I took a taxi to the South of the city today (Songjiang district), as I will be teaching for a few days at the Institute of Visual Arts. I was reminded once again just how massive Shanghai is – the taxi took an hour and a half and that was with traffic actually moving!
The Institute is part of Fudan University. I haven’t had a chance to look at the campus yet as Yijia, the lecturer who invited me, took me straight to a hotel. I am writing this 15 floors up at the Hotel Vienna. The wind is whistling outside my window and the view tells me there is still a lot more Shanghai out there. Where does it end?! This part of town has a slightly French feel to it – it has wide, tree lined boulevards, which the skyscrapers and futuristic glass domes of the University’s many, many Institutes render tiny, despite them being the equivalent of major roads back home.
I’m looking forward to meeting students tomorrow (despite the 8am start). I’ve had a nice bit of email correspondence with some of them already, which makes the whole thing seem a little less scary. In the meantime, more sketching and collaging and drinking Chinese tea puts my mind at ease.
Sunday weather. A grey, muggy morning turned into a day of torrential rain, but as luck would have it, these were perfect conditions to see the current exhibition at James Cohan Gallery.
The gallery is in what was once the French quarter of Shanghai. It’s housed in a lovely old garden villa, which still has the feel of a home (albeit a shabbily grand one, complete with hand painted ceilings and 1930’s stained glass windows). The show is called “Day and Night” by two of the gallery’s New York artists, Spencer Finch and Byron Kim. It was a pleasure to find and enter the space, as not only was the weather bad, so was the traffic. (Apparently this weekend gridlocks are common because so many people are out to buy the hairy crabs (!) that are currently in season.)
Softie that I am, Finch’s work did make my eyes well up (just a little bit, mind). His light pieces had the same tranquil tenderness that Agnes Martin’s paintings do. (Agnes Martin is one of my favourite painters and her work really does make me teary.) The pastel colours of his melting candles hummed in the dull light and his light-box take on a winter’s dusk in Paris was equally potent. I emerged from the gallery feeling like I’d just spent an hour floating through space. Delightful.
I spent today at Shanghai University’s Library.
“Fear of the word can therefore be understood as fear of the magical power of words, and it is tempting to see in most textual censorships, book burnings, mockeries of the readers craft, an exorcising attempt to defeat the suspected wizardry of language itself.
It may be that a society, defining itself through the erecting of walls, nurtures at the same time the suspicion that within those walls something will be born that will contest its definition, will seek to alter its identity. And even though our societies grow in the give-and-take between that which we exclude and that which we include, we are more wary of the critical and inventive force of language than we are proud of its power to preserve. Consequently, we attempt to restrict or deride its imaginative efforts.”
The Traveler, The Tower and The Worm, Alberto Manguel
Today I decided that at six days into my residency (how did that happen?!), it really was time to sit down and study the photos I’ve taken and the sketches I’ve made so far.
Art materials are dead cheap here. I got a whole rainbow of fine-liners in a shop on campus for about £2! I also have several big sheets of really good quality paper, as it was being offered free in one of the installations at the Rockbund Emerging Artists show yesterday. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that.
I’ve had a glorious day of cutting and collaging and gathering my thoughts together for the Water Town project. It’s made me remember the luxury that a residency provides – time to just let things happen, time to play. With a constant slew of deadlines when I’m at home, that just doesn’t happen often enough.
I’ve made umpteen collages, many of them dealing with the abundance of lines, stripes, sticks, towers and heights in the landscape. Yesterday’s late afternoon visit to the top of the Oriental Pearl Tower (350 metres up) has clearly had an effect on me and perhaps that ride on the rollercoaster insider the tower (no, I’m not joking) scrambled my head a little bit… but where would an artist be without a little bit head scrambling?! Isn’t that why I’m here?
The “Hugo Boss Asia Art Award for Emerging Chinese Artists” is currently on show at Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai.
Of the 7 finalists NONE were women, which started me off round the exhibition in a right grump. However, some of the work brought me round soon enough.
Li Liao specializes in performance. For “Spring Breeze”, he was attached to an office building via a bike lock around his neck for the day. He passed the time smoking, looking at his phone and generally looking bored/uncomfortable.
Veronica Lu’s reaction to this made me chuckle, “I don’t understand why he is wasting time” she said… was she right? I’m not sure. I don’t think he was wasting time. I think he was feeling time, which is not quite the same thing.
Hsu Chia Wei’s film “Marshal Tie Jia” and its accompanying installation pulled me in despite there being too much Chinese history and anthropology to fully comprehend what was going on. I tried to embrace the mystery, but why did that bloke turn into a frog? And in what way is a pond a myth and an island politics?
No such questions arose with Kwan Sheung Chi’s genuinely funny video “Doing It With Mrs. Kwan… Making Pepper Spray” in which “Mrs. Kwan” guides the viewer through the preparation in the calm, cheerful and slightly patronizing way that daytime TV cooks do the world over. Some languages are universal.
