fRUITYSPACE, the Unpretentious Beijing Basement Where Anything Goes, Music Included | Great Little Studios

Not the least bit grand, not the least bit profound — but interesting all the same.

On the last day of 2018, fRUITYSPACE was packed. The Beijing basement holds 150 people at most; that night more than 200 turned up, and many had to take turns pushing the door open to get in and out.

They had come for the New Year's Eve show, four bands taking the stage in turn, 40 minutes each — though even people who had bought tickets couldn't always name them. That didn't surprise the audience, because Lao Zhai, who runs the space, does this all the time: if he likes the way a band sounds, he asks them to come over and give it a try.

Sour Tower, the first band up, was booked exactly that way. Lead singer Wang Xu was nervous, but mostly excited — standing almost face to face with the crowd was new to her. The post-punk band, formed in 2016 by three women who work together as illustrators, had in fact never played live before. They had only posted a few tracks on Douban, and they learned how to run a sound check by watching the other bands do it, minutes before the doors opened. "We had no experience, so we almost said no. Then Lao Zhai told us that sometimes you have to put a little pressure on yourself."

They did make plenty of mistakes — someone off to the side said, "well, that's that" — but Wang Xu found the night "really interesting." "The crowd looked young, and they were more upfront, kind of like your friends, very familiar, not condescending at all." It was her first time in the basement.

That night also brought a band from Hangzhou, a band from Fuzhou, and a musician from Inner Mongolia. "The feel here is roughly this: a bit nostalgic, not chasing trends, quick to act, encouraging to newcomers," as one recap of the New Year's Eve show put it.

On ordinary days people start drifting into the basement after 6 p.m., and "there's no telling when they leave." Nights when nobody comes at all are common too. Music isn't the only thing that happens down here. One room holds a steadily refreshed stock of art books and tapes from all over the country, along with printed matter Lao Zhai and a few friends make themselves; pull the door shut and the music outside vanishes. They first meant to set the room up as a radio recording studio, but it is now a small shop selling independent publications they produce and sell themselves.

There is a photo book that fits in your palm, though you have to lean in to read it, because the type is tiny and the room is dim. There are a few white coats, the lab kind, coarse and creased, with "space frutiy records" screen-printed on the breast pocket — their own merch shirts. "Not everyone can pull these off," Lao Zhai wrote when he posted a picture of them to his WeChat Moments.

Wednesdays are usually documentaries. Sundays are old films from the 1980s and '90s, with a discussion afterward. Friday night is "OPEN DJ NIGHT," where anyone can play their own songs, and weekends are scattered with noise, experimental or band shows, musicians from China and abroad, booked fairly randomly. There is always an exhibition to see, too — it may be tucked into a corner. "Nothing is ever a smash hit, and nothing is ever a flop or a total bore either. It's pretty even, all kinds of formats."

Before another record-playing night, Lao Zhai wrote: "I figure not many people will come, but we still have to do it — maybe a couple will turn up. Besides, coming for a drink without the records isn't hard either." Someone once said that Lao Zhai doesn't talk much but is very funny, a bit like an amusing neighbor.

Lao Zhai is one of the people who run fRUITYSPACE. His real name is Zhai Ruixin, but friends usually just call him "Zhai." In March 2016 he took over this basement — a noodle shop before that — together with Yao Lan. The two are the same age. Back in 2001 they sold cut-out discs and CDs together, out of a record shop near Baitasi, the White Pagoda Temple.

The crackdown closed the shop. Lao Zhai went to work at a radio station and shut himself in his room after hours to make music, quietly putting out a few electronic albums under the name me:mo. Yao Lan opened a rehearsal room in a Xisi hutong to serve musicians, joined the band Second Hand Rose in 2004, and gradually turned into a professional guitarist who plays onstage for a living, though he never dropped the habit of doing small paintings on the side. What also never changed was that both of them still wanted to open another place: it didn't have to be big, but it had to be simple enough to allow every kind of event and performance, and to host "unprofessional" art shows — spontaneous creativity was enough, and newcomers should be encouraged. Music would make up 30% of the programming.

The timing never came, though, until Lao Zhai opened the vinyl store fRUITYSHOP in Dongsi with his business partner at the time, Wang Zheng, and began to learn how to run a shop; meanwhile Yao Lan's band grew steadier and more assured, and won more recognition in the mainstream market.

In November 2015, over a bowl of noodles, they happened on this basement being sublet, and by the next day Lao Zhai and Yao Lan had decided to take it. Then came the rounds of Beijing's secondhand markets, the furniture retrofits, the scavenged planks, the paint — as much of it by hand as they could manage. By March 2016, fRUITYSPACE was open. Lao Zhai handles day-to-day operations, show programming, event ideas and publicity; Yao Lan looks after the hardware and the music gear.

Hot mulled wine is the basement's winter specialty, 40 yuan a cup, carried in hand as you drift slowly to the back of the crowd. People who know the ritual tend to come by about once a week. Wang Dachuan is one of them. He is older than most, so the regulars call him Brother Wang. Born in 1970, he works mainly in investment and collects old photographs — several thousand of them, from the late Qing and the Republican era through the Cultural Revolution to the 1980s and '90s, all within his range of interest.

On December 2, 2018, he used photographs he had picked out to mount a show at fRUITYSPACE called Discarded Expressions, about the looks on people's faces in Chinese family photos of the 1980s and '90s.

"There isn't the least bit of grandeur in these photos, not the least bit of profundity. It's all ordinary human expression, full of details that move you, or make you laugh, or seem outsized. The kind of picture that got thrown away right after it was taken," Lao Zhai said.

Brother Wang tracked these down at Beijing auctions and on Kongfuzi, the secondhand-book site. Twenty or thirty years ago, when people left a home behind, they dumped the negatives they didn't want and the scrap collectors carted them off — "or in periods when a lot of people were on the move, being relocated into new buildings by demolition, or moving to another city, they'd hand the unimportant things to relatives, or dump them on antiques dealers." Back then everyone preferred everything new. Sometimes the auctions Brother Wang goes to turn up material on the War of Resistance Against Japan, or expensive photographers' work — Daido Moriyama, contemporary American photography. But Discarded Expressions is not interested in grand historical subjects or period markers. It is interested in very private, domestic pictures, in the real faces people show when they are completely relaxed: lofty, joyful, furious, sometimes brazen and bold. One is just a circle of men tearing into their meat. Another is a woman holding a photo album, chin propped on her hand, her look hard to read.

He doesn't think people back then were more buttoned-up than people now. "Even in the Republican era you can see that some people were very lively in private, even free inside. Looked at as human beings, every one of them is remarkable. It's only that images from back then were more often an official narrative, and private faces were hidden inside family photography," Brother Wang said. "Some of the bigger expressions and gestures — a joy that clearly comes from somewhere deep inside — may not exist anymore today. They show the spirit of some of the people of that era."

The two of them settled the theme — people carried by their expressions — over a casual chat at the shop. The photographs were sorted, grouped, framed, and finally hung in a white space of about 10 square meters in the basement. Light came down from a bare fluorescent tube in the corner, giving the room a worn, dated feel, more like an unfussy little gallery. "Honestly I don't dare call this an exhibition. However I tried to make the poster it felt wrong, I couldn't say why, so in the end I just didn't make one," Lao Zhai wrote. "But casual without being careless is our principle for exhibitions in the basement. Treat it like a stroll through Panjiayuan — as long as you come away with something, it's fine, and at worst it'll crack a smile out of you."

The run of events fRUITYSPACE puts on is steady and good-humored. Some turn out unusually successful and fun; others fail and peter out, gone without a trace. Lao Zhai thinks creating is something you do for your own pleasure, but you have to put it out there and share it, and the output has to keep coming.

"Back when the internet first arrived, some talented friends of mine suddenly saw so much foreign stuff that they lost their confidence — they'd wonder, can I really do this? And I'd think, why couldn't you? Forget everything else: something has to come out, you have to make things happen, whatever it is. Don't just forward stuff on Moments. That means nothing at all."

Take, for instance, an exhibition called Waste Girl in October 2018, mounted on both walls of the passage down to the basement, where you could look up and see it as you walked down, close enough to touch.

The show was about junk, life, and creativity. Zhu Liyu, who had moved to Beijing from Shenyang less than a year earlier, had never put on an exhibition. She does some illustration and haunts independent-publication fairs. She studied journalism, and after graduating she dragged a suitcase to Beijing and became a shop assistant at a boutique. In one corner of her small rented bedroom sat a big bag holding the discarded objects she had collected for their texture: the brightly colored mesh sleeves that come on seasonal fruit, each with its own deliberate netting pattern, thickness and material; thrown-out egg cartons, washed clean, colored with crayon, half an eggshell tucked back inside; oddly shaped plastic bottles with eyes stuck on and their caps joined mouth to mouth — making them kiss.

In the passage, she arranged these small pieces across the walls and used them as the display. Some sat on boards propped against the wall, or in corners of the ceiling; the ones that "couldn't attend in person" she photographed and taped up. The overall effect was happy, fine-grained and lively — which is exactly what Zhu Liyu wanted. "No rules, no restrictions telling you what you can't do, all of it free, no fixed purpose, and in the end you get results you never expected instead." The show surprised a lot of the people who came, and quite a few friends she hadn't seen in a long time turned up. "Maybe everybody just likes cute things." Zhu Liyu is now preparing a small show about flowers, encouraged by how the first attempt went.

Another event people bring up often is the "Junk Festival." It isn't held often, but it has been winning people over since 2016, and it is always fixed for late September, at the turn of autumn, or the May Day holiday.

"Swap the shit you don't need anymore." It is a flea market for offloading secondhand things sitting idle. But it's usually the genuinely junky junk that sells best; there's no market for anything too fancy. A pot lid ("don't underestimate it — the day you actually smash one at home, it's really hard to find a replacement"), dirt-cheap effects pedals ("everyone who comes is a friend, after all"), fruit and vegetables grown at home ("these sell really well"), phone screen protectors ("there happened to be a guy who fixes phones, so we called him over"). One year Yao Lan sold his own hair at the festival ("a fan paid a lot of money for it").

There is no need to book a stall — turn up and set up. "If you don't get something, just ask." "Bring your own QR code so you can take payments even when you're away." Each day it closes when the crowd thins out. But the fun of the Junk Festival is beside the point: it started as a way to shed clutter and make friends. "Around 2006 Beijing had a lot of markets, the retro kind or the more upscale kind, and later the Daliushu night market got popular," Lao Zhai said. "But what we're pushing here is the process of making friends. A lot of friends love buying things and piling them up at home, and none of it is much use. Here you just bring it straight over. No distance between people, nothing you're afraid to sell."

Lao Zhai designed the Junk Festival poster. One day he spotted a heap of trash on the street and took a picture of it; when it came time to make the poster, he added a few lines of text.

"Night Drawing" and "Night Tinkering" are the basement events they keep experimenting with and keep failing at. The original idea was to get people to come down after work and draw something, anything — "who knows, something might come of it." By the eighth edition nobody was showing up, so Lao Zhai changed the name to "Night Tinkering" — "make whatever you want, it doesn't have to be a drawing" — and that didn't work either. In the end it was Yao Lan who brought in his uncle, who had sung dan roles in Peking opera for decades, for a show that combined "Peking opera quick sketches" with traditional opera. It went over quite well.

"The old men and women of Beijing found the basement pretty novel, and they were willing to take in avant-garde things, though I think they'd still have preferred a proper opera stage, so the audience below would look lively too," Yao Lan recalled. Today the nighttime series has become "Night Reading" — come by after work and read aloud from a book. They are still experimenting.

In 2018, the two side projects Lao Zhai founded under fRUITYSPACE — the record label space fruity records and the independent publishing project fRUITYPRESS — both tried some new things.

The Molds, a veteran underground alternative rock band formed in Beijing in 2006, has won a following for its thick, gritty sound, steeped in the roots music of the 1950s and '60s. With Lao Zhai running things, they formally began work on their first studio album. In early 2018, in a basement Yao Lan keeps in Beijing's Yanhai Sailuocheng complex, a few young men started arranging and recording; then they went to Shanghai; a little under six months later they released the record on vinyl, cassette and CD, and sold a respectable number of physical copies on a 12-city tour. Fans were thrilled.

Compared with signing to a traditional record label, the band's guitarist, Josie, thinks this way is "purer and simpler," with every step becoming something the group figures out together — the printing technique for the cover, booking the tour dates. "It's just a few people doing something purely out of interest." Josie had quit his job as creative director at an advertising agency in 2016 — "work and life had no real snags back then, and colleagues would occasionally come to our shows" — and he quit only so he could concentrate on that year's tour.

Everyone in this crowd listens to a lot of music. Josie is especially fond of Central Asian and North African music, and he remembers walking into a show of exactly that kind at the fRUITYSPACE basement. "That night there were hand drums, a sitar, some ouds too. They seemed to have brought in a group of teachers from Minzu University of China. It's unbelievable — you can see a show that legit in Beijing, right?" he said.

Sometimes he plays there, more often he just drops by, and what strikes Josie most is how comfortable the room feels. "It's like a little Eastern European bar you wander into by accident while traveling. Foreign country, you don't speak the language, but the songs playing feel familiar, and you can safely let yourself get drunk."

That offhand comfort actually takes slow, patient management. Lao Zhai doesn't make much of it; he uses the word "raising" for the process. Even though the shop programs something every day, "a place like this isn't like running a restaurant. It still needs to be raised, it needs to build up a crowd. We're not the aggressive-promotion type either. Day to day it just runs steadily, and people who don't like it, I don't need them to come." Before opening, he and Yao Lan had already agreed that the first few years would go to "raising" the place. Gradually, in 2018, the shop's operations began a steady climb.

The other project, the independent publisher fRUITYPRESS, puts out art books that are decidedly "unconventional." That "unconventional" is a matter of personal taste. Founded in April 2018, the project is run mainly by Cao Di, who has more experience with it. "At first Lao Zhai only knew a little about what underground bands abroad printed in the '80s and '90s. He liked the undiluted quality of it. I know this area better" — meaning independent publishing and printing — "so it gradually became my job. Independent publishing exploding worldwide is really a story of just the past decade." Four small books have come out so far.

Cao Di often turns up at the basement doing odd jobs like checking tickets, but what he does more of is comb the internet for work that hits him as "very direct, very raw," then get in touch with the makers and help them produce a publication. Good things, he believes, have to be pushed out into the world. His taste runs to photographs by complete amateurs who look at the world in an unusual way — work that draws a little notice for the subtlety of what it shows, but that usually doesn't have many followers — or small drawings that are light on technique and still throw off sparks, a bit abstract and strange. A handful of small drawings done in pencil straight into a sketchbook gave Cao Di the feeling that "this is exactly right," and in the end he and Lao Zhai paid out of pocket to print 25 copies of a palm-sized book. Only after tracking the artist down did Cao Di discover she was a girl in her final year at an art high school, close to graduating.

The book is called TOURNIQUET, by Zhang Manqi. "The drawings look like they came to her on the spot, with none of that mannered, academy-trained quality, and they're definitely not landscape painting in the traditional sense," Cao Di said. "Look at the way she draws two trees with a house cutting straight through the middle; or a house on fire with a kid holding an enormous knife. Really atypical imagery, and not fully abstract either."

But after taking it to a book fair, Cao Di felt some conflict. "Maybe it's also because I liked it too much — I let a lot of production standards slide. I thought printing it in black and white, flaws and all, was great, but the customers didn't see it that way. To them it just looked careless." He feels he owes the artist and the work more responsibility, and at the same time believes that breaking that "naturalness" would strip away what made it worth anything. "You know what I mean — if you have to make it look like a proper product, really treating the customer as king."

Lao Zhai also published a book of his own under the imprint, Chinese Arms, a collection of photographs of old-style hand-poked tattoos. Between 2016 and 2018, on and off, he kept an eye out for people on Beijing streets and in restaurants with arm tattoos that looked "really fierce," and would go over and start a conversation; if there was something to it he would photograph the tattoo, and if he was turned down he would leave. "If someone clearly says no, I never push it. The ones who let me shoot will usually talk with you for a while."

Chinese Arms simply records the conversations as they happened. The subjects are usually over forty and come from all over the country. In the 1980s and '90s they dipped needles in ink and poked in dragons and tigers, or the character for "endure" — work that looks raw and blunt. Tattoo machines didn't exist yet.

One exchange in the book goes: "This one's a rabbit holding a spray of flowers. I was born in the year of the rabbit. Why the flowers? Because the rabbit came out crooked. Did it in the '80s. I tied three needles together myself and it only took half an hour. Back then families had a lot of kids and nobody was watching what you did."

Lao Zhai said in another interview that this was very folk, very interesting, and worth recording. "The way I see it, this is something particular to China, and it's been around a long time — it just hasn't gotten any attention. Basically all of these tattoos were done before the mid-1990s; they're very much of their moment. After that people moved over to eyebrow-tattoo machines and it stopped being this method. Though in technique and meaning it doesn't have the complexity of Russian prison tattoos or American gang tattoos."

"I've also run into guys with striking designs on their hands who looked like they were doing pretty well, and they must have had stories. But because I could sense something in their expressions and the way they carried themselves, I didn't dare shoot them. I'm not exactly a rigorous documentarian, and I didn't want to bring trouble on myself over it," he added.

Most people feel that the fRUITYSPACE basement Lao Zhai and Yao Lan run has cleared some open ground for people who have spent a dozen years in Beijing only to find they have fewer and fewer places to go. "A place without so much fussy pretension." Zoomin' Night, the experimental music collective founded ten years ago and pushed around by the closure of one well-known Beijing venue after another, now plays at fRUITYSPACE regularly. They have also gotten better at making conditions out of whatever is available — underground passages, other people's living rooms, parks all work as stages.

Zhu Wenbo, who organizes it, thinks today's urban environment is more like an "ecological food chain" than it used to be: as small venues disappear, inexperienced musicians gradually lose their chances to get onstage. "You can't expect someone to walk in and play a huge show right away. Performing is a very live thing, and it ought to be allowed to go wrong."

Lao Zhai isn't pessimistic. "It's not as if a place closes and the life in it is gone. Trends seem to rise and fall, wave after wave, but watch long enough and you find it's actually always there. If it's not here, it'll definitely be somewhere else. Beijing, this city, has that kind of capacity to adjust itself."

That vitality shows even more clearly in a music radio show he has kept going, and kept updating, for nearly ten years.

In early 2009, Lao Zhai and his old friend Xiao Sun recorded the first episode of their radio show at home. The show is called "My Spiritual Medicine," and it shares old foreign songs from the 1940s through the '70s that were hard to hear in China at the time. In the 1990s, Beijing Music Radio's New Music Magazine, Old-Fashioned Car and Midnight Blues had been their own musical education. Both of them agree that the music of the 1950s and '60s left a deep mark on the music of every era since.

At first they spread the show on Douban, then set up a website and built up a group of longtime listeners; then streaming arrived and they lost a lot of them. Today only a few thousand are left. But on the question of promotion, neither man has budged in years. "Honestly, we don't really care about that." Xiao Sun works at the National Library of China; at home he has piled up a collection of tens of thousands of records.

What also hasn't changed is what the two of them hear in the roots music of the 1950s and '60s: its plainness. Xiao Sun thinks it holds up over time. "Making something new doesn't have to be defined by era. It can be very old-fashioned and very plain at the same time." Which is not far from how fRUITYSPACE is run.

This basement, at No. 13 Meishuguan Dongjie in Dongcheng District, sits away from the tourist areas, so there is little to disturb it; it faces the street, but there is no sign on the door, which keeps it hidden enough. It works as a natural filter. Someone walks in, feels uncomfortable within a few seconds and turns around and leaves — that tells you he doesn't belong to this kind of space. Someone feels at ease and stays. Brother Wang, for one, comes two or three times a week and thinks of it as part of his life.

The cover image and accompanying photos are courtesy of fRUITYSPACE. On the cover, from left: Lao Zhai, Cao Di and Yao Lan.