China News Service, Beihai, September 6th. Title: From "farming to make a living" to "planting art to prosper the village", the ancient village of Beihai, Guangxi has made a gorgeous turn
Author Feng Shumin Zhai Liqiang
The cigar arrowroot holds up a "giant umbrella", the bougainvillea pours down from the metal cage, and the dragon spits beads with strings of white beads... Lin Yimei, who is nearly eighty years old, stands in front of the garden in her garden, holding the water pipe to carefully water a metal cage with climbing plants and flowers. This is one of the things she must do when she gets up in the morning during the hot summer and autumn seasons.
Lin Yimei is an ordinary peasant woman in Chixi Village, Haicheng District, Beihai City, Guangxi. This metal cage planted with subtropical flowers and plants is a planting installation "Flower Cluster" created by her and several young artists. There are dozens of such public art works in Akashi Village, which has more than 350 farmers. They are distributed at the corners of village roads, in front of and behind houses, and in public open spaces.
This artistic village was a traditional farming village a few years ago and was once an officially registered poverty-stricken village. With the arrival of a group of young artists, the transformation of Akanishi Village quietly begins.
Two years ago, at the invitation of the local government department, the Academy of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University used its brand influence and professional creative resources to conduct resident creations in combination with the red earth landscape and subtropical vegetation characteristics of Chixi Village. The creative team used abstract and simple metal cages as "canvases" and hundreds of subtropical plants as "paints" to "paint" dozens of public art works in the village with the villagers. This move activates the natural and cultural resources of Akanishi Village and integrates art, ecology and local life.
Under the guidance of the artist, waste materials such as stones, discarded acrylic boards, and old cable ties that were piled in the corners of the wall in the past were moved out, welded, and buried in the soil by the villagers, and turned into large-scale outdoor art installations. These artistic works, which are full of villagers' daily emotions and local memories, allow Akashi Village to embark on a new path of cultural and tourism integration of "art + research + farming".
Akashi Village connects the above-mentioned art works with hundreds of acres of ecological farmland, and is equipped with 15 handicraft experience venues such as tie-dyeing, pottery, and bread kilns. It can accommodate 1,500 students and tourists to carry out practice at the same time. The newly built "Akaxi Natural Geography World" venue earlier this year covers interesting projects such as a 5D cinema, building an insect hotel, dry land curling competition, and making succulent micro-bonsais, turning the village into a complex rural tourism destination that integrates farming experience, agricultural science popularization, research practice, and leisure and sightseeing.
Villagers who have been farming in Chixi Village for most of their lives have gained tangible benefits from art for the first time. 60-year-old Huang Wenfeng is one of them. After busy farming, Huang Wenfeng learned simple plant pruning from artists and became a part-time caretaker of art installations in the village. Together with other villagers, he was hired as a farming practice instructor at the Akanishi Research Base. Depending on the season, he taught the children rice transplanting, vegetable picking, planting and other agricultural work, passing on the hard-won practical understanding of "one meal, one porridge".
Nowadays, you can learn about the rural culture through local books at the farmhouse in Chixi Village; go to the intangible cultural heritage workshop to make an ancient tie-dyed handkerchief with a unique pattern; follow the workshop teacher to sew soothing or mosquito repellent sachets with Chinese herbal medicine; experience the working process of "sweat dripping on the soil" in the "field classroom"... A variety of immersive experience projects are popular among tourists.
"Tourism, with study as its main project, now accounts for more than half of the village's collective economic income." Chen Zhidong, director of the Chixi Village Committee, said that more than 90% of the villagers in the village have built small Western-style buildings and purchased cars. According to official statistics, in 2025, Chixi Village received a total of 85,000 tourists and achieved revenue of more than 3 million yuan.
