itinerant space

Nomadic, Itinerant, and Invisible Specters: The Dual Realisms of the Sixth Ring Odyssey
Jingjie Zhang

Beijing’s Sixth Ring Road is a prematurely built wall.

Around 2009, this newly completed elevated ring road functioned like an enormous lasso, demarcating the legitimate boundaries between Beijing’s modern and primitive, urban and rural, wealthy and impoverished. It appeared to serve as a practical conduit linking the different lives of different people, while simultaneously resembling a silent city wall, pronouncing whose lives would be incorporated into the city and modernity, and whose would be cast to the margins. Shuipo Village and Yanjiaying Village in Gaoliying Township, Shunyi District, offer one small example under the reach of this verdict.

The heatwave arrived exceptionally early in London this year, and it was on one such sweltering afternoon in late May that I interviewed Lin Zi (one of the project’s lead curators ), who inspired the writing of this article. In this conversation, he mentioned that the Sixth Ring passes coldly between these two villages, encircling Shuipo Village within its inner boundary while casting Yanjiaying Village to the outside, yet ultimately without seeming to have truly changed anything. Or rather, this lasso did not at the time bring a wholesale modernity to the area around the Sixth Ring; it seemed only to have shaped people’s lives in an imperceptible silence.

The Sixth Ring produces a constant, pure, and symbolic rupture, manufacturing the difference between what lies inside and outside the city. It is precisely across this fault line, both within and without, that hundreds of artists have anchored themselves to village residential plots, constructing worlds of varying scales: in some cases the ground floor serves as a production workshop while the upper floor provides bodily rest; in others, a few chairs outside for smoking while the interior becomes the site of a return to reality.

Mark Fisher, borrowing from Jameson and Žižek in Capitalist Realism, describes that suffocating sense that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’—yet on the terrain of Beijing, China, this formulation encounters a somewhat peculiar condition: the conflict between the legacy of socialist realism on Chinese soil and capitalist realism.

This conflict is by no means rare on a global scale, particularly since 1934, when Socialist Realism was promulgated by the Soviet Union as a political-cultural requirement and established as the supreme criterion of creation and criticism for socialist countries worldwide. The surviving modes of socialist realist production may still exert influence over the art of many countries and regions today. Yet, this influence appears to run especially deep in China. Socialist Realism was established as mainstream discourse in the early years of the People’s Republic, when Mao Zedong, at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, articulated the necessity of socialist realism as the guiding principle for Chinese literary and artistic creation. From its origins, this mode of socialist realist creation was fundamentally required to proceed from a proletarian standpoint, with the typicality and verisimilitude of everyday life scenes as its core; in the early years of the republic, it was further invested with the mission of glorifying collectivism and revolutionary heroes, incorporated into the educational system, and made to exert long-term influence over China’s art academies and social cultural production. Beijing, as China’s political and cultural center, and as one of the regions producing the greatest volume of artistic and cultural output since the founding of the republic, has become a site of particular complexity under the rapid expansion of late capitalism and global neoliberalism, alongside the influx of numerous currents of contemporary art theory.

In Beijing, these two realisms appear opposed. One proclaiming the market as the sole reality, the other insisting that the socialist mainstream narrative serves politics, yet they have arrived at a tacit complicity where practitioners in Beijing’s art industry are concerned: the former, through structural exploitation via exorbitant rent and institutional representation systems, expels creators unable to generate symbolic circulation value from the market discourse of central Beijing; the latter, through urban planning and policy, marginalizes content that drifts beyond the mainstream. The land redevelopment around Shunyi’s Luoma Lake between 2022 and 2024, and the earlier demolition of the Heiqiao Art District, both bear the shadow of this complicity.
Or rather, within the broader academy, capitalist realism and socialist realism are not in fact recognized as operating in a mode of complete binary opposition; they can even envelop one another. Under the influence of globalization and neoliberalism in particular, capitalist realism inverts everything in an almost sophistical gesture: what appears on the surface to be the natural and actual occurrence of things, whether market logic, technocracy, entertainment, or indeed the mainstream of socialist realism, has in reality been domesticated as a natural explication of capitalism itself, so as to maintain its perpetual infiltration of cultural production, education, media, and public discourse as a normalized ideology.

The question of the Sixth Ring is not one of commercialization, nor of the mainstream, nor, when all is said and done, a question of marginalization—especially since marginalization as a sociological descriptor for this situation may already be something of a cliché.

In my conversation with Lin Zi, I learned that the Sixth Ring Odyssey project is precisely attending to this point. Among the more than one hundred artists spanning the area from Yanjiaying to Shuipo Village and from Yanjiao to Dachang, the vast majority in fact have no gallery representation, and many of them may hold other jobs or maintain entirely separate lives. They also face the predicament that artists elsewhere in the world likely share under the conditions of late capitalism: their work may be compelled into structural silence before it has ever been exhibited, or it may be smoothed into a kind of fold deployed for distraction and entertainment. In Hito Steyerl’s terms, an image (or works) that does not participate in circulation is in the contemporary context nearly equivalent to nonexistence. Yet the artists of the Sixth Ring have directed their attention toward a further question: what must be refused within the Sixth Ring is the very system of judgment that equates invisibility with worthlessness, rather than the condition of marginalization itself.

In Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant distinguishes between two fundamentally different modes of invisibility, the passive invisibility that follows dispossession by power, and the actively chosen opacity (opacité). From his perspective, opacity can on one hand serve to conceal the self, functioning as a kind of archaic concealment; taken further, it constitutes a tendency toward refusing to be fully understood, to be reduced to a consumable sign, to be incorporated into any single system of narrative. He summarizes this epistemological claim as the right of all difference not to be fully comprehended, that, the right to maintain its own impenetrability, without having to exchange transparency for legitimacy, mainstream belonging, entertainment, leisure, or commerce.

Transposing this concept onto the geographical and political reality of the Sixth Ring, what becomes visible is that the invisibility of the Sixth Ring artists does not merely establish their status as victims of marginalization’s injustice, but is simultaneously evolving into a decidedly active cultural position. Under the operation of the Sixth Ring Odyssey, this identity comes to resemble a nomadic, itinerant, and bodiless specter haunting this terrain. Thanks to the particular geography of the Sixth Ring, they temporarily produce neither the fluid symbols of commercial circulation demanded by capitalist realism nor the clear mainstream narratives required by socialist realism. Yet, ultimately, they remain capable of leaping instantaneously into either camp and becoming part of it. Interestingly, in my conversation with Lin Zi, we also touched on a second layer of meaning in Odyssey beyond the epic, the journey, and adventure: that of the ‘“Odyssey period’” as a psychological concept describing the state of having already left one’s point of departure but not yet arrived anywhere definite.

Deleuze and Guattari’’s concept of nomadism (nomadisme), as elaborated in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), brings this opacity into a dynamic metaphysical dimension at considerably greater abstraction. The nomad is not simply the opposite of the settler; movement within the smooth space (espace lisse) that the nomad inhabits is always regarded as a vivid banner raised against the striated space (espace strié) that fixes all things, all lives, to a single coordinate. Is nomadism, when all is said and done, a refusal of this absence of direction? No entirely certain answer can be found. Just as the Sixth Ring artists themselves cannot, in their most candid self-questioning, answer: what is the ultimate direction of making art here? Where does the future lead? In fact, no one refuses the arrival of an answer; but in the process there exists the force of refusing to be captured by a predetermined destination.

From Heiqiao to Caochangdi, from Luoma Lake to Yanjiaying and Shuipo Village, spreading further to Yanjiao and Dachang. Ultimately forming eight relatively concentrated cultural patches and clusters inside and outside the Sixth Ring, this is, for the Sixth Ring Odyssey, neither starting point nor destination. Borne along by capitalist realism and socialist realism, people move slowly, drift slowly, and slowly gather again into new clusters. The line of flight (ligne de fuite) does not point toward a direction of escape; or, in the case of the Sixth Ring itself, there is nowhere to flee—only the chance excavation, in the course of this process, of new pathways that the existing system never anticipated.

In their nomadism, the Sixth Ring artists constitute these hundreds of studios and hundreds of anti-essentialist artistic practices. The essentialist premises of capitalist realism perpetually insist on this default and naturalized ideology: that the value of art is determined by its capacity for market circulation, and that to lack gallery representation is equivalent to lacking value. The essentialism of socialist realism, for its part, treats art space as a pawn subject to top-down functional zoning and policy. The very existence of the Sixth Ring artists in Beijing is a manifestation of the fissure between these two realisms. From today forward—fleeing from history, drifting—until the day the answer arrives, to be inscribed into a different kind of historical planning.

Initiated in 2026, the Sixth Ring Odyssey; Shuipo Village + Yanjiaying Village and Surrounding Artists’ Studio Survey Project represents a deliberate attempt to translate this opacity and nomadism into curatorial methodology. Its core intention is not to repackage these artists and send them back to the tidy exhibition halls of the city center. The project is more concerned with constructing a nomadic line of escape: through an interactive map, enabling academic, collector, and media perspectives to actively traverse the physical boundary of the Sixth Ring and, without gallery, institution, policy, or capital operation, arrive at the doors of those hundred-plus studios spanning tens of thousands of square meters.

Odysseus eventually returned to Ithaca, but that home had long since ceased to be what it was when he departed. Throughout his journey, Odysseus was certain an ending awaited him, though when it would come and where it would lead, he could not know. The Sixth Ring artists are likewise certain of the coming of an ending—but at least until then, the force of nomadism has already pervaded the body. Beyond the Sixth Ring Odyssey, there are many similar situations. Incidental visits and connections are, when confronted with the structural pressures of these two realisms, ultimately still fragile. This fragility should not be romanticized merely as a kind of tragic grandeur, nor should it simply be archived as a chapter in the history of the Chinese contemporary art ecology. As the two realisms silently and imperceptibly shift the odyssey to new terrain, the specter in nomadic circulation continues to wander and haunt that territory, rendering the question itself unavoidable.

Project official website