RongRong’s Diary: Beijing East Village
Photographs by RongRong
Texts by RongRong, Silvia Fok, and Artur Walther
Published by Steidl, Göttingen, 2019

In the 1990s and early 2000s, young artists, musicians, and writers moved from all over China to Beijing, then a hotbed for underground culture. One of these “Beijing drifters,” RongRong relocated to the capital in 1993 from his hometown in Fujian province. At the time, he was a student about to embark on the study of photography. Unable to afford a proper apartment in town, he and a group of artists resided on the capital’s eastern fringes, in an impoverished suburban area, where they shared cigarettes, cheap beer, and inspirations.