Two nations under a groove

David Holmes and The Frames drew Chinese audiences to Beijing's most vibrant cultural quarter during the city's Irish arts festival, reports Rosita Boland

Of all the venues for the three-week Festival of Irish Arts and Culture in Beijing, by far the most culturally exciting was the Yan Club, in Dashanzi Art District, where the DJ David Holmes and The Frames played on two consecutive Saturdays.

Dashanzi Art District, or Factory 798 as it is also known, has become Beijing's newest and most vibrant cultural area. Factory 798 is enormous, perhaps a kilometre long, accessed through a barrier at the entrance to the compound. Only private cars can travel through the complex: our taxi was allowed in only when the enterprising driver deftly removed the taxi sign from the roof and pulled it in through the window.

The site, which originally housed a military-electronics factory, dates from the 1950s. Designed by East Germans, the sprawling complex of vast Bauhaus-style buildings was once under the control of the People's Liberation Army. For the past two years its low rents and distinctive warehouse spaces have attracted scores of artists.

In 798 today are art galleries, studios, bookshops, the Yan Club, an extraordinary, cavernous bar, called Vibes, and astonishing restaurants, including a stunning modern French one called Sit, whose film-set style any design magazine would bay and howl to photograph. Even to walk round the place is to feel energised. There is nothing remotely like Factory 798 in Ireland: the place is simply on such an enormous and ambitious scale. Last month alone saw the first Dashanzi International Art Festival, a four-week event for which every gallery in the district showed new work, on the theme of understanding modern life through sound and light.

The district is buzzing, but it's not all shiny. It has an edge, a frenetic energy that perhaps comes from the fact that it may no longer be there in another two years. Sit, for example, is the most surreally beautiful restaurant I've ever eaten in, but its existence is so perilous it doesn't have the facility to accept plastic - payment is in cash only.

Factory 798 has the misfortune to be on the road that links Beijing to its airport, a crucial axis of commerce. This is now very valuable land; developers would love to get their hands on it, turf out the feckless artists and make stacks of money from moving in commercial companies. Money talks the world over. Despite Beijing's vast scale the appetite for yet more land to develop seems insatiable. The city's old hutongs, for example, the traditional lanes and courtyard houses that form some of the few remaining links with the old fabric of the city, are disappearing by the day, replaced by high-rises.

The artists working in Factory 798 have done much to draw attention to the place. They are also campaigning to save it, headed by Huang Rui, one of the first artists to move to the area, in 2002. Government officials have visited, to see what is going on there, and the artists hope that if Dashanzi's profile continues to rise it will be left alone. In only two years the district has made a name for itself both inside and outside China: last month the Washington Post ran a large feature on the area and Dashanzi International Art Festival. But pessimists say the whole place will be destroyed within two years.

Factory 798 is a 40-yuan (€4) cab ride from central Beijing, a good 40 minutes in a taxi. It's the farthest from town of all the festival venues, but putting Holmes and The Frames in 798's Yan Club is a deliberate decision: another attempt to raise its profile and so keep it the property of the artists.

The club's vivacious owner goes by the improbable name of Bing Bing, which translates as Ice Ice. "It is the only name I go by," she says. Bing Bing is originally from Chongqing, in south-western China. She has owned the Yan Club for two years, since the district took off. It opened in October 2002 after six months of renovations.

There were about 400 people in the club for Holmes, and it was stuffed to the rafters for The Frames. Who did Bing Bing think was in the club those two nights? "A modern crowd who have a taste for new, modern, international things, especially the Chinese crowd, who are modern and trendy and very much like the concept of what the Yan Club is about."

Joshua Heffernan, an American musician who went to hear Holmes, had a franker view. "The place is full of pretentious expats and nouveau-riche Chinese." Heffernan's four-piece band, Yin Ts'ang (he is one of two US members; the others are Chinese), have just released China's first hip-hop album, To Serve The People. MTV China has nominated them for a best-newcomers award, and they are now dealing with considerable attention from the media and from fans.

If the jury was out on whether the punters were pretentious, you couldn't say the same about the terrific airy venue, with its concrete floor and wide staircase. The bar, for instance, couldn't have been simpler. It was more reminiscent of a rural ballroom of romance than a modern club, neat rows of Coke and Sprite cans lined up on a table alongside bottles of Corona and Tsingtao beer.

When you indicated which brand you wanted the bar staff fetched it from a fridge, although this was no promise it would be cold: the fridge was functioning as a very large cupboard the second night I was there. Neither was there a cash register: the money was posted in to a large wooden box like so many little paper letters.

Beijing, like any capital city, is not a true representation of the greater country. But it represents itself. There is now a place in Beijing called Bar Street- a self-explanatory name - and one called Lotus Lane, overlooking Houhai Lake. Lotus Lane opened last autumn, a strip of impossibly pretty bars and restaurants lit by enough candles to make you worry slightly about fire insurance. The place looks amazingly posh until you require a bathroom and discover you have to trot off over the hills and far away to use the lane's communal one.

Bar Street sounds hideous, but many of its establishments, unlike those in Temple Bar, are places you'd like to drink in, charming and individual. The Hidden Tree has a garden overhung by huge trees, a welcome relief from all the surrounding concrete. Bar Obscure, across the way, my own favourite, is a tiny atmospheric place with red couches set out rather like the dining carriage of an elegant old train. There's a bar for every mood between Bar Street and the peaceful lakeside venues of Lotus Lane.

"There was nothing like this in Beijing 10 years ago," says Carol Lu, who was translating for the Irish press. Lu could be described as a perfect example of an outstandingly modern Chinese woman. She speaks fluent English, works as a journalist, a restaurant reviewer and an arts critic and was a contributor to a Time Out guide to Hong Kong. Next month she's off to Sweden for a year-long museum curator's course. She wants eventually to work as a freelance curator in China.

When I were there Lu was writing a 4,000-word article for China Youth Magazine on Views From An Island, the Irish visual-arts show in Beijing. The magazine is a 400-page monthly that she says aspires to be the Wallpaper* of China. "It was founded by a painter in Shanghai, Chen Yifei, who also owns boutiques all over Shanghai."

Lu quizzed me at length about Ireland's art scene, and in return she filled me in on life in Beijing: surely what cultural exchanges are all about.