I learned a couple of days ago that the artists who protested on Chang'an Dajie at the start of the month about their forced eviction from their studios (an 'art colony' that the Chaoyang District government of Beijing had encouraged them to establish less than a year ago) have now been promised some financial compensation.
Whether this compensation will be all that substantial remains to be seen (some of the artists had supposedly sunk most of their life savings into fitting out studio-homes they hoped would last them at least a decade or two), but it's a pretty remarkable concession by the powers-that-be. Similar cases in the last few years of artists' communities being broken up by predatory developers have enjoyed no such 'happy ending'. And ordinary folks are getting forced out of their homes in their thousands all the time all across China, with little or no warning and not much in the way of compensation. As I mentioned in that earlier post, one must suppose that the involvement of Ai WeiWei - China's premier modern artist, enjoying a very high profile both within China and internationally; hence just about untouchable - in this incident has been the decisive factor in obtaining this moderately favourable resolution. (The possibility of retributive police harassment against the other - non-famous - artist protesters continues to be a bit of a worry, though.)
[Double happiness for my old mate Wu Yuren, one of the artists affected, who's got a retrospective show on at the White Box gallery in Dashanzi at the moment (it opened last Saturday). I'm hoping to go and check that out sometime this weekend.]
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