indie art: August 2010 Archives

I recently wrote about a night shoot where we broke into an abandoned location:

It was linked to this event.

So now, the photos by Ren Hang (任航) have been processed and are starting to crop up. Click into this full post to see a selection. But first, I want to link an independent review of the event itself. It's long and detailed and feels like a vindication of the entire project:

Renhang has posted all the Boojii shots from that night in one amazing gallery here on Douban. It's Douban though, so a lot of the shots are partially censored, as you'll notice. Also, I can't freely throw around photos I'm privy to that haven't been put in the public by the photographer himself so these are not exclusive or anything. But they are great and it was a great night.

As I have been blogging here, we have had Beijing based photographer Ren Hang down for this indie event. 

Here's a review of it over at Layabozi. More here about that soon.

While he was down, Ren Hang was in photo overdrive and I also had him shoot the two artists on our indie label project. You can read about the shoot with Pairs right ... here. And by the way, hot tip, two of the finished tracks we did with them are up early at that link.

On Monday night we wanted to shoot both Little Punk and Boojii, who had played our show on Saturday. 

We wanted a surreal decaying location for a night shoot. Whenever I come through Zhongshan Park on the light rail (line 3) southbound, I always see a large abandoned lot that is completely overgrown. It also contains an old French school house and some other partially demolished buildings. Art scene friends had told me that they had previously hopped the wall and used the inside of the perimeter for graffiti. 

Firstly, I made an advance trip and dummy run on an earlier day. There is a regular gate and a couple of guards in a box at the top entrance, exactly next to Changning Road and Kaixuan Road where the train passes overhead. The place to climb the wall, where it is lowest, is where the lane passes the old school house. I could get over it but dropping down the other side is not for everyone, so I planned to get a ladder (see below pic). 

We used the inside of the school house for most of the shoot, we had nine of us over the wall without major incident. The inside was dark and we needed flashlights, a couple of fancy phones sorted that out as it happened. The room at the top of the tower was amazing and full of ruined vintage furniture. The four storey stairwell had no inner walls or banisters though so consenting adults only. 

The shoot was amazing and getting out was the funniest part. I hopped back over with the ladder and then the others walked up to the far end and told the guards they had wandered in at the other end and had no idea where they were. The guards let them out through the gate.