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The woman was sitting on a low stool, handling gently a white, gelatinous lump of glue the size of a human brain as she submerged it in a bucket of water. She took it out and pushed it carefully through a piece of cloth before transferring it into a small steel saucepan and stirring it with a wooden spoon, spraying it with water a couple of times.
Her colleague was unrolling lengths of silk on to a long, wide table, matching each one against the picture we had brought, a figure of a woman in ink on rice paper that looked like a Gerald Scarfe cartoon. He took his time, guiding us away from the more expensive fabrics and towards cheaper ones he said were adequate for our purpose.
[ Gerald Scarfe: ‘To destroy a politician is very difficult’ ]
This was the Songzhuang art colony on the eastern outskirts of Beijing and I had come with a painter to frame two pictures he had made for me. One, a large, abstracted image of nine Tang dynasty ladies, would sit in a conventional frame but this one was going on to a scroll.
The rice paper would be fixed on to the silk background which would in turn be glued on to a paper scroll, which would be weighted at the bottom with a wooden rod. The painter made all the decisions, glancing towards me every so often, not so much for approval as to make sure I was paying attention.
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The idea for these pictures was born months ago when the painter came to my place for dinner with four of his former classmates from art school. Ten years after they graduated, he was the only one to make his living as an artist while the others had various government jobs with a vague connection to art and architecture.
Coming in from a trip to the kitchen I found them standing in front of a picture that took up most of the surface of one of the livingroom walls. A traditional Chinese landscape painting of a river, it was something I acquired almost by accident after I moved in.
“We don’t like it,” the painter said.
The others chipped in to denounce every element of the picture, its subject and composition, the artist’s technique and even the frame. One of them said it added to a more general problem with my apartment, which was that it had too much yin and not enough yang.
By the time they left, we had agreed that the landscape had to go, along with a view of Central Park with a reference to Hannah Arendt that was hanging in the hallway. In their place I would have two new pictures to be commissioned from the painter, which would bring more yang into the room.
As we left the framer’s in Songzhuang, the painter remarked on how cheap it was, pointing out that if we had picked a less opulent fabric, the scroll would have cost just RMB60 (€8). He has been using the same framer since he left art school and over the past few years the prices have not gone up and may have come down.
It is a familiar conversation in China where the economy is in trouble but, unlike in Europe or the United States, the cost of living is coming down for many people. This is partly a consequence of the deflationary pressures driven by a three-year housing market slump but it also reflects the fiercely competitive nature of the Chinese market.
The housing crisis has not only seen property values fall but is also driving down rents, even in the most expensive cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. One friend told me this week that he negotiated a cut in his monthly rent two years ago from RMB11,000 (€1,400) to RMB10,000 and he was hoping to knock another RMB1,000 off it this year.
Another man who moved back to Beijing with his family after three years in Shanghai said that everything from furniture to children’s clothes had come down in price. Government trade-in schemes have driven down the cost of household appliances and drivers are profiting from a price war among China’s multitude of electric vehicle manufacturers.
China’s ecommerce infrastructure, more extensive and advanced than that in Europe in the US, makes pricing more transparent. And apps for everything from restaurants and food delivery to massages and pedicures offer real-time feedback from consumers on price as well as quality.
A few days after our visit to Songzhuang, the painter asked me if I wanted to join him on a bicycle ride late at night when the air was cool. We cycled past the busy bars and restaurants near the Drum Tower and then south past Beihai Park to the northeast corner of the Forbidden City.
As we sat on a wall on the edge of the moat, looking across at the former imperial palace and down towards the ducks courting below, the painter opened two bottles of soda water that cost RMB2.5 (30 cent) each.
“All the best things in Beijing are free or cheap,” he said.