Day Five

In the morning I did the prior day’s diary after making ham and eggs for breakfast. I then did some more work on cleaning up the casting resin from the glass castings. Li Gang then stopped by with Sou Chou, the contractor that he used for the other units. He was always hanging around Li Gang and drove a fancy car. I previously heard a number of complaints about his work, but Abraham told me that he was satisfied with the work he had done on one of his units. I had drafted out some fairly detailed plans. Since I had done the electrical boxes in a way in which Li Gang did not understand, he said the plans were worthless. I had used the layout of Abraham’s original unit as a model because he had separated his gallery space from his living space. In most of the artist’s studios, there was no such separation.

Li Gang, Sou Chou and I looked at the empty space. We then went to Abraham’s original space, so I could explain the changes. Sou Chou told me my plans were not needed and he would give me an estimate tomorrow. And then we proceeded to Ta Dun a/k/a the Garden restaurant so Sou Chou could celebrate our new relationship. As we were concluding our late lunch, Peter Lewis and his Japanese friend, Kaokay, joined us. She lives in Japan and comes to China to purchase unique fabrics. And then everyone went back to the SAC compound because Peter wanted to see Li Gang’s and my work, and even more important to him was to try to see Kunte Wylie’s operation at the SAC compound. But that was like an armed fortress which was impenetrable. Apparently Kunte Wylie has a well organized staff of Chinese artists doing much, if not all his paintings of the old masters using the faces of hip hop stars. According to Peter, this artist is very hot now.

I went back to my unit to start to work on cleaning up the new bronze castings that Li Gang had just brought back from his foundry. That night I was going to try to use Skype to call Leslie rather than going out to dinner. I was unable to activate the call on Skype, so she called my cell phone from her Skype connection. I was very tired but waited up to meet Haika so she could tell me about her experience with Sou Chou as her contractor. She did not show up by 12:00 so I went to sleep.

Day Six

I met with three people who had used Li Gang's contractor of choice, Sou Chou , and each told me they were very unhappy with the quality of his work. When I mentioned this to Li Gang his response was these people did not know anything about building, especially building in China -- they are artists! Sou Chou came by that afternoon and presented his plans and an estimate that appeared to be twice what Abraham had told me he was charged for his initial unit last year. I told him I would have to think about it, but I was extremely unhappy with his doubling the price and would call other contractors.

I called Abe to get the confirmation on the price and he told me then that it cost about twice what he originally told me and how unhappy he was with the quality of Sou Chou’s work. Apparently, Christina told him to tell me the truth. He offered to have Christina recommend other contractors.

Haika gave me the details of her bad experience with Sou Chou. Lennart also advised me that he was not happy with his work. Everyone had spent much time trying to get this contractor to correct his errors and Haika finally gave up and tore everything out and started from scratch. The others felt they had no other choice as they did not know who could coordinate this other than Li Gang.

I suggested to Li Gang that he seriously consider a new GC for these units as everyone was mad at him for recommending Sou Chou. If he was getting a percentage, he should make that arrangement with the customer. He said he would have the contractor who did Two Lines Gallery give me an estimate.

I went back to the studio to do more work on cleaning up the glass and bronze castings and to refine the plans that Li and Sou Chou said were unusable. His plans, with his estimate, were so vague and incomplete that it was obvious to me that he was going to build what he wanted, with no material specifications and not what I wanted.

Day Seven

I met with an artist who was recommended by two other people that could do the coordination with the contractor and to others to complete the project. She said that the plans I had done were very easy to follow. I had been through 3 Manhattan office build outs from scratch plus 2 residential renovations.
I met Li Gang’s new contractor and went over the plans for the new unit. He was the contractor that Gang and Lennart had used to build out Two Lines Gallery in 798 district.

I then had lunch with Huang, his wife Lily, Li Gang, and Li Gang’s crew. Lily ordered in take out. Lily is a painter and Huang is primarily a photographer and we sat at the table in the middle of the studio surrounded by their art. Li Gang and Huang were discussing the pinhole cameras and their uses. That is the current rage amongst the artists. After lunch I went back to do some more work on cleaning off the casting residue. Li Gang stopped by and we discussed art, life, etc. for a couple of hours. Li Gang had to go home for dinner and I ended up having dinner with Li Gang’s assistant. Basically, we combined our left overs from prior meals and that was dinner.
I then did some more work on finishing up the “White Beach” woodcut and started a new woodcut layout. When I wanted to take a break I did some more work trying to clean off the remaining casting residue from the glass and steel sculptures. I spoke to Leslie at approximately 10:30 and after updating the diary went to sleep.

I met with an artist who was recommended by two other people that could do the coordination with the contractor and to others to complete the project. She said that the plans I had done were very easy to follow. I had been through 3 Manhattan office build outs from scratch plus 2 residential renovations.
I met Li Gang’s new contractor and went over the plans for the new unit. He was the contractor that Gang and Lennart had used to build out Two Lines Gallery in 798 district.

Day Eight

I had an early morning meeting with the new contractor through Zhu Li, a local artist who has an excellent reputation for organizing things. She had agreed to act as an intermediary with respect to the Chinese contractors. Fortunately, Abraham Lubelski’s original unit had many of the ideas I wanted to incorporate, including, most importantly, a totally separate space for a gallery/studio. This contractor seemed quite knowledgeable and had some good suggestions. I hope he comes in with a reasonable estimate. I then went off to a business meeting. The business lunch is so much larger than I am used to eating in Beijing. I knew when I was done that I would not need to eat or even want to eat any supper.

When I got back to the compound Li Gang was meeting with two Belgian designers. They had a number of questions about local computer services, which I was able to help them with since I had used these types of services for some of my big Chinese flags series. Lunch, which Gang had ordered in, came next and I excused myself to start working on cleaning of the casting residue from more of the bronze sculptures in my deep-sea creature series. It is a tedious and boring necessary evil. Li Gang thinks the casting residue adds character. I disagree.

At about six o’clock a number of people gathered at Li Gang’s studio to have tea and watermelon. I then realized that my cell phone was running very low. I needed some exercise anyway so I rode to the store that sells additional Sim phone credits. I also learned at the business meeting that for a small fee China Mobile will make sure that I can keep my cell phone number. I will find out the details from China Mobile and definitely do this before I leave Beijing. Upon my return there were still people at Li Gang’s and I had some watermelon.

An American gallery owner is interested in purchasing some interesting sculpture from my neighbor Ye DongSheng. I gave DongSheng her e-mail address so that he could send her pictures of the “Chinese red soda bottle rocket”. He took a picture of the sculpture and is coming over tonight after dinner to have me review it before it is transmitted to the art dealer. I said that I would be up to go over the images and what to transmit. Basically, this is a fiberglass sculpture of a soda bottle with rocket booster fins. I think it is quite clever. DongSheng has also done a take off on the Duchamp’ bicycle. He has mounted a bicycle rim, which is badly twisted, on top of a decorative Chinese stool.

Today I started the casting residue clean up work on the smaller bronze long and slender (about 4 feet high). There is much less cleanup work on this sculpture than the much smaller deep-sea creatures. After communicating by e-mail with my office and others, I decided to read some more of the new Tao book concerning how the new “ head of the religion” was identified and trained for his position. However, the substance of the book is various aspects of the Taoist approach towards life. It is fascinating but very slow read because I am trying to understand the concepts.

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