Nothing sums up the Cultural Revolution that is sweeping through Beijing quite like the Arts Coffee Haven Coffee & Bar at 25 Imperial College Street. Located on a quiet hutong in the capital city’s leafy Dongcheng district, it was opened by Wang Haiyan, who has turned the traditional gray tile and brick courtyard home into an oasis for locally based intellectuals and the road weary tourists that stumble across the place on their way to the Confucian and Lama temples down the road.

“I had opened it as a handicrafts shop,” Mr Wang said. “But so many tourists visiting the nearby temples stopped in to ask where they could get a cup of good coffee that I decided to turn it into a coffee house instead.”

There is something organic about Arts Coffee Haven that sets it apart from the upscale East-meets-West venues in Shanghai’s Xintiandi or Hong Kong’s Lan Kwai Fong. High priced interior designers were not contracted to outfit the place. Instead, Mr Wang did it himself, using antiques he found at flea markets as well as Tibetan artifacts, such as the Buddhist hangings that grace the walls.

It is a scene that is repeated throughout the city, from the shores of Hou Hai, where scores of outdoor cafes and beer gardens opened in the days following the Sars scare in 2003, to the back alleys of Sanlitun, where funky eateries like Purple Vine sell the antique furniture you dine at – as well as the tasty dishes that you consume.

The city’s up-and-coming artists’ colony, 798 Space, has almost become a cliché. Housed in a 1950’s complex of seven Bauhaus-inspired factory buildings designed by East German architects and built by Soviet contractors, it sits in the middle of the Dashanzi Art District in Beijing’s Chaoyang section. In less than five years, it has transformed itself from the temporary home of a small handful of working artists in search of spacious studios at low rents into the very symbol of China’s avant-garde.

The site of both domestic and international exhibitions of contemporary art, 798 Space also holds experimental dramas, dances, concerts and an increasing number of fashion shows and product launches. It has become so trendy, in fact, that some of the capital’s more cutting edge artists are starting to give it a wide birth, heading to such lower profile venues as ShangriLa and the Picked Art Centre in the city’s Northeastern suburbs.

Hosting exhibitions of prominent overseas artists such as drawings by British-born Susan Melikian Steinsieck and steel flag sculptures by US-based Charles Hecht, the Pickled Art Centre, which was established in 1999, has attracted artists from all over the world. Offering a vast array of resources, including a sculpture foundry, it is starting to gain the attention of serious foreign media, such at NYArts, a New York-based arts bimonthly. An art exchange programme for foreign artists was launched this year.

Established in 1991, the Red Gate Gallery is located on levels one and four of the Dongbianmen Watchtower in the heart of Beijing. Representing 22 Chinese artists working in a diverse array of media, it was founded by Australian-born Brian Wallace, who went to China in 1986 to study Chinese at People’s University. He went on to study art history at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and began organizing exhibitions of young Chinese artists in 1988. The venue holds up to eight solo exhibitions per year. The next, a solo exhibition of contemporary Chinese artist Lu Peng, runs from October 15 to November 6.

With the highest concentration of contemporary artists in the country, Beijing is slowly gathering the critical mass that could turn it into Asia’s Left Bank. “Beijing has what it takes to become an arts centre for Asia,” Xu Yong, a gallery owner at 798 Space, said. “Neither Shanghai nor Guangzhou can compete and neither can Japan and Korea. They don’t have the long history that Beijing has, and they don’t have as many universities or as many artists, writers and intellectuals.”

Meg Maggio, director of Beijing’s Courtyard Gallery and a resident of the city for nearly 20 years, agrees. “Whatever Shanghai people might say to the contrary, Beijing continues to enjoy cultural primacy as the most important meeting place for artists from all over China,” she said. “The result is a unique confluence of creative types from China’s far-flung provinces, where conservation overheard among artists is typically peppered with a combination of heavily accented Putonghua alongside the increasingly liberal use of English words like ‘cool’, ‘CR-Rom’, ‘DVD’ or ‘bye-bye’.”

An artistic Great Leap Forward is taking place amongst Beijing’s hutongs and highrises. Vibrant and organic, its unmistakably Bohemian quality is turning the Chinese capital into the country’s artistic and cultural hub.