Caochangdi and Northeast Art Spaces: Red-Brick Studios

Roughly three kilometres northeast of the 798 Art District along the Airport Expressway corridor, where Chaoyang's urban blocks give way to country lanes and poplar groves, the village of Caochangdi and the surrounding (Cuigezhuang) art belt offer a completely different contemporary art experience. As commercial rents and weekend foot traffic climbed inside 798 during the 2000s, serious collectors' galleries, archival institutions and working artists shifted outward to Caochangdi. Here, instead of converted 1950s munitions factories, the architecture itself was purpose-built from the ground up using humble northern grey and red kiln bricks.

Architectural gallery compounds in Caochangdi

Much of Caochangdi's distinctive look comes from more than twenty courtyard studio and gallery complexes designed in the early 2000s by artist and architect Ai Weiwei (FAKE Design). Using local bricklayers and traditional grey hutong bricks laid in crisp, minimalist geometric lattices, these walled compounds feel like serene contemporary monasteries:

• Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (yingxiang yishuguan): founded by photographers RongRong and inri, China's premier centre dedicated to contemporary photography and video art sits inside a tranquil grey-brick courtyard with staggered brickwork walls, library archives and an outdoor lawn.
• Red Courtyard and Chambers Fine Art / ShanghART Beijing: clustered around the central village square (Caochangdi 258 and 300), these cavernous, sky-lit halls stage museum-scale sculpture and painting exhibitions with rarely more than a handful of quiet visitors in the room.

Adding the Red Brick Art Museum (Hongzhuan Meishuguan)

Ten minutes north by DiDi in Hegezhuang (or reached from Maquanying Station on Subway Line 15) stands one of the most striking architectural museums in China: the Red Brick Art Museum, designed by Peking University architecture professor Dong Yugan. Rather than white-cube plaster walls, the entire museum and its sunken classical scholar's garden are constructed from millions of warm terracotta-red bricks laid without cutting a single brick. Inside the main halls, circular brick moon gates, narrow shafts of natural skylight and stepped brick amphitheatres give way outside to black-swan ponds, weeping willows, stone bridges and wisteria pergolas. Pair a morning at the Red Brick Art Museum with a courtyard lunch in Hegezhuang and an afternoon gallery walk through Caochangdi and 798.