Shanghai Art Chase- NYU Shanghai: Letting Go by Drew Gibson

Drew Gibson

4 June 2009

Letting Go

Speed on Shanghai on Speed

Background

"I think we were invited [to Shanghai] because of the way we work in our projects, why doing and thinking at the same time is somehow linked to the Chinese way of urban planning, urban architectural planning, where they also try to be extremely fast and are also forced to think and to produce at the same time... more producing and less thinking. Just letting it go." Julian Friedauer, Speedism

Speed and dynamism propel the city of Shanghai like never before. The special status granted to the city in recent decades has unleashed massive amounts of international and intercontinental activity that have landed the city once again at the forefront of Asian and world metropolises. The startling pace of the city's renewal has spiraled the once-static city into complete cacophony as modern skyscrapers and infrastructure appear to sprout from the ground, shaking the very foundations of the place and rendering the landscape much more pointed and oblique. But the flurry of activity that has descended on the city is directly the result of a national dialogue now extended far beyond China's borders and engaging directly with Western countries. So with the resulting economic exchange has naturally come a great wave of multicultural inputs and influences that have exploded the boundaries of Shanghai's art world and blurred the lines between different media.

The artist-architecture collective called Speedism is a natural entryway into the newly multicultural realm of the Chinese art culture. The duo consists of Pieterjan Ginckels of Belgium and Julian Friedauer of Germany, and they have now participated in Chinese art events on multiple occasions. What they perform is a kind of spontaneous, live-action rendering--- Often set to music, their complex images come together in a way that connects architecture, urban design, music, choreography, and the visual arts. What defines their creative process is the notion of speed as a self-sustaining and life-giving force toward creativity, that speed and spontaneity in urbanism and design can allow for a kind of stream-of-consciousness unraveling of the self that gives rise to an architectural order. "In 2009", Ginckels explains, "peple take a bit of everything and they build their own person together out of stuff or superficial sides of stuff. I think that's what you see in our images and projects. There's more input and output than just urbanism or architecture". So Speedism's image-making process has a lot to do with the way real-world cities are built, albeit the spontaneous process is channeled through the individual rather than through the physical builders of an urban society.

Shanghai Urbanism and the Chinese Dream

"I think we're visual tourists, we're formal tourists. So we kind of get off on specific buildings and mistakes in buildings. They're probably not buildings people want to come see in China-- in Beijing, it's not really CCTV that we're looking at but the ugly Venturi-meets-Superstudio toilet pavilions in the park, that kind of stuff. Since we're always playing with fiction, these things all find their place in a story we have not really invented yet. Slowly, everything shapes together." -Pieterjan Ginckels

The architectural legacy of Shanghai has always been about some kind of dialogue with the West. Of course, such a dialogue wasn't always on such positive terms as it is today, as the origins of Shanghai are very much tied to the colonial settlements of the English, French and Americans. Even so, the European presence was seminal in building the city into a major port and commerce center, and brought the metropolis toward a form much closer to what we know today in terms not only of urban planning but in the extreme diversity of the structures that began to appear and shape Shanghai's identity on multicultural terms.

The imposition of the European powers on the city's urban fabric began to test the patience of the native Chinese, however, and many visionary ideas for the city began to brew from the lingering angst of their presence. The government in Nanjing granted the city its municipality status in 1927 which greatly expanded its political powers, although these powers did not extend to encompass the French and International settlements. Among the most famous and outlandish proposals, then was dreamt by Sun Yat-Sen, who envisioned a rerouting of the Huangpu River to the east of the city and the construction of a new Chinese Bund: the "Great Port Scheme", as it was called. The Europeans to the west would thus be left to languish in their increasingly obsolete settlements. "Cut off from their access to the sea, the foreign bund would literally be left high and dry"[1], says author Thomas J. Campanella. Another plan involved building a wall of Chinese settlements extremely densely around the foreign concessions to effectively isolate the Europeans from the mainland. This kind of urban planning warfare did not actually come to fruition but it caused a definite anxiety for the foreign powers, who saw an increasingly strong will among the Chinese to build Shanghai on Chinese terms.

The plan that was actually acted upon was slightly more practical, though no less visionary: the plan called for the construction of a new Civic Center to the north of the established city on the Huangpu River, to eventually rival if not overshadow the foreign concessions. Among other structures a magnificent municipal building was built, but the plan was put to an agonizing halt by the Japanese invasion in 1937. The municipal building today houses the back offices for the Shanghai Museum of Sport.

The revitalization of Shanghai's dreams did not occur until decades later when the Shanghai municipality made the distinct choice to consult with French architectural groups in charge of the Paris metro area as they began the construction of Shanghai's sprawling Pudong New Area, which aside from the engineering feat it represents also serves the symbolic function of uniting the two landmasses on either side of the river, lending the cityscape on each side a much more dramatic flair as they look onto one another in a gesture of unity. And as the two sides are brought together we see the long-awaited influx of international inputs that has electrified the city with a new wave of spontaneous growth and activity. Shanghai is the kind of city that thrives on this energy, and the presence of artistic collectives like Speedism as well as high-profile construction projects from international architects is making the place that much more of a magnet for a renewed cosmopolitan discourse.

The New Landscape

"We [and the architects] are on two different sides of one big story, somehow. We think the Chinese kind of architectural visualization tries to help the Chinese Dream to come true, this somehow political dream of the perfect city, the perfect architecture, the perfect life in Chinese cities. It's somehow a dream but we say it's a sad dream, and our images are on the other side. What we do is somehow a "doom" version of it, which is not really "doom" as much as a happy doom." -Julian Friedauer

If Speedism are not architects per se, they certainly operate like them: Ginckels on a loose napkin offers his description of the social mechanisms underlying the new China. Beginning with the revolution, he says---not the political revolution or politicized "Cultural Revolution" but rather the real cultural revolution that began with the economic reforms of 1979, China has been on a course to realize its own Dream, which Ginckels represents with a straight diagonal arrow, moving constantly upwards. We in 2009 are about on the halfway point of this arrow. At this same moment we intersect with an equal and opposite arrow moving downwards—the ever-present potential for Doom, for chaos, disarray. Two sides of one story, wherein one can transform into the other almost undetected. So Speedism images are a sort of parallel for the architectural renderings that give way to mammoth structures in the real world, exposing in rendering the potential for their opposite consequences.

If we were to translate this into physical terms, it might be useful to think of the "dream" as something like a modernist dream. So the modernist slabs at this point have thrust Shanghai into a transitional moment, where there is a bizarre interplay of gleaming highrises and small-scale lilongs below, an interplay of chaos and order that is threatened by the looming monotony and homogeneous scale of the modernist constructions.

In the art world there's been a kind of backlash against the perceived threat of homogeneity, and this can be seen in the widespread adoption of abandoned spaces for the purposes of the local arts scene. Both Beijing's 798 and Shanghai's 50 Moganshan Road arose from this backlash, proclaiming in their own way that the old and new need not stand in conflict with each other. Xue Song was the first artist to rent space from M50 in the year 2000, perhaps at the point when the new structures in the city really began to threaten the city's vibrant social spaces and traditional culture. So the artistic aims of the Shanghai arts scene are not very different from the aims of the city at large—namely, to carve out an identity for the city and the country at large that straddles the border between tradition and reinvention, between the national and international.

It's an alternative sort of development pattern that has taken hold only during the past decade and has seen outgrowths throughout the city, not only to preserve the old street life and city fabric but for commercial reasons as well—the Xintiandi development near People's Square has been criticized as a Disneyfication of the urban landscape, but at the same time grapples with the same East-meets-West architectural paradigm as M50, but this time deliberately caters to the wants and needs of foreign visitors. In the greater scheme these efforts look like small attempts to get a grasp on the vast mechanism of change that thrusts the city ever closer to the dream/doom it is apparently destined for.

On the other hand, if these counter-movements appear to hinder the speed of change in Shanghai, perhaps it's worth considering that they very well could be accelerating them. That is, the power to shape the city's creative identity is apparently undergoing another transformation, from something that exists solely in the hands of the municipal or Beijing governments to something that is already becoming more democratic and open to more voices within the city. Something inside more of an open forum that allows for greater internal spontaneity. If the productive forces in the city change hands, we are likely to see a reorientation of the Dream itself, from the utter singularity of the Modernist columns to a greater diversity and integration of edifices and alleyways.

Media and Contemporary Arts

"So we propose a visual doom, a fictional doom-- because our projects are fiction-- that grows together with the dream. ...the opposite of what all the rendering offices are doing. But at the same time we play with the rendering and visualization to create something. As much as the render is real, our images also are real and have a kind of power." -Pieterjan Ginckels

Other artists like Allard van Hoorn have launched exhibitions like 2007's Platform for Urban Investigation[2], which bring together people as diverse as artists, architects, and photographers as they jointly contribute projects based on different elements of the urban experience, and particularly that of Shanghai. The projects range from Jian Jun's Household Objects (simply, objects plucked from the urban environment and placed in galleries) to something as abstract as Christian Leibenger's Tricycle House, a traditional Chinese home (in miniatore) built atop a tricycle, destroyed gradually in movement, and in a fashion meant to reflect creative destruction and urban change in Shanghai.

The overriding theme is that of the urban landscape as an aesthetic and intellectual experience, as a set of near-abstract spaces that we exist within that has more to do with the ideas that bring them together than with the physical properties of the places themselves. These kinds of excursions expand the boundaries of an arts scene already leaning on the interdisciplinary, elevating the arts and architecture to a place equally under the umbrella of "experience".

"I don't want to give away too much because if you have many inputs then you play it out on many levels, so you have to tell ten stories when you make the image. It's at once the power of the image that you can generate so much with it, but at the same it it's a bit of a hassle that it's always that much. Doom is a bit like that." –Pieterjan Ginckels

What Speedism apparently does is offer a solution to what to make of this kind of multimedia convergence, and that is to take it to its natural limits. Because the images, as Pieterjan explains, draw liberally from all the elements of design, urbanism and art nearly indiscriminately, the best resulting approach is to continue to draw from them and avoid filtering our output with the natural impulse to categorize. "We Might Be Wrong" they proclaim in their website's Manifest, as if anticipating the natural backlash that might greet such unrestricted spontaneity. If Shanghai has loosened the filers on the kinds of influences that pour in from the Western powers it has always grappled with, then as we transition toward Dream or Doom we will naturally see other forms of expression follow it toward a place no longer hampered by categorization or the necessity of identity.

Works Cited

Campanella, Thomas J.

The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World

Princeton Architectural Press, 2008

Hoorn, Allard van.

Platform for Urban Investigation: Shanghai II (2007)

http://www.allardvanhoorn.com/biography_pui_shanghai_2.asp#Folding

Interview with Speedism: Partial Transcript

Drew: Do you view your work as a mirror of real-life urban processes?

JF: We don't know if it's that in general but we can say it's definitely a link to Chinese urban life, real life. We've been already to Beijing for five weeks in December and I think we were invited because of the way we work in our projects, why doing and thinking at the same time is somehow linked to the Chinese way of urban planning, urban architectural planning, where they also try to be extremely fast and are also forced to think and to produce at the same time... more producing and less thinking--- just letting it go. That's also somehow.. we work together----

PG: Yeah I think it's what Julian says, but also, and that's where we're actually somehow far from the architects, that in the first place it also interests us, or it's not only in urbanism that you find this kind of random... throwing everything in together, superficial network-- you build your identity with stuff. It's a kind of collage, and I think maybe in Shanghai the most or in China, people don't really care if they copy the whole thing or if they copy something or they just copy the formal part of it, like extermal or... but in general you can see that in 2009 people take a bit of everything and they build their own person together out of stuff or superficial sides of stuff.. I think that's where you also see in our images and our projects... There's more input and output than just urbanism or architecture.

Sometimes some things fit together and they're not from the same domain, they're not both from architecture, but we can have a song, like the piece with the black mirror had, and we combine it with architecture--- more randomly, less specific than we're talking now.

Drew: Is the modern Chinese city in particular an important part of your work, and if so, do you find yourselves thinking about it in terms of its "Chienseness" or what otherwise sets it apart from European or Western Cities?

PG: I think one point we have to make clear is that we're not really hardcore researchers. The things you think of when you think of the Chineseness of the Chinese city are not things that we really grasp or that we tend to use when we think of the Chinese city in our projects. So again, as much as people construct complex things on a superficial level, we also kind of superficially understand or quote the Chineseness of the city. I guess there's lots of formal input we take from the Chinese city, and we kind of recognize the way that the city is built up here, and the way that we build up our images, but I don't know if you take a very specific input like Chinese cities are, they have this graph of population, this graph of investment and all of this... I don't think we ever try to look at such levels of understanding.

JF: I think it's the way you explained it: We're not so much researchers, we are much more like travelers, or tourists. We pick only things we like, and they don't have to be Chinese. So it can be like, in our last project, can be something to do with feng shui, it also can be something like the cheap dvd copy of the cool film we found on the street, which has nothing to do with China. The content of that film can be anything.

PG: I think we're visual tourists, we're formal tourists. So we kind of get off on specific buildings and mistakes in buildings. They're probably not buildings people want to come see in China-- in Beijing, it's not really CCTV that we're looking at but the ugly Venturi-meets-Superstudio toilet pavilions in the park, that kind of stuff. Since we're always playing with ficiton, these things all find their place in a story we have not really invented yet. Slowly, everything shapes together.

Drew: Since you're working with the medium of rendering, do you think there's a reltation between what you do and the officlial architectural renderings that anticipate physical structures?

JF: We're on two different sides of one big story, somehow. We think the Chinese kind of architectural visualization tries to help the Chinese dream to come true, this somehow political dream of the perfect city, the perfect architecture, the perfect life in Chinese cities. It's somehow a dream but we say it's a sad dream, and our images are on the other side. What we do is somehow a "doom" version of it, which is not really "doom" as much as a happy doom.

PG: It's got a short intro text, like everything I don't want to give away too much because if you have many inputs then you play it out on many levels, so you have to tell ten stories when you make the image. It's at once the power of the image that you can generate so much with it, but at the same it it's a bit of a hassle that it's always that much. Doom is a bit like that.

So we propose a visual doom, a fictional doom-- because our projects are fiction-- that grows together with the dream. ...the opposite of what all the rendering offices are doing. But at the same time we play with the rendering and visualization to create something. As much as the render is real, our images also are real and have a kind of power.