Doing the Cha-Cha with Marx and Engels: an Ode to Shanghai

Fuxing Park, Shanghai, April 2019. Photo: Luise Guest

In a pre-pandemic world I would have been in Shanghai with my daughters right now, introducing them to the city I have grown to love over the last ten years. Such plans we had, for wandering the streets of the former French Concession, watching the dancers in the park, exploring the tiny shops and all the art galleries, and - of course - eating amazing food. In this grim and fractured time it may seem frivolous or self-indulgent to be remembering an era when travel to China was a (relatively) simple matter of getting a visa and booking a flight: in our new parallel universe that will likely be unthinkable for a long time to come. But in a period of growing xenophobia everywhere across the globe, it's more than ever necessary that we hold on to our dreams of trans-cultural encounters and our hopes that in the future our borders will open and our horizons will expand once more. And my nostalgia helps me with that, in a bittersweet way.

Shanghai laneway, April 2019. Photo: Luise Guest

Instead of being a Shanghai flâneur exploring ever-widening arcs around Maoming Nan Lu, I'm 'sheltering in place' like most people across the planet and wondering whether our world will ever be the same. One year ago I was in Shanghai after a week in Beijing, interviewing artists, visiting exhibitions, and enjoying the frenetic pace of this city with its complicated history. I've been thinking about what it is that I most enjoy about Shanghai, and how it is so different to Beijing. My affection was far from instant - it took quite a few years of learning the rhythms of this mega-city with its population of more than 24 million people before I suddenly realised one day that I had fallen in love with it.

Shanghai street scene, 2017. Photograph Luise Guest. 

On my first visit, arriving by high-speed train after a month spent in Beijing, I became instantly lost in the multiple exits from the station, and found it utterly alienating. I had unwittingly booked a hotel in exactly the wrong part of the city, all 8-lane highways and concrete and glass, impossible to walk around and in a construction zone difficult for taxis to navigate. It was the end of winter, and still bitterly cold and damp. On my second visit the following year, and just slightly more savvy, the taxi driver from the airport decided that a foreigner was just too much mafan and tried to make me get out on the side of the elevated expressway off ramp. Fortunately, by this time my Chinese was just barely good enough to argue, and by midnight I'd arrived at the right (very odd) hotel. Although only after he had tried to drop me at three others, apparently randomly selected.

I hired a young translator for my interviews with artists who introduced himself to me with his chosen English name as 'Troy Sailor'. He was certainly handsome and charming, but on our first trip to an artist's studio he unsmilingly told me that in China, old women like me stayed home to save their money to pass on to their children and didn't gallivant around the world on their own. A great start! But going back through my notebooks I am astonished to remember that on my very first trip, as the recipient of a travelling scholarship for art educators, in a single week I interviewed luminaries Hu Jieming, Yang Zhenzhong, Shi Qing and Pu Jie, as well as Shi Zhiying, Chen Hangfeng, performance artist Wu Meng and Monika Lin. And a very young Lu Yang, who had just recently graduated from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. This is evidence of my own chutzpah, for sure, but also reveals the kindness and generosity of the artists and their galleries - I'm grateful to Shasha Liu and Martin Kemble from Art Labor, Lorenz Helbling from ShanghART, and to Art + Shanghai curator Diana Freundl, who had shown Shi Zhiying's beautiful paintings in a group show of women artists.

Lu Yang with 'Biological Strike Back', 2011. Photograph Luise Guest

Leaving the hotel to find somewhere to eat on my first night in Shanghai I remember being too terrified to cross the road, as hundreds of motor scooters revved their engines impatiently at every traffic light. Shanghai taxi drivers were not the chatty, chain smoking 'lao Beijingren'  with their leather jackets and buzzcuts listening to crosstalk on their radios that I had become used to, but surly characters who reversed terrifyingly, at speed, on the elevated freeway and zigzagged in and out of lanes, horns blaring and cigarettes dangling from their mouths as they swore at every other road user. Shanghai driving, it seemed, was a Darwinian exercise where only the most fearless survived. When I showed a Chinese address to one driver, he told me he didn't have his glasses so would have to borrow mine - then proceeded to hurtle down the highway, turned around to face me in the back of the cab, wearing my multifocals. At that point I truly thought I would never see my children again.

In 2012 I was still describing Shanghai as a savage beast of a city - a jabberwock with 'jaws that bite and claws that catch'. When did this change? Perhaps it was in 2013 when I had enough Chinese to feel more confidently independent, or arriving in the Spring of 2014 and realising just how beautiful the old streets are.

Former French Concession street scene, April  2019. Photograph Luise Guest

So what do I love?

The parks with their dancers and singers - of course.  I love the impromptu concerts by students in the tiny park across the road from the Shanghai Conservatorium. On each visit I try to make a very early morning visit to Fuxing Park with its staggering array of activity including the very loud, and often completely tone-deaf, amplified singers belting out anything from Chinese opera, to cheesy karaoke ballads, to Puccini.  I love watching the ballroom dancers doing rather stiff, upright, Latin moves under the watchful gaze of Marx and Engels.

Doing the cha-cha with Marx and Engels. April 2019. Photo Luise Guest

I love the tree-lined streets with their tiny shop windows where gaudy qipao and satin stilettos jostle against windows displaying rows of lacquered roast ducks or dusty mops and buckets in hardware stores. I love the lines of people waiting to buy baozi, pancakes and cakes at the famous places on Huaihai Road. I love the strange fashions in the windows of the 'Shanghai Lady' department  store. I love peering into beautiful but run-down gardens behind walls and fences. I love the sheets, towels, quilts and undies hanging from lines strung from windows, between trees, and on power lines, and the padded jackets waving in the wind on coat-hangers hooked onto street lights.

'Shanghai flags' in the French Concession. April 2019. Photo Luise Guest

Cyclists on Changle Lu, Shanghai, 2017. Photograph Luise Guest

I used to love the uniquely Shanghainese habit of wearing pyjamas in the street - often paired with high heeled shoes, and a tiny dog on a leash, or sometimes worn with fluffy slippers. Younger people found this fashion choice excruciatingly unsophisticated and over the years these sightings have become very rare. I always found it eminently practical and comfortable, if not exactly elegant.  Now that we are all wearing old track pants all day, or switching from our night pyjamas to day pyjamas to start working on laptops in our locked-down interior worlds, it also seems rather foresighted.

Shanghai street scene, 2012. Photograph Luise Guest

I love Shanghai's architecture too, from the art deco around Maoming Nan Lu and Huaihai Lu and the colonial buildings (a reminder of a dark past, but very beautiful) on the Bund. The towers topped with neon-lit, Gotham City-like spires you glimpse as you speed along the elevated freeway coming into the city are visions of a modernity of the past. The stone doorways of shikumen houses and multi-dwelling longtang laneways, whether crumbling and chaotic or restored and gentrified are beautiful. They are endangered, of course, as Shanghai undergoes a constant process of being torn down and rebuilt, like every other Chinese city.

Shanghai Longtang, Neighbours chatting, 2015. Photograph Luise Guest

Shanghai rooftops, 2011. Photograph Luise Guest.

Most of all I love the palpable energy of my conversations with artists in their studios - oftentimes now far outside the city centre - and their sense that anything is possible. Last April I engaged in intense conversations, recording interviews with artists ranging from painter Zhao Xuebing to video artists Li Xiaofei and Qiu Anxiong, and global new media star Lu Yang, almost ten years after we first met.

Zhao Xuebing in his studio, 2019. Photograph Luise Guest

Qiu Anxiong in his studio, 2019. Photograph Luise Guest

With Lu Yang, Shanghai, 2019

Now, of course, galleries and museums are closed, exhibitions are virtual, and art fairs are cancelled or indefinitely postponed. The future of the artworld, and of artists as nomadic beings participating in a global ecology of fairs, biennales and curated museum shows is anyone's guess. We can probably assume that after this (if there is an after this) then nothing will ever again be quite as it was.

Chen Hangfeng in his Shanghai studio, 2011. Photograph Luise Guest

Last April I travelled to the outskirts of the city to meet once again with Chen Hangfeng in a suburban villa.  I had first interviewed Chen ten years earlier in his tiny, former French Concession studio: changes in the places where artists live and work echo the changes in Chinese society over the intervening time. Chen discussed his new work 'Excited with No Reason'. This video animation was inspired in part by his new life, shuttling back and forth between Shanghai and Amsterdam, and his interest in global trade and its effects - an interest that seems even more compelling in a world brought to its knees by a pandemic that has infected the globe, vectored on planes and cruise ships.

The outcome of that conversation with a wonderful artist who jokingly describes himself as a 'half-assed literati' was published last year as Invasive Species and Global Trade Routes: A Conversation with Chen Hangfeng. Click on the link to read the article in Sydney-based online journal, The Art Life.

Artists, in Shanghai and everywhere, are continuing to work in their studios. Perhaps artists and writers, often somewhat introverted and solitary by nature, are among those whose lives are least altered by our current circumstances. I hope I shall return to see their new work and to wander those streets and laneways once again.

Shanghai street in the rain, 2011. Photograph Luise Guest

六六大顺 or, 2017: Six of One and Half a Dozen of the Other

Thinking about the usual end of year list (lazy writer's shortcut, I know), my plan was to write about six outstanding exhibitions. Six of the best, I thought, but when the phrase came to mind I shuddered: I remembered to my horror that it's what cane-wielding teachers said to boys they were about to beat when I was a child. Absolutely barbaric, and not what I meant at all!  Although, come to think of it, I've seen some exhibitions, and some artworks, that could be described as painful this year. Hence the English title of this piece, 'Six of One and Half a Dozen of the Other'. The Chinese title is uncharacteristically optimistic too, unlike most Chinese aphorisms: 'Liu Liu Da Shun' means that everything is running smoothly, an outcome devoutly to be wished as we approach the Year of the Dog.  I'd much rather write about art that I loved than the much greater proportion of exhibitions and individual works that left me cold, so here are my top six art experiences for 2017 as this difficult and, yes, painful year comes to a close. Four exhibitions, and two encounters, in no particular order, and a quick gloss over the half dozen 'other'.

Song Dong, Wisdom of the Poor: Song Dong’s Para-Pavilion, Old house, old furniture, steel, Dimensions variable. 2011. Image courtesy Rockbund Art Museum

1. Song Dong, "I Don't Know the Mandate of Heaven" Rockbund Museum, Shanghai, April
In Shanghai at the end of April I was lucky -- so lucky -- to catch the last weeks of this show, a survey of 30 years of Song Dong's work. From his earliest performance works, lying flat on the frozen ground in Tiananmen Square and breathing, or stamping the surface of the Lhasa River in Tibet with a seal carved with the character for 'water', to works based on his extended series of 'para-pavilions', architectural structures made from re-purposed furniture and building remnants, the show was a marvel across the six levels of the museum. For a review published in 'The Art Life', I described it like this:

I Don’t Know the Mandate of Heaven’ is a mature artist’s reflection on life’s joys, dreams, fears and disappointments. Beijing-based conceptual artist, Song Dong, responds to one of the Analects of Confucius, in which the sage suggests that by the age of 50, one ought to be sure of one’s place in the universe, should know ‘the mandate of heaven’. The getting of wisdom, if you like, should be done and dusted. Across six floors of Shanghai’s Rockbund Museum, and across its façade, rooftop balcony, stairwells and elevators, Song Dong responds to Confucius with all the uncertainty and anxiety of a more complicated age: ‘At 10, I was not worried. At 20, I was not restrained. At 30, I wasn’t established. At 40, I was perplexed and at 50, I don’t know the mandate of heaven.’

The exhibition is divided into seven ‘chapters’, one for each floor of the museum and the seventh for the exterior. Each chapter is represented by a Chinese character; together they form a line of a verse:

Jing (mirror), Ying (shadow), Yan (word), Jue (revelation),

Li (experience), Wo (self), and Ming (illumination).

Entering, you are immersed in a structure of re-purposed window frames and mirrors, a (literal) Daoist reflection on the fleeting nature of the physical world, beautiful and unsettling. Within the structure you find Song’s homage to Duchamp’s first readymade. The Use of Uselessness: Bottle Rack Big Brother (2016) is an enlarged version of Duchamp’s inverted bottle rack; on its prongs are discarded bottles that once held whiskey or powerful Chinese baijiu. Lit to resemble a fallen chandelier, they have been cleverly arranged to look a lot like the ubiquitous surveillance cameras that watch our every waking moment. This modern day panopticon has particularly chilling connotations in China, and the work reminds us that surveillance has been a recurring theme in Song’s work. To read more, click HERE

2. "Jasper Johns, Something Resembling Truth", Royal Academy, London, October

While I loved visiting old favourites on my blink-and-you'll-miss-it work trip to the UK in October (obligatory visit to Holbein's Ambassadors, the odd Titian and Raphael, and my favourite bizarre Annunciation by Carlo Crivelli) only one London exhibition really excited me, another survey. An artist of almost Chinese longevity, Jasper Johns has produced consistently interesting work since the late 1950s and this exhibition, the first comprehensive survey to be shown in the UK in 40 years, revealed the shifts and developments in his six decades of practice. Many works I had only seen before in reproduction, such as the Four Seasons paintings; other, more recent, work was completely new to me. Johns continues to experiment with form and content, defying stereotypes of the aging artist repeating the tropes of their youth. In the grand, hushed surrounds of the Royal Academy, visitors murmured discreetly, a very different experience from being amongst the young Chinese audience at Song Dong, taking selfies and giggling.

3. Qiu Anxiong, "New Book of Mountains and Seas Part III" at Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing, April
Immersive and extraordinary, Qiu Anxiong's final work in this trilogy is a frighteningly dystopic twist on the present day. Adding a newly high-tech gloss to Qiu's technique of animating his ink drawings, the work conveys themes of twenty-first century anxiety and alienation expressed through the metaphor of the metropolis. It's probably no wonder that speculative fiction is big in China, although I often feel that nothing could be stranger than reality.

4. Zhou Li, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, April
In her first solo exhibition for many years, Zhou Li's works completely seduced me. In a darkened space on the upper level of the huge Yuz Museum on the West Bund, her abstract canvases glowed. Floating shapes hover on soft grounds of grey, or occasionally, of vivid red or pink. Linear forms overlap, abut and coalesce, suggesting the constant rhythms of the universe. Zhou, like many contemporary Chinese artists, is interested in Daoist philosophy: the push and pull of yin and yang are discernible in her juxtapositions of line, colour and form.

Here's a description of the show from ARTFORUM

In 2017 I have been fortunate to have conversations with many artists, both in Sydney and in China. As part of an archive project for the White Rabbit Collection, I have recorded interviews with Guo Jian, Song Yongping, Lu Xinjian, Xiao Lu, Lin Yan, Song Jianshu, Xia Hang, Cang Xin, Wang Zhiyuan, Huang Hua-Chen and Shen Jiawei. You can find these videos HERE. For my own ongoing research project I have re-interviewed Xiao Lu, Ma Yanling and Tao Aimin in Beijing, and for yet another project I've met with Shi Yong in Shanghai. Courtesy of the Vermilion Art stand at Sydney  Contemporary, I engaged Cang Xin in conversation about his life and work as a post-89 conceptual artist. All of these conversations have been fascinating, but two that have been especially memorable were my second visit to the studios shared by Yu Hong and Liu Xiaodong, in Beijing, and a long conversation over cups of coffee in the British Library Cafe with performance artist Echo Morgan (aka Xie Rong).

Yu Hong, One Hundred Years of Repose, 2011, Acrylic and gold leaf on canvas, Image courtesy the artist

Yu Hong in her Beijing studio in 2014, Photo: Luise Guest

5. Yu Hong spoke about her work 'One Hundred Years of Repose', currently on view at the White Rabbit Gallery, and about her particular painting techniques, when we met in April in Beijing. I find Chinese artists of her generation especially interesting: they began their studies in an era of strict formalism and an approved style influenced by French Realism and Soviet Socialist Realism, and then graduated into a changing world in which avant-garde artists and critics were doing their best to shake everything up. My last conversation with the artist had taken place in the spring of 2014, while I was writing my book about Chinese women artists, 'Half the Sky', and we sat in her studio drinking cups of tea in front of that painting. I had been amused when I arrived that time to find a kerfuffle of TV camera crews and cars outside the studio: she had been painting a portrait of tennis star Li Na, commissioned for a Tiffany ad campaign. Inside the studio was a different, and much quieter, more reflective world. And so it was again in 2017, as we drank tea and spoke about her love for the physicality of paint, behind us on large easels a multi-panelled work appropriating Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine ceiling, the figure of God now a Chinese Immortal.

Echo Morgan, Be the Inside of the Vase, 2012, Performance Still, image courtesy the artist

6. With Echo Morgan in London, our conversation ranged across her dramatic and difficult childhood, shaped by her resilient mother as much as by her gambling, gangster father, and an eventful journey towards a life in the UK. I'm thinking about her work in relation to my interest in how women artists are using ink and their bodies. More soon.

And the 'Half a Dozen of the Other'?
Best not to dwell. Disappointments in 2017, apart from the sense of impending doom shared by all sentient beings in a time of Trump, included the David Hockney exhibition at the NGV, some lacklustre shows at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and a truly awful exhibition by ''KAWS" at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, to which the only possible response was "WTF". I'm sad not to have been able to see THAT Chinese show at the Guggenheim, nor the earlier "Tales of Our Time", but, hey, you can't see everything. Onward to 2018, to a new Biennale of Sydney, curated by Mami Kataoka, to a visit to Melbourne to the first NGV Triennial, the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial in November, some exciting shows coming up at White Rabbit Gallery, building on the beautifully curated 'The Dark Matters' and 'Ritual Spirit', and to further adventures in China and elsewhere. And a heartfelt New Year's resolution to work harder on my Chinese. We'll see. Meanwhile, a happy and prosperous 2018 to all readers of this blog!

With Cang Xin, courtesy of Vermilion Art, at Sydney Contemporary (we did not exchange clothing!)

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.