in the city center have a mature rental market; villas do not. Local Hangzhou media report that in recent years some people have rented empty villas and turned them into "party houses" let out by the day. On the city's edges — Xiasha's riverside, Lao Yuhang — plenty of long-vacant townhouses and detached villas have been taken over by sub-landlords who spotted the opening. They add game rooms and board-game rooms, list the places for short stays on various platforms, and rent them to companies holding annual parties and team-building events.

Next to them, or to the artists who settled years ago in Beijing's "painter villages" at Yuanmingyuan and Songzhuang, Xiaocai and his friends are quieter tenants. The detached villa Qingwu She rents now had stood empty for nearly a year before they moved in; the previous tenant, a foreign student, had turned the garage into a karaoke room and was thrown out after the neighbors complained about the noise.

"Villas aren't expensive, but the right listing is hard to find." Xiaocai and Sinan worked their way through dozens of villa compounds across Hangzhou and still haven't found anything better. "You rarely see them listed publicly on platforms like Lianjia. Most villas just sit there empty — most people who can afford a detached house don't necessarily care about that bit of rent."

Before the villa, Xiaocai and his companions moved through several other places.

The first was Zhuantang, near the China Academy of Art's Xiangshan campus — usually the first stop for art-school graduates once they leave campus, since cheap studios can be found in the urban villages nearby. But in recent years Zhuantang has gone the way of Xiaozhou Village near Guangzhou's university town: cram schools drilling students for art-school entrance exams have taken over the "farmers' houses" on the rural-urban fringe.

For another venture they spent eight months at Dream Town. "That was no ordinary office building. The whole design had style, and every detail was thought through for young startup teams," Xiaocai said. The place, with its café, comfortable chairs, and shared spaces, was faster and more efficient — and all of that made Xiaocai and his friends feel tense.

Villas turned out to be the right home for a small cultural startup like Qingwu She. Rents on Hangzhou villas are not high right now; Xiaocai and his companions took two detached houses here, each a little over 10,000 yuan a month. "Living at Qingwu She costs a creator about 3,000 yuan a month. For creators whose average monthly income runs between 10,000 and 20,000 yuan, that's affordable."

"We've all spent a long time working alone, and a lot of us have social anxiety," Sinan said, explaining what living together is good for. "You get to see everyone's strengths and weaknesses — one person has a great eye for color, another can draw incredible storyboards. You don't have to study it on purpose. Maybe one day after a meal you're standing behind someone's computer, spacing out, watching them draw, and it suddenly hits you: 'Oh, so you can do it that way!'"

"Here we're learning how to tell a story well," Xiaocai said — that is what the comic artists at Qingwu She want to do.

Red Skin is the work of Qingwu She's online comic artist Qieshi Hongrenmo, known as A-qie, with Xiaocai as producer; the standalone volume has now been published in France. Back in college, Xiaocai read Li Yaosha's book Ten Years of Undercover Investigation (《暗访十年》) on the Tianya forum, which portrayed people at the margins: beggars, sex workers, blood sellers, surrogate mothers. He passed the story to A-qie, who was stuck on a comic script at the time, and the two later secured the adaptation rights from the author.

A-qie pulled out the chapters about sex workers and turned them into a story of just over 100 pages. The setting is an inner lane in an urban village; the narrator is the landlord of a rental room, and the story opens out through "my" brief encounters with three sex workers who rent from him. Local toughs, pimps, counterfeiters, drug dealers, and assorted others hide in the filthy back alleys at night. This is the other side of the city.

Here is how A-qie draws the itinerant quacks: no patient walks out of these "specialists'" clinics cured for less than a few thousand yuan, and what these "venereal disease specialists" actually hand over is potassium permanganate and penicillin. That is the most basic medical knowledge, the kind any street doctor or hack knows. These "specialists" sell hope in the back alleys, and the sex workers treat them like Hua Tuo reborn. A-qie annotates the panel with the stock phrases of quack advertising: the medicine cures on contact, his hands work miracles.

Some have criticized the author's position in the original book: he called himself an undercover reporter yet was not neutral. In the comic, A-qie becomes "I" and takes part directly; there is no need to stand by neutrally. When one of the sex workers is beaten by her man, for instance, "I" agonize over whether to call the police.

"A bare 100-odd pages isn't enough to portray any group in depth." "I'd rather draw the people who are too busy every day to groan even when they're sick," A-qie wrote in the book's afterword. "With prostitutes, what people mostly argue about is whether they deserve sympathy. I don't care about that at all, and I believe the sex workers don't care either — besides, that was never why I drew Red Skin."

"The characters in the original book are all people who really existed. What struck me hardest after reading it was that those faces from that era were so far from me and so close at the same time."

After Red Skin, A-qie's next work was Echoes of Haimen (《海门回声》). The rise of independent publishing in recent years has opened a door for mid-length standalone comics like these, and Qingwu She plans to try a series of standalone volumes.

A standalone volume of around 150 pages is a different thing from a long serial updated over time; Xiaocai says the former usually comes out more finished, while quality is harder to control in the latter. "A lot of the time it feels like we're creating to hit a quota, so the work becomes 'output' rather than what you actually wanted to make. Then you hit a wall — it feels like you're drawing and drawing without saying anything, without expressing anything. A lot of creators go through that kind of self-doubt."

"People complain that from the 1980s on, many Chinese comic artists threw down their weapons and went to work as subcontractors for foreign animation companies, drawing 'in-between frames' that took no skill. Manpower, or a backward aesthetic, gets blamed for Chinese comics losing their edge; some say imported animation was simply flashier. But really, people back then just found Japanese animation more interesting and more gripping. Put plainly, they told better stories."

"Buying stories isn't easy, though. We're fighting for them against the film and TV industry and the screenwriting companies, and we don't have the advantage."

Xiaocai and Sinan were not the first creators to try living together in Hangzhou. In 2006, the comic artist Yao Feila founded Xiatiandao in a cluster of village houses on the shore of Baima Lake in Hangzhou's Binjiang district. In 2016, before Xia Da and other top comic artists walked out at the end of that year, the company took a 25 million yuan capital injection from Huace Film & TV at a valuation of 500 million yuan — one of the highest for a comic content company at the time.

On Google Street View, which hasn't caught up yet, you can still see the village houses that once held Xiatiandao. At the start, the comic artist Zhu Letao designed the renovation herself; unlike a professional architectural drawing, her plan carefully marked where the floor-to-ceiling windows, the white shelving, the stained-glass collage panels, and the coffee terrace would go, and which osmanthus tree outside the door had to be kept.

In the golden age of comic magazines, Xiatiandao's artists rode high. We once reported on the rise and fall of the magazine Manyou (《漫友》); it was through that magazine's introduction that Xia Da's What the Master Never Spoke Of (《子不语》) became the only original Chinese comic to break into a top-tier Japanese comic magazine.

But by the end of 2016, according to local Hangzhou media, the bulldozers were closing in. The village houses around it had already come down, leaving Xiatiandao standing alone like a condemned building.

The creators who had once been "hidden away in a small building, a world unto itself" fell apart. Yao Feila was an excellent comic creator, but not necessarily a competent manager. The media have analyzed how Xiatiandao, which flourished on the distribution channels of comic magazines, missed its chance to change as new comic platforms rose and the traditional split of copyright and revenue stopped being fair to creators. After Xiatiandao failed, people began to question what traditional comic CP companies (content providers) were still worth against huge, ever-expanding platforms like Tencent Comics and Kuaikan Comics.

Xiaocai and his peers are learning how to make comics, and learning how to run a business.

Twenty kilometers north of Qingwu She, another animation company, Fanfan Comics, has built a bigger creators' settlement, Liangzhu Liangzuo, in the town of Liangzhu. The company, which licenses works from Japan's Shueisha for the mainland Chinese market, is likewise hunting for homegrown creators; the Xinxing Cup original comic competition it started in 2007 has now run more than a decade. Liangzhu Liangzuo has since opened branches in Wuhan, Guangzhou, Beijing, Tokyo, Taipei, Chengdu, and other cities. Xiaocai calls it a steadier company, more focused on content; he won the silver prize at the Xinxing Cup in 2013.

"In the future we'd like to open Qingwu She in other cities too, but that's a long way off. Let's start by telling one story well."

Q = QDaily

A = Xiaocai

Q: You've talked before about wanting to explore different ways of writing scripts.

A: Right. Most comic-making in China today follows the Japanese model, where one artist handles almost the entire process — script, storyboards, everything. That traditional approach has drawbacks. It loads every technical demand onto one person, and when that person is only a creator in his twenties, it's very hard to cover all of it. The model asks too much of any one individual.

What we want now is a division of labor — story, drawing, and comic language — a bit like the way a film crew works. In China right now there are plenty of people who draw well, very few who write well, and very few who are good at comic language. The person in charge of comic language is what we call a "comic producer" — the equivalent of a director telling the cinematographer how to shoot.

Q: Are there many people in China who draw well?

A: Many, but most of them go into illustration; there's still the pressure to make a living. The people actually drawing comics tend to be more ordinary artists, and on top of that they have to handle too many technical jobs at once.

Q: Your recruiting post at the start of the year also said you wanted to hire comic screenwriters. How has that gone? Are there many people in China who write comics well?

A: Honestly, really good writers are very hard to find. It's not just comics — the whole industry, film and TV included, doesn't value writers enough. "Doesn't value" means, plainly, pays them less; the job isn't competitive, so talent takes longer to develop. We'd like to do some exploring here ourselves.

Q: As the "animation capital," what impression does Hangzhou make on you?

A: Apart from the comic conventions every year, honestly not much. We hope for government support, but we're cautious about it. In the early years, from 2004 to 2014, national policy pushed hard to support homegrown animation and restrict imports, but the methods were a bit absurd — one minute broadcast on certain TV platforms earned a reward of 500 yuan, and 3D animation earned 1,000 yuan a minute. In a very short time China's total output of homegrown animation became the largest in the world, which was ridiculous. Some schools piled in the same way when setting up departments; a lot of people who had studied ink painting or oil painting were hired into animation programs, and some of them couldn't even use a computer.

That kind of "support" tested nothing about the quality of Chinese animation. It only asked for volume and airtime. So for many animation companies, rather than work hard at making something, it was easier to chase the channel: as long as it aired on television, a Chinese cartoon could earn money from the government, and some companies would pay out of their own pockets to get their work onto TV.

Down the road we'd really like to build an artists' village. We once thought about moving into the Xixi Wetland — there's already an artists' village there, but it felt like it was still just running a business. Right now may be a lull, and we want to use the lull to tell every story well.

(The cover image is a work by Bangqiaoyan; the long-format header image is a work by Laoyu. All images in the text were provided by the interviewees.)