A coterie of classical to cutting-edge Mexican painters and publishers, DJs and designers, is descending on Beijing to create cultural colonies across the Chinese capital.

As these explorers paint the capital with the centuries-old colours and electronic symphonies of post-modern Mexico City, they will also "seek ways to link up these two cities and countries in a cultural dialogue," says Chaos Y Chen, a globally connected curator who helped organize the arts festival.

Mexican and Chinese envoys of the arts will also navigate new pathways for cultural globalization to evolve and counter-balance the oceanic flood of "America, the cultural superpower," said Chen.

Festival site

Mexico passed up China's major museums and State showcases for arts exchanges, and chose instead to hold its first cultural festival at Factory 798 in Beijing's Dashanzi area.

Mexico's Ambassador Sergio Ley Lopez says the digital composers, fashion designers, neo-century scribes and traditional painters he is helping bring here are all from the Mexican capital's La Condesa arts district, the centre of the Central American country's cool contemporary culture.

"Mexico City's La Condesa Art District is hailed by many as the most important cultural and intellectual centre of our nation's capital, particularly for the new generation of artistic creators and promoters," says Lopez. "At the soul of this great art district we can find a great number of art galleries, painting studios, residences of artists and intellectuals, libraries, Mexican fashion boutiques, restaurants, bars and nightclubs."

"La Condesa is, without a doubt, a centrepiece in Mexico City's efforts to generate a cosmopolitan identity," he says. Mexico's top envoy here adds that, similarly, Factory 798 and the surrounding "Dashanzi Art Zone stand out as the most creative and dynamic space in Beijing's cultural scene."

In the five years since its creation, Factory 798 "has become a reference internationally in the area of new artistic expression."

The ambassador adds that organizers of the Mexican arts-fest, which runs through the end of October, want to create long-lasting links between "these two artistic and creative communities, which belong to two extremely rich and ancient cultures in China and Mexico."

The festival now unfolding at Factory 798 includes the abstract- to European-inspired oil paintings of a dozen major Mexican artists who have accompanied their artworks to Beijing. Among the works is Boris Viskin's "Somewhere," a painting within a painting of a nude surrounded by Cartesian cubes of colour and black.

Boris Viskin is not only a painter, but also a cultural entrepreneur who created "Cafe La Gloria as a gathering place for artists in the Condesa district of Mexico City to show each other their latest works," says Sandra Durand, an attache at the Mexican Embassy in Beijing.

"Many of the Condesa artists join together in a 'collective workshop' at the same time as creating their own individual artworks," says Durand, who helped organize the cultural festival.

Indeed, these artists and thinkers have created a city-within-a-city at Condesa, complete with their own circuit of cafes, musicians, magazines, websites and photographers.

Perhaps taking cues from the French Surrealists, one of the first groups of artists to survive and flourish by uniting under a common manifesto of creativity and individuality, the Condesa group is beginning to radiate its ideas and images across the planet.

Factory 798 has, for a time, become a miniature cultural clone of Condesa. The painted artworks being showcased at 798's Beijing Cubic Art Centre (www.11-art.com) are just a stone's throw from the Mexican cuisine now being served up at the At Cafe by Mexican chef Jose Ruigomez.

Ruigomez, who left a post at Mexico City's Cafe La Gloria to migrate to Ibiza an idyllic isle of Iberian culture and electronic music, says he has become so fascinated by Beijing's booming transformation that he is scanning the city for a spot to set up his own Mexican eatery.

At the 798 Space Gallery, photographer Rogelio Cuellar is presenting his black-and-white impressions of La Condesa's spectrum of changes over the last decades. This "Traces of a Presence" show is a documentary of Condesa's evolution from a peripheral district of Mexico City into the cultural soul of the cosmopolis and of the country.

"Rogelio Cuellar lives in Condesa and knows many of its artists," says attache Durand. "He specializes in portraits of the Condesa artists, but also takes photos of cathedrals, monuments, heroes and nudes."

At the nearby Vibes music showcase, DJ Damian Romero will create sonic sculptures from the clay of Mexico City's emerging electronic music scene. Romero helped set up the electronic Imeca Music (www.imecamusic.com/) record label and is part of an exploding group of digital artists who have begun crisscrossing the globe to spread their musical messages.

Romero will be joined at 798 by twin fashion designers Paulina and Malinali Fosado, who unveil their "New Mexican Avant-garde" exhibition of leading-edge clothing over the weekend. Their cool/hot designs, which have been plastered across Beijing's art spaces and alleyways in the last weeks, were recently given the limelight at the prestigious Mexico City Palace of Fine Arts.

Back at Factory 798, a fantastic array of Mexican art books some hand-crafted artworks themselves are now being showcased at the Timezone 8 bookshop (www.timezone8.com). The writings, which span the ancient to the post-modern, include the beautifully edited Spanish- and English-language Artes de Mexico (Mexican Arts), which "is a cross between a book and a magazine," says Durand.

Alberto Lacy says in an introduction to the magazine that its editors "see art as the tip of the massive iceberg that is Mexican culture." Lacy adds: "Artes de Mexico's goals became clearly defined: to delve into hidden aspects of the country through its visual manifestations; to be ever curious and inquisitive, incessantly exploring, discovering and marvelling at the new enigmas of a dynamic, highly creative and always surprising culture."

Durand says "many Mexican publishers and journals would like to establish ties with their Chinese counterparts" as each country tries to use the forces of globalization to propel its culture across the planet.

Growing ties

Chaos Chen, who left a leading post in the Millennium Art Museum in Beijing to set up a dynamic curating atelier called Chaosprojects (www.chaosprojects.cn), says the two cities and two countries have a common interest in forging ever-stronger cultural contacts.

"The first two decades of China's opening in the 1980s and 1990s were centred on ties with North America and Europe," she says. "But as China's development and opening speeds up, more people here are becoming more curious about the entire world."

Durand says that "in the future, we want to invite a group of contemporary Chinese artists to visit Mexico" to maintain the momentum toward stronger cultural ties.

Mexican Ambassador Lopez says he hopes the arts festival "contributes to the establishment of new channels of communication between China and Mexico two countries that are constantly reconstructing their artistic identity in the middle of amazing reform and change."

(China Daily October 28, 2005)