A Basement Where Anything Goes, Because a Few People Wanted an Escape from the Dull | Great Little Studios

Or make some use of that "creative urge with nowhere to go."

In the basement of Building 1, Lane 298, Anfu Road, the first thing you see inside the door is a poster: a red finger pressing a doorbell, and beside it, in large characters, "Anyone in the hall?"

You can knock and walk in. The place is stacked with posters, illustrations and publications. Every Tuesday evening there is a film screening, and if knowing nothing about the place makes you nervous, a young woman named Runqiu will come over to chat, or crack a joke. Drinks are self-serve. Find a spot and stay.

Except that it is a basement. Most people who turn up have either been brought by a friend or followed the official account, which announces everything. If something comes up on a Tuesday and the screening can't happen, Runqiu posts a notice the day before: "The hall chiefs are going out on a date, so screenings are off for one night. Hall friends, come back next week."

If you don't come often, the place is a puzzle. The security guard at the compound that owns the basement feels exactly that: "I don't know what these young people are up to in there, and I'm not interested." Part of it may be the young people who walk past the guardroom on their way down. They don't look like office workers — they say little, and their clothes and haircuts are loose and brightly colored. They duck into the building and head straight for the underground passage. After watching this often enough, the older men in the guardroom decided they were "not quite respectable."

Runqiu and her husband Li Xiaoyu took over the 250-square-meter basement in April 2017. It has five rooms. Most of the time the two of them, who work in advertising and creative planning, use it as a studio. But they wanted more than a space; they wanted interesting people and interesting things to turn up in it. They call it Anfu Hall.

In June 2017 the subject of Anfu Hall's first show was Jiang Long, Runqiu's deskmate at the ad agency, where he worked as an art director. There was no plan to speak of: Jiang Long got off work only a few hours before the opening and started hanging the show in the middle of the night. He brought about 1,000 sheets of A3 paper printed with the work itself — 1,000 photos shot through phone filters — and tape, his only other tool.

The show was called "Real Filters, Fake Life." In Sichuan dialect, zhen zige means "the genuine article, the real deal"; put another way, the filters are for real and the life is a put-on. "I like taking pictures," Jiang Long said, "but apart from adding filters and using a digital camera, I don't seem to have learned much else."

After that first show, people started trickling in. In July, a young raincoat label approached Anfu Hall about holding a launch there; they thought the space matched their brand's own inventive, experimental streak.

In January 2018, a woman who goes by the online name Zaojian Chun found Anfu Hall through the Hall Owner Crowdfunding Plan, joined almost at once, and used the space to run a secondhand market called Chun Ji. People traded clothes, odds and ends, books and music, and even piercings and tattoos. More than 300 people were expected. It worked, and six months later they did it again.

As the hall took in more ideas, it also took in more castoff furniture.

Sofas and coffee tables abandoned on Anfu Road got carried down to the basement by hall friends, and each room began to take on a function of its own. By 2018, "Anyone in the hall?" was the line heard most often in the WeChat group.

A visitor rings the bell, comes in, looks at an improvised collage show, and then finds a Coslife dress-up contest meant to "challenge boredom," or a painter from the Northeast telling gangster stories, with the sofa full. A few things run on a schedule: on Wednesdays, Li Xiaoyu's band Peace and Waves rehearses in the basement, and the crowd thins. Photographer Wang Wei turns up whenever, testing lights in the corner of one room, working on his own pictures or on a commercial job.

Wang Wei and Li Xiaoyu both come from Daqing and have known each other for years.

Wang Wei moved to Shanghai in 2017. He is good at catching life mid-improvisation, and is drawn to the street, to fashion and to youth culture — close to what Anfu Hall is. He used to hold a work-unit job at an oil field. "The way you got through winter at work was to hide in the oilfield metering room and watch Ma Dashuai, with tea and snacks laid in," Wang Wei said. "It's nothing like the way I live now."

"This is a place where you can escape the dullness," said Si Wei, an engineer in manufacturing. By day he inspects equipment at a factory and supervises workers handling phone screens. After work on Wednesdays he often drives an hour from Pudong Airport to Anfu Hall to write, record or rehearse with Li Xiaoyu. He plays bass in Peace and Waves, and he loves baseball.

"Since I met Li Xiaoyu and the rest, life feels wider. Before, it was one small patch. It's not that Anfu Hall has some great artistic achievement or deep meaning. It's just that having it around really does make life fuller."

After one baseball outing organized by the hall, Si Wei is now hooked. Every night after work he goes home and practices his swing in the garage.

Nezha, a graphic designer, tattoos on the side. She is also the only taker so far for the hall's Owner Crowdfunding Plan: for a small rent she gets free use of a corner of the hall as her tattoo studio. "Clients find it novel to come here for a tattoo," she said. She works there about three times a week, almost always at night.

Paying a year's rent on Anfu Hall in 2017 used up everything the couple had saved since their wedding. The hall makes almost no money on its own; friends in bands chip in a token rent for the rehearsal room.

Then came the Hall Owner Crowdfunding Plan: pay a fee and get shared studio space in the hall, free tea and snacks, and use of the place for events, all good for three months. The fee was "500 yuan and up, or no ceiling at all." The rest is covered by the couple's day job in advertising.

That arrangement suits the mood they picked up from Charlie.

Charlie was an old man they met surfing alone on Malibu Beach in California, on their honeymoon. Sixty or seventy, living in an RV. "We'd never met anyone like him in China — so simple, so pure, so free."

"Everybody up and down Malibu Beach knew Charlie. He sat in front of a very beat-up little car, and his manners were courtly. He'd lay out a spotlessly clean little rug and set out a small cushioned rattan chair. He sat there, holding the best spot on the whole beach for watching the sunset. Sometimes he'd see a set coming in from far off and change fast, grab his board and go after it; sometimes he'd sit and watch the waves all day."

They have never forgotten it.

In 2017, a month after taking the basement, Li Xiaoyu and Runqiu went back to the United States. A year on, at the same spot on the same California beach, the battered white RV was still there.

"Charlie had been living in that RV the whole time — no phone, no Facebook, no Instagram — and we found him. The year before, out surfing, he'd given me a T-shirt with his face printed on the back; this time Xiaoyu and I made him one too, with 'FindCharlie' on the back," Runqiu said. "He had a new girlfriend, though — a ranger at a national forest park, and she carries a gun."

Back home the two of them quickly ran off a set of FindCharlie T-shirts: 60 of them, in a single size, Charlie's, with a matching red-and-yellow dry bag (Charlie could use it as a water bucket in the RV). They sold them only in person at Anfu Hall, since Charlie had neither a phone nor the internet.

In October 2017, after a "product launch" staged inside a mock-up of an RV — Charlie's RV — the whole run sold out in a day, and the FindCharlie T-shirt began turning up on every regular at Anfu Hall.

"Make money, pay off the loan, buy a flat in a good school district, help your kid with homework — it's stifling just to think about it!"

In December 2017, writing a blurb for a project coming to Anfu Hall called "FxckOff 30," Runqiu put it this way: "Turns out other people are just as unserious at 30. Seeing that, I feel better."

FxckOff 30 was a challenge set by two women about to turn 30, Mary and Juan: 30 slightly ridiculous things they had never tried, all before the birthday. The 30th was a show at Anfu Hall looking back at the other 29.

At the opening, the ribbon-cutting involved a giant pair of scissors slicing through the two characters for "middle age," hung from a clothes hanger.

In May 2018, Anfu Hall put on a one-person photography show called "Pearl," meant to "celebrate failure." In one room a red curtain covered an entire wall, strings of pearls hung down it, and film photographs by Qian Yifan were arranged among them: fragments of a failed life braided into pearls.

Runqiu thinks the show is as simple as it looks — forget the idea of art and just look at it. All the pearls came from Taobao.

"Qian Yifan is a failed artist," Runqiu said of the show. "She came back from studying abroad, tried working an office job, tried starting a company, and failed at both. But she lives vividly, and she makes things vividly, on instinct. Catching the finest details of a passing moment with a camera is what she has always done."

People arrived a few at a time. There was never a surge.

With one exception: during the Shanghai International Film Festival in June 2017, Anfu Hall published a three-month schedule of 34 classic films and invited friends and cinephiles to come and watch. "That was when the most people knocked on the door for the first time," Li Xiaoyu recalled, "but most of them were film fans. The moment the festival ended, the numbers dropped right back."

Anfu Hall wants more people knocking mainly to get people with ideas inside and making things — so that the "rough," the "sort of interesting," even the ridiculous private notion, gets built. "Anyone can ring the bell, come in and talk about what they're into, and then we do something together," Li Xiaoyu said.

The Anfu Summer Cool-Off Show, held in July 2017, is the example.

A month before it opened, Runqiu and Li Xiaoyu talked over how to run it, and the rules were settled fast: encourage real socializing; fill the place with work, no limits; not a business, never closed; keep blurring the line around art. They got to work writing the copy and designing the posters, and invited people they knew — mostly ad people and illustrators from the creative trades — to make sure enough odd work turned up on the day. Each maker's contact QR code was printed as a sticker beforehand, to go up next to the work so that anyone could get in touch afterward.

On the poster, Runqiu wrote: "It's the Major Heat this summer, so come in and cool off, friends, and leave your creative urges that have nowhere to go here in Anfu Hall. Anyone is welcome to join the Anfu Summer Cool-Off Show at any time. There will be watermelon and snacks."

Over that Anfu Summer Cool-Off Show weekend, the hall door never shut, the air conditioning bled cold air out into the corridor, and people kept knocking: some carrying bowls of water and paint, some hauling in a projector or a birdcage.

Zhang Zihao, a "hall friend," brought a few photographs and some blank canvases. The photographs showed the kit he had carried not long before while working as a bodyguard in the Philippines; the canvases were blank — apart from a few bullet holes — because "conditions at the time meant I couldn't paint anything." His actual job is painter. Photographer Wang Wei hung several pictures he had taken, some of them shot over the New Year back home in Daqing, where he documented "a friend who had spent several months in a psychiatric hospital."

Another illustrator picked a room and began covering the wall with waves and drowning stick figures, with empty speech bubbles floating beside the figures for visitors to fill in themselves. More than 100 people came through that show.

Runqiu doesn't think the weekend was absurd, or a joke. "It was pretty ordinary, actually. We don't interfere at all with what they want to do." Someone left a hammer behind on purpose that day, she said, standing alone in a corner of a room — and visitors took it for a piece and crowded over to photograph it.

Most of the time, whether to hold an event at all is decided on a whim. Press either of them for the reason and Runqiu or Li Xiaoyu, who run the place, will usually just say, "Because it's fun."

On December 31, 2018, Anfu Hall staged a New Year's skipping-rope session, the idea being to jump into 2019. Plenty of people had drunk too much and threw up before they made it into the new year.

2018 was also the year the hall's finances started to look up. The most recent project came from the Puchi stand-up comedy troupe, with meal tickets as the design idea; the finished set included a calendar, show tickets, posters and a box. Li Xiaoyu ran the project and produced the visuals, Wang Wei shot the products, and hall friends helped with styling.

Li Xiaoyu puts it down to people recognizing the taste Anfu Hall stands for, trusting it, and coming to them. The arrangement is now a standing one: every Sunday, Puchi's Shanghai show plays at Anfu Hall.

A looser collaboration, one that tied the format to the space itself, came during the World Cup. "Puma came to us wanting to turn the hall and the matches into a 'Puma Football Living Room' — using the hall's space and ideas to carry cultural content for a football brand. That one was a lot of fun."

In Puma's official photos of the collaboration, the hall's old friends are sunk into the sofas, yelling at a World Cup match, with an Anfu Hall × Puma rug spread out in the middle of the room. Through the tournament they gathered there every night and watched until late.

For the collaboration, Li Xiaoyu asked four designer friends from the hall to make four football illustrations, staged them in corners of the hall for the product shots, ran several offline FIFA tournaments, and taped a few football episodes for the Anfu Hall radio channel. "For the hall, it was something of a milestone," Li Xiaoyu said. He is looking for more commercial work of the same kind: "We're very open to commercial partnerships that are both mutually useful and fun."

Li Xiaoyu and Runqiu are trying to bring Anfu Hall above ground, so that more people know it exists and the operation becomes sustainable. They work with the "Music ONLY" radio show founded by Shasha, taking hall merchandise around to independent shops, dessert bars and cafés in Shanghai for live-recorded "pop-up" broadcasts.

Sometimes they hand out hall stickers and posters. But the people who turn up are still mostly friends.

They also make a show that records Chinese and foreign bands playing live at Anfu Hall, "DATINGlive," ten episodes so far, crewed entirely by hall friends. Bands touring through Shanghai come down to the basement after their city show and play a second time. It isn't cheap: the equipment costs a lot. Li Xiaoyu is in a band himself, and cares about the ceremony of putting music on record. "That show matters to us right now," he said.

Runqiu also brings up what the basement can't do, and the rent. "The ceiling isn't high enough, so organizers of fine-art shows or theater pieces come to look at the space and find they can't do it here. That rules out a lot of what we'd like to do." The partition walls cut down what can be made in the space too, which in turn limits renting the place out and taking in rent for it.

With Shanghai rents climbing, the two of them worry. Another increase and they couldn't carry it. Salaries alone cover roughly the basics of running Anfu Hall, and they want to do more.

"But Anfu Hall will exist regardless. If the rent goes up, the two of us will just move somewhere else," Runqiu said.

All images courtesy of Anfu Hall.