上海日记 Shanghai Diary: A Revisionist History and the Mandate of Heaven

Chinese flag billows at the stern of our boat, heading towards Yangshuo, Photo:LG

After Beijing, and a somewhat ill-fated trip to Guilin that featured a hideous hotel; food poisoning; a gazillion pushing, shoving, spitting, shouting tour groups following young women with flags and megaphones; and a trip along the admittedly beautiful Li River being lectured by the very dutiful guide I had hired to organise the details of boats and cars ("The government has completely solved the problem of pollution, the water is completely safe for swimming!"- yeah, sure), it was so good to return to Shanghai. Toilets that flush! Fabulous food! A seamless transition from Hongqiao Station into a taxi! Even the notorious Shanghai traffic was better than usual, and after 45 minutes zipping along those Jetsons-style futuristic elevated freeways I breathed a sigh of relief to see familiar Deco Gothic spires and emerge onto Huaihai Lu and then a tangle of smaller streets.

The Guilin adventure had its moments, for sure. The landscape is extraordinarily beautiful, and the trip down river was relaxing in a soporific way, despite the convoy of crowded boats. The old towns around Yangshuo - although most are not so much old as 'old', with reconstructed stone and timber houses and alleyways filled with red lanterns - were quite lovely, whether real or fake. I was the focus of much good-humoured curiosity from locals in a few villages, especially from old ladies chatting as they squatted in old-style rural Chinese toilets (i.e. no doors and long communal troughs.) To see how the laowai would pee was obviously a matter of great curiosity. All I can say is, you can get used to anything. Guilin itself - or what I managed to see of it before I was confined to the hotel room for two days after an unwise restaurant choice - is ridiculously pretty.

Old? Or maybe ''old" architecture. But beautiful nonetheless

But, oh Shanghai, how I love you! I love your plane trees, your Art Deco, your ridiculously tiny shops selling preposterous shoes and glittery clothing, your good coffee, your cool boys nonchalantly smoking while steering their motor scooters, your young girls singing to themselves while they ride along on their bicycles, your glamorous women striding in their stilettos, your old men playing cards in Fuxing Park, your gatherings of ballroom dancers at night in the small park on Huaihai Zhong Lu. I love the Huangpu river seen from high above the Bund, and even the ridiculous Oriental Pearl Tower.

Conversation, April afternoon, Shanghai. Photo:LG

I love your quilts and underwear hanging out to dry on every post and powerline, your grumpy old ladies, the uniquely Shanghainese habit of wearing flanellette pyjamas as streetwear, your dumplings and xiao long bao. The remaining shikumen stone gate houses are lovely, and it's taken me a long time to figure out how to find addresses in the longtang laneways, but now I know how to do it I love that too.

Shanghai juxtapositions, Photo:LG

On my last day, exiting Fuxing Park, a young Chinese man asked me if I knew where a particular small hotel was. And I did! And I managed to direct him in Chinese (only having to run after him once to say that I meant turn right, not left.) I knew because I had stayed there two years earlier (very weird) and probably he asked because he thought the only foreigner in sight may well be staying nearby, but I was ridiculously pleased with myself nonetheless.

Changle Lu, April. Photo:LG

I was last in Shanghai for a few days in mid-December, and before that at least once every year since 2011. I remember writing that it was a tough, tough city; in fact, with shamefully purple prose I described it as a 'snarling beast, a jabberwock'. What was wrong with me? Why has it taken me years to learn to love Shanghai as much as I love Beijing? I take it all back. Certainly, every city appears different in Spring than in mid-Winter. And Shanghai in Spring is gorgeous. So this time, I wandered, I found new corners, streets and alleys of the former French Concession, I made my way to every possible gallery, and I saw Song Dong's exhibition at Rockbund Museum,I Don't Know the Mandate of Heaven'. I ate noodles and dumplings. I was in heaven myself, a little delirious after being ill and miserable in Guilin.

Song Dong exhibition 'I Don't Know the Mandate of Heaven', installation view, Rockbund Museum

I started this post intending to write a serious analysis of the art I saw in Shanghai, but it seems I've got a little sidetracked. Soon I will write about the artists I encountered in galleries large and small: Song Dong, Xu Bing, Lu Yang, Liang Shaoji, Hu Liu, Chen Yujun, Yin Xiuzhen, Hong Hao and many more. I discovered a new and wonderful painter at the Yuz museum, and unsurprisingly I detested the extremely popular 'Kaws' exhibition. But you will have to wait till next time to find out why

Lu Xinjian: Looking for Harmony in the City

Shanghai-based painter Lu Xinjian has invented his own visual language with which he represents his experiences of urban life. In several interviews for the White Rabbit Collection since 2015 in Shanghai and in Sydney (Judith Neilson was one of the first collectors to see his early 'City DNA' paintings in Beijing, in 2011), he talked with me about his early life as a boy in rural China, and his surprising metamorphosis into a highly successful contemporary artist on the global stage.

Lu Xinjian and a painting in his 'City Stream' series, image courtesy the artist

These interviews were compiled as a profile of the artist published this week in 'The Art Life', together with a video interview conducted at White Rabbit Collection late last year. It goes like this:

Lu Xinjian’s early life seemed an unlikely background from which a successful artist might emerge. Born in 1977 into a poor farming family in a rural village in Jiangsu Province, by his own account his childhood was spent running wild, looking after ducks and chickens. After school he studied computer graphics and graphic design, despite his love of painting, knowing that a poor boy making his way in the world needed a more secure income than that of an emerging artist. 

Lu Xinjian with his mother, image courtesy the artist

But a chance encounter changed everything: in 1998 the influential Dutch design company Studio Dumbar had an exhibition at the art museum in Nanjing, where Lu Xinjian was studying. He didn’t have the money to buy a ticket to enter the gallery, but stood entranced in front of the posters, absorbing their structures, colour, line and form, their use of the Modernist grid. Returning to the college library, he began to read everything he could find about European design, determined that one day he would go to study in the Netherlands. It took four years after graduation to save the money, but in 2005 he graduated from the Design Academy in Eindhoven, and in 2006 from the Interactive Media and Environments Department at the Frank Mohr Institute of Hanze University of Applied Studies.

Lu Xinjian in the studio, image courtesy the artist

In Eindhoven and Groningen Lu Xinjian found himself at the centre of a particular Modernist tradition. To that point he had loved the work of Keith Haring and other contemporary American painters, but now the work of artists of the European ‘Zero’ movement of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Heinz Mack, Gunther Uecker and Otto Piene inspired him. They believed that art should be a ‘zone of silence’ devoid of personal expression. Lu Xinjian saw in this philosophy a link to Buddhist traditions of restraint and simplicity, harmony and quietude. After early experiments with figurative expressionist painting, an influential teacher, Petri Leijdekkers, introduced him to de Stijl and the work of Mondrian. He had been at an impasse, lonely and depressed during a residency in Korea, when he began to draw views of the night sky, the edges of buildings as lines and the stars as dots. The dots and dashes found in the ink drawings of Van Gogh, the grid structures of Dutch and German early twentieth century design, and the cool abstraction of Mondrian coalesced to form a new way of thinking. This epiphany was the start of his important City DNA series.

Lu Xinjian, City DNA – Beijing, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 400 cm, image courtesy White Rabbit Collection

From this point Lu Xinjian began to paint in more abstract ways, using aerial perspectives of iconic metropolises: New York (irresistibly recalling Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie) Beijing, Shanghai, Rome, Paris, London, Los Angeles, and Venice. The first in the series, however, was the Dutch university town of Groningen, where he had taken photographs from the top of the tower in the centre of the town before returning to China. Sources for his imagery included maps and satellite views of each location, as well as photographs, but the artist sees his work as philosophically complex and multi-layered. He believes cities are built and defined by history, culture and language as much as by geography; each is distinct and unique, despite the homogenising impact of globalisation. Lu Xinjian tells the story of each city in a visual language of his own invention that merges western abstraction with simplified forms that recall the Bauhaus and Dutch graphic design, in combination with computer coding. The picture planes appear to pulsate with energy, despite their flat, brightly coloured grounds. Struggling to find a name for this body of work, Lu Xinjian suddenly saw the lines and dashes as akin to a diagram of a human genetic code. Cities, too, have a kind of DNA structure, a term borrowed from architectural practice, conveying something of the unique and complex social and architectural systems of the modern metropolis.

TO read more in 'The Art Life' , click HERE

And here is the video interview with Lu Xinjian 


Lu Xinjian in Conversation with White Rabbit from White Rabbit Collection on Vimeo.
Shanghai-based painter Lu Xinjian discusses his 'City DNA' series, his interest in Mondrian and Dutch design, and how a boy from a poor rural farming family became a successful contemporary artist

北京日记 Beijing Diary: Art and Life in a Grey City

Guozijian Street Beijing, photo LG

My three April weeks in China were lucky ones - even despite the food poisoning (thanks, Guilin) and the viral pneumonia (thanks, Hangzhou). Why lucky? Because you can go to China expecting to see extraordinary contemporary art and find little that excites you, or you can go another time and be blown away by the quality of work shown in galleries and artists' studios, by the sheer energy, vitality and innovation of what Chinese artists are doing. This was one of those fortunate times. And to be back in Beijing in Spring after a twelve month absence was a delight: the sky was (mostly) blue, the parks full of blossoms and ballroom dancers; and the galleries (mostly) open and showing interesting work.

Reflected blossoms, near Nanluoguxiang, Beijing, photo: LG

China's dizzying pace of change continues: on every visit, even if only a few months apart, I see new developments. This time what I noticed most was the explosion of the bicycle-sharing app; the streets are filled with colourful bikes rented easily, anywhere, by scanning a QR-code with your smartphone, and then left wherever you finish up. Every ride costs about 20 cents and they are HUGELY popular. Beijing has once again become a city of bicycles. And tiny new electric cars as well. The old tin can 'beng beng' taxis are still there, and the traditional pedi-cabs (not used only by tourists, by the way) but my usual Dongzhimen neighbourhood is filled with little vans silently scooting along delivering water, take-out meals, dry-cleaning, and anything else you can imagine could be delivered in a city of entrepreneurs.

Motor-cycle taxi, Dashilar, Photo: LG

Old shool beng beng taxi, Photo L

Combined with the three-wheeled carts collecting recycling, generally presaged by a ringing bell and a harsh cry,  it is a collision of old and new. The scourge of the silent scooter on the sidewalk is still there, though, particularly unnerving at dusk, or when the rider suddenly shouts at you to get out of the way. And there's still plenty of sidewalk spitting, which is perhaps a comforting sign that some things don't change. Old bars and expat hangouts have closed (sorry, not sorry) and the gentrification of the hutongs proceeds apace, but the essential character of the city remains, much like its inhabitants - tough, gritty, no bullshit, and a sardonic sense of humour. I was glad to see the battered velour armchairs still on the street in Chunxiu Lu, and the outdoor hairdressers at work in the hutong nearby. And the unique and unmistakeable smell of the Beijing drains is always present.

Hutong, Dashilar, photo: LG

Washing drying in the lanes, Beijing, April 2017, Photo: LG

Beijing rooftops through a hutong window, Photo: LG

I was in Beijing for my own research project, meeting with artists who are subverting ink traditions in very particular ways, and most of my time was taken up with long drives to and from studios in Songzhuang, Caochangdi and Shunyi. But in intervening windows of time I visited galleries in 798 and Caochangdi and saw wonderful things.
My top  5 Beijing highlights:
1. Qiu Anxiong, 'New Book of Mountains and Seas Part III' at Boers-Li Gallery - immersive, completely extraordinary. Qiu has created a dystopic universe with just enough connections to the present-day to make it thoroughly terrifying. So immersive that I sat through the entire video twice. Part II was a central element of White Rabbit's 2016 exhibition, 'Vile Bodies'. Here Qiu talks about his work for the exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum in 2013: http://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia/video/collections/asian/qiu-anxiong-ink-art

2. Wang Yuping at Tang Contemporary - a remarkable painter whose work I had not seen before. His series of paintings of the intersection near Jingshan Park is so characteristically Beijing that it would make you weep with nostalgia. And how lovely to discover that he taught my good friend Gao Ping at CAFA, and is a beloved professor. The exhibition 'Jingshan Hill' is divorced from current fashion and theoretical discourse and is all the better for it.
https://www.tangcontemporary.com/wangyupingen

3. Tai Xiangzhou at Ink Studio -  a stunning exhibition called 'Speculative Cosmologies' - the curator says: Working in the literati mode, Tai spent years copying and mastering classical compositions and brushwork. He focuses on the landscapes of the Song Dynasty (960-1279), considered a Chinese golden age for both pictorial and astral arts. Speculative Cosmologies features select examples of Tai’s classicizing style, including Mountain of Heaven, a virtuosic rendition of a Song monumental landscape as a screen—a format charged with cosmological significance; Cosmic Symphonies, an elaboration of a celebrated 13th-century album depicting different aspects of water; and Microcosm-Macrocosm, a primordial landscape without organic life generated from a miniature scholar’s rock. Lovingly and intimately antiquarian, these paintings also ask, speculatively and counterfactually, what a Song landscape would be if it encompassed the vastly expanded scope of contemporary knowledge and experience. http://www.inkstudio.com.cn/exhibitions/24/overview/

4. Liu Di at Pekin Fine Arts - new directions in the work of this interesting artist, whose digital works of large-bottomed animals plonked in the courtyards of Beijing apartments have been shown at White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney. http://pekinfinearts.com/en/exhibition/liu-di-break-with-convention/

5. An exhibition of new directions in the work of young artists, both Chinese and international, at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) - still with a cloud hanging over its future and no buyer in sight - presented tiny enclosed spaces with lots of video.Highlights here were the futuristic imaginings of Cui Jie - and in China they're not much of a stretch - and a stunning, ambiguous installation by Ma Jianfeng. Here's an interesting article featuring Cui Jie - and Lu Yang who I will write about in a later post: Where Next? Imagining the Dawn of the Chinese Century

Apart from that, the skies were blue and clear, my wanderings in the remaining hutongs were a delight (even though I still cannot persuade my husband to love Beijing), you can now get excellent coffee all over the city, and it was great to be back in a place that I have come to love like a second home. I visited the studios of Xiao Lu, Ma Yanling, Yu Hong and Bingyi, and spoke with Tao Aimin at Egg Gallery and Ink Studio in Caochangdi.

With Xiao Lu and her exciting recent ink works in her studio, Beijing, April 2017

The following week, in Shanghai, a city I have grown to love over the years, the exhibitions on offer were just as compelling. Next week: Shanghai Diary Revisited.