In an empty room there is a picture of a man standing before a group of tall buildings. To the right of the picture is a white screen, onto which names are projected through a small plastic board. A group called FM3 is playing ambient electronic music. In the toilet, director Ju Anqi's film "There's a Strong Wind in Beijing" is being shown.
All these artistic elements are part of the May 26 opening ceremony of the Mustard Seed Garden, or Jiezi Yuan in Chinese, a space for multi-media arts.
"It's all about space," said Li Zhenhua, founder of the Mustard Seed Garden. "Zhang Hui's installation work, FM3's music and Ju's film are all contesting the same space."
The form of the opening ceremony indicates the orientation of the Mustard Seed Garden, which is going to be host to activities involving the visual arts, performing arts, concerts, theaters and films.
Located at Feijiacun, Laiguang Dong Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing, the Mustard Seed Garden is in the old workshop of a pickle factory.
The name Jiezi Yuan was the title of a Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) painting text book.
In 1996, Li started the Mustard Seed Garden project, when he founded a gallery/cafe of the name. Though the life of the gallery/cafe only lasted one year, Li's Mustard Seed Garden Productions had at the same time been sponsoring various other art activities, such as the "Culture/Life" exhibition (August 1999), the "Sound" exhibition (December 2000), the "Film Link," a club for Chinese and foreign experimental films and concerts by "Wild Children," a group which combines unplugged rock with northwestern Chinese folk music.
Now, four years after the closure of the gallery, the Mustard Seed Garden has found a new home, and hopefully this time it will be a permanent one. The Mustard Seed Garden has also diversified.
"Multi-oriented, multi-media, open art forms and challenging ideas are the orientations of the new Mustard Seed Garden, which will also try to build a reasonable bridge between art and economics, to provide more modern resources and a better environment for common aesthetic values," claimed the leaflet at the gallery's opening.
Plans in the short-term at Mustard Seed Garden include a play starring singer Zhu Zheqin (Dadawa), an exhibition of traditional Chinese furniture and a Digital Video Festival.
"The Jiezi Yuan is an old book," said Li, "yet I hope we can explore some new ideas with the same name."
(China Daily 06/05/2001)
