Nanshan Village, a suburb of Beijing, once a hollowed-out village with dried-up rivers and dilapidated earthen houses, has recently seen a renewed vitality thanks to renovations and an art festival. Tsinghua University's Academy of Fine Arts has been deeply involved in Nanshan Village's artistic transformation. Meng Chao, the village's first secretary, is a graduate of the academy.
During the National Day holiday, in conjunction with the "Green Art" 2025 Beijing Nanshan Art Festival, The Paper visited the artistic rural construction of Nanshan Village.
Nanshan Village
From an ancient village to an artistic utopia
Nanshan Village lies approximately 80 kilometers northeast of Beijing, at the southeastern tip of Pinggu District. At dusk, while most villages are plunged into darkness, the guesthouses scattered along the canals and amidst the dense forests surrounding the village are ablaze with light, creating a bustling paradise.
Nanshan Village in the evening
It is understood that since 2023, Pinggu District has built this place into a pilot area for a new type of rural community. The government has revitalized the village's idle residential land, collective construction land, inefficient agricultural land and forest land, and carried out organic renewal of the village.
Over the past two years, Nanshan Village has renovated 226 residential buildings and three parcels of collective land. Through leasing and transferring these buildings and land, the village has developed 70 guesthouses with diverse styles and 10 public service facilities. These guesthouses feature a variety of themes, including the pet-themed "Mengchonghao," the martial arts-themed "Juyitang," and the nautical-themed "Boathouse." Most of these guesthouses offer spacious spaces, adjacent to verdant hills and farmland, with rooftops and courtyards, catering to urban nomads' desire for a closer connection to nature.
Nanshan Village House Renovation B&B
Furthermore, this is a new type of village that serves both peacetime and emergency purposes. This "dual-use" approach is an innovative urban development concept that seamlessly integrates normal and emergency use. Pinggu District, where Nanshan Village is located, experiences heavy rain in the summer. In 2024, Nanshan Village successfully navigated multiple downpours and regional floods in Pinggu District, effectively evacuating and relocating residents. In normal times, however, this village is a tranquil and beautiful place enjoyed by both residents and tourists. During our visit, we discovered that the village had transformed many discarded farm tools, wooden planks, and other items into playful and climbing facilities like slides and seesaws.
Agricultural tools are the bones and muscles of agricultural civilization, carrying the memory of the land and the labor history of generations. Transforming agricultural tools into recreational facilities also completes a symbolic transformation from "tools of production" to "medium of play." This "locally sourced" approach enhances the artistic identity and local character of public spaces.
A giant made of discarded farm tools, wooden boards, etc.
During the National Day holiday and art festival, the number of tourists coming here also increased significantly, and this ancient village became a bustling art park.
New art season focuses on "Nanshan scenery"
In recent years, artistic rural construction has been widely carried out, and more and more teachers and students from art schools have gone deep into the countryside, participating in rural construction through artistic means, and injecting new vitality into rural development.
The artistic transformation of Nanshan Village is inseparable from the deep involvement of Tsinghua Academy of Fine Arts.
Since 2024, the Academy of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University and the People's Government of Pinggu District have taken "School-Local Cooperation Empowers Art Rural Construction and Cultural Industry Empowers Rural Revitalization" as the theme, and have guided artists and designers to come to Nanshan Village through dispatching the first secretary to the village, setting up an "Art Nomad" base, planning to build the "China Rural Aesthetics Museum", founding the Earth Art Festival, creating a rural art market, and upgrading agricultural product packaging design.
"Art Practice" in Nanshan Village
The "Green Art" 2025 Beijing Nanshan Art Season is a new practice for these "art nomads" here. This art season focuses on "Nanshan scenery", and highlights the theme, local nature and culture. It also specially invites a creative team represented by well-known artists such as Li Xiangqun, Dong Shubing, Chen Hui, and Ma Tianyu to jointly launch more than 30 art works such as "Taoxianhui", "Son of Nanshan", "Nanshan Elves", "Taotao", and "Portrait of Li Kai", adding a new art landmark to Nanshan Village.
Son of Nanshan
These works are inspired by the natural scenery, historical memories and characteristic agriculture of Nanshan Village, transforming Pinggu peaches and mountain pets into concrete and tangible visual images.
The work, titled "Nanshan Elves," takes "symbiosis with nature" as its core inspiration, incorporating the endearing image of forest elves into sculptural language. Through the interaction between the elves and the green environment, it conveys the environmental concept that nature nurtures vitality and humans protect the ecology. Pinggu is famous for its peaches, and "Peach Blossoms" utilizes the transparency of outdoor endurance board to blend the peach blossoms in the painting with the village scenery behind. "Nanshan Fireworks" uses the aesthetic of dopamine color as its language to construct a dreamy flower field emerging from the ground on the village lawn, allowing the color matrix to dialogue with the natural field.
Peach Blossoms
Small figures made of stones in the river
A statue of Li Kai has been completed high above Nanshan Village. The statue is based on the painting "A Single Tree." Li Kai was a Qing Dynasty scholar who influenced the development of Liaodong poetry. In his later years, he lived in seclusion in Nanshan Village, Pinggu, for over 30 years. A stone inscription of his inscription, "Reflection Pond," remains intact in the village. The statue aims to enhance the cultural atmosphere of Nanshan Village and bring this historical figure to life.
Portrait of Li Kai
Sculptor Dong Shubing's "Son of Nanshan" uses nickel-bronze to create the image of a giant baby sleeping soundly in a dreamcatcher cradle, conveying an atmosphere of tranquility and innocence; Professor Chen Hui and others' "Burning Spring Breeze" uses a keel iron frame, renewable polyester yarn and fiber optic light strips to abstractly display the beauty of peach blossoms; and there is also a "Water Cube" built with discarded peach baskets, which changes colors in the mountains at night.
Peach Cube
Meng Chao, a postdoctoral fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University, participated in the preparations for the 2025 Nanshan Art Season as the first secretary of Nanshan Village. He also has many thoughts of his own on the artistic transformation of Nanshan Village.
Meng Chao believes that there are two one-sided views on the practice of artistic rural development: one views it as a one-way aid to rural areas, while the other views rural areas as experimental fields, hoping to conduct unrestrained creative experiments. Both of these one-sided views are detrimental to the effective development of artistic rural development.
"When looking at artistic rural construction, we should neither simply understand it as one-way assistance nor regard it unilaterally as a creative experiment. It should be that the organizers and participants of artistic rural construction, after having gained an in-depth understanding of the countryside as students, use artistic aesthetics and other means to work with villagers to continue the rural context, deepen local culture, and carry out artistic transformation of regional aesthetics, thereby stimulating the villagers' endogenous motivation." Meng Chao proposed.
Climbing and playing facilities for children in the countryside
Meng Chao explained that in most cases of artistic rural development, artists live, eat, and work alongside local farmers. Locally created works are often large in scale, and many artists' concepts require the collaboration of multiple trades. Large sculptures and installations often require a comprehensive construction team, making local villagers the preferred choice.
The little rabbit wall lamp has artistic beauty and also provides lighting for the village.
The village's Dule River, formerly known as the "Dulou River," was nearly dry. Due to silt accumulation, water seeped into the ground, leaving only a cracked riverbed. Based on villagers' accounts and extensive research, the team ultimately decided to dredge the silt away, carve a shallow pond in a low-lying area, and design and build stone steps based on the terrain.
Nanshan Village River