Instant Hutong art project investigates the borderline case of Hutong districts in old downtown Beijing. The work explores both spatial and social aspects to screen the uniqueness of a urban tissue made of lanes and courtyard houses and the community of people living in it. It is organized as a series of art pieces and installations on the border between art, social investigation and urban research in the aim to generate and stimulate an open debate. The work is currently involving questions such density, unstructured reappropriation, gentrification, relationship between people and their physical space, property speculation, disappearing community and identity.

The approach is open and flexible, mixing together different media and techniques of visual arts to capture every little mark of this reality in transformation. We started using maps of old Beijing, which have been reinterpreted as spatial textures, transformed, decontextualized, reinvented and readapted. Those detailed maps are generally forbidden from Chinese government and at first it was necessary a preliminary research work to get them and then redraw completely line by line.

Since the work starts from a physical urban space, our effort is to make it interact physically with people stirring up emotions. A central role will be played by graphic, printings, sculpture and installations, while video, photography, interviews with people will be used to complete the picture from unexpected point of view.