Shanghai Style by Lynn Pan

A review by Lisa Movius in that's Shanghai Mar 4, 2008

http://www.urbanatomy.com/articles/detail.cfm?aid=1016

the roots of style
" I like looking at what makes Shanghai different. It is something I
have been thinking about for decades," says writer and historian Lynn
Pan 潘翎. Of course, Pan's done more than just think; she's parlayed
her interest into a writing career spanning several decades and
producing many books. Pan left the city in 1955 at age ten and went
on to spend much of her childhood in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Great
Britain, working in Hong Kong as a journalist for the Far Eastern
Economic Review and in Singapore establishing a research center on
the Chinese Diaspora.

But like many Chinese émigrés, Pan couldn't resist the pull of the
homeland and returned to explore the city of her birth. Her
grandfather was the Shanghainese developer behind many historic
Shanghai landmarks such as the Hengshan Hotel and the Canidrome, and
his legacy forms the narrative of Tracing It Home: A Chinese Journey
(1992). A resident since 1998, she first returned to Shanghai in 1981
and wrote Searching for Old Shanghai, and though stories were
plentiful, she had a hard time finding a willing publisher. "Back in
1981, no one had even heard of Shanghai," she recalls. She found one
in Sanlian Shudian 三联书店 (Joint Publishing Company), which has
seen the book through more than 15 printings.

Pan's oeuvre expanded in 1984, when she penned Old Shanghai:
Gangsters in Paradise after meeting the son of famed gangster Du
Yuesheng 杜月笙during her 1981 trip to Shanghai.
"His wife wore nail polish, and she served cucumber sandwiches with
sweet butter at tea – in 1981!" she recalls.
Not long thereafter, Pan wrote China's Sorrow, concerning the Yellow
River, and The New Chinese Revolution, about Deng Xiaoping's 邓小平
reforms, and in 1990 she released Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A
History of the Chinese Diaspora. She has also edited The Encyclopedia
of the Chinese Overseas and co-written books on Chinese craft art and
on Hong Kong in the 1960s.
Her latest book, Shanghai Style: Design Between the Wars, is the most
extensive and authoritative English-language history of the emergence
of haipai, Shanghai's unique fusion aesthetic, to date. Chinese-
language scholarship on haipai literature, art, design, theater, film
and music is extensive, though for the most part, English-language
pickings are limited to salacious tales of gangsters, bankers, whores
and foreigners, a situation that is perhaps attributable to the
belief that contemporary Western readers are uninterested in Chinese
complexities.
"Foreigners have always underestimated Shanghainese culture," Pan
says, chuckling at British Shanghailander architect George Leopold
Wilson's declaration in 1930 that "Modernism will never go down well
in Shanghai." In fact, it was already popular with Shanghainese
artists, designers and architects at the time, and in 1921, the
city's leading paper, Shenbao 申报, ran an enthusiatic full page
article about Le Corbusier "when he was still considered quite
radical world-wide".

Shanghai Style is an engaging, enjoyable and rigorous academic read,
crammed with illustrations from paintings, books, magazines, comics,
advertising, architecture and interior design.
In the book, Pan differentiates haipai 海派 from what she calls
"Shanghai style" 上海式. Emerging between the wars, the latter,
explains Pan, is Chinese mixed with Western influences, to produce a
period style which was Modernist and commercialized. In the sense of
being bastardized and commercial, haipai shares these
characteristics, though it also encompasses elements of culture and
behavior. What's more, haipai is not period specific; it is
constantly evolving, even today.
One of Shanghai style's best representatives is the accomplished
graphic designer, musician, composer, publisher and entrepreneur Qian
Juntao 钱君??(1906-1998), whose biography launched Pan's
investigation into its origins.
Pan says that "Qian described his style as futurism, or weilai pai
未来派," a unique blend of obscure Russian cubist futurism and
Berlin dadaism. It is likely that Qian studied these two movements in
imported magazines, including Vanity Fair, which in the 1930s was
designed by Russian Mehemed Fehmy Agha and Italian Futurist Fortunato
Depero. Qian absorbed other influences from the set design and
cinematic styles of such films as Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Referring to the influences on artists such as himself and Qian,
cartoonist Ding Cong 丁聪 says they took a bit from here and a bit
from there, digesting and assimilating and translating it so
thoroughly that they completely obscured its origins.

In doing so, they created something entirely new, something uniquely
Shanghai.

I am eternally optimistic; I am Chinese”

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=7408

I am eternally optimistic; I am Chinese"

On the eve of a retrospective at the Guggenheim, Cai Guo-Qiang
discusses his materials and his potentially explosive new book

Cristina Carrilo de Albornoz | 15.1.08 | Issue 187

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Cai Guo-Qiang's Inopportune: Stage One, 2004, originally shown at
Mass MoCA in North Adams, was acquired by the Seattle Art Museum in
2006 for its new building. Another edition of the work will be
installed in the artist's retrospective at the Guggenheim next month

Cai Guo-Qiang's Inopportune: Stage One, 2004, originally shown at
Mass MoCA in North Adams, was acquired by the Seattle Art Museum in
2006 for its new building. Another edition of the work will be
installed in the artist's retrospective at the Guggenheim next month

Cai Guo-Qiang is one of the most prominent living Chinese artists.
Trained in theatre design, in 1999 he won the International Prize at
the 48th Venice Biennale. He is best known for his firework-based set-
piece installations and for drawings made using ink and gunpowder. In
November, a set of 14 untitled drawings by the artist sold at
Christie's, Hong Kong, for £9.5m ($19.1m)—setting a new record for a
Chinese contemporary artist at auction. Next month the Guggenheim in
New York, will host Cai's first major retrospective, "I Want to
Believe". The show will coincide with the publication of a limited
edition, potentially

self-combusting book (nine copies only) entitled Danger Book: Suicide
Fireworks, published by Ivory Press and personally annotated by the
artist. Cai is currently also serving as artistic director of visual
and special effects for the Beijing Olympics this summer alongside
film-makers Steven Spielberg and Zhang Yimou who are artistic
consultants. His compatriot, artist Ai Weiwei who collaborated on the
design of the Olympic "bird's nest" stadium in Beijing with Swiss
architects Herzog & de Meuron, has now disassociated himself from the
event, referring to China's "disgusting" political conditions. Cai
declined to answer our questions about Ai Weiwei's statement or the
growing international lobby for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics

in protest at the human rights abuses within China and the regime's
support for the

Sudanese government.

The Art Newspaper: Your retrospective at the Guggenheim is called "I
Want to Believe". What does it refer to?

Cai Guo-Qiang: The title is based on my childhood curiosity. I
doubted everything,

but underneath I had a sort of expectation

and aspiration.

TAN: Your father was a historian and landscape painter who also
practised calligraphy. Did you emulate him in your youth?

CG-Q: I was more of a rebellious type. As a teenager I was immersed
in martial arts and even starred in some kung fu films. At the same
time my father introduced me to 5,000 years of Chinese poetry,
paintings and literature at a time when the [Communist] Party forbade
it. I understood quickly the value of the underground. I was always
very unwilling to align myself to any particular group. My peers were
producing politically pointed Pop paintings and installations. I
refused western influences and hiked to northwest China near Tibet,
visiting archaeological sites, studying nature and painting portraits
of people I met.

TAN: What was your idea of an artist?

CG-Q: When I was a child, the Chinese government did not allow
citizens to buy flowers because it was a very bourgeois thing, but
since my hometown of Guangzhou was far from the capital, I could buy
flowers from farmers and go home and paint them. I associated this
bourgeois act with being an artist. I didn't want a nine-to-five job.
I wanted to live freely.

TAN: In China you started experimenting with gunpowder in the making
of art. Was this a way of expressing yourself with no fears or limits?

CG-Q: Gunpowder is a spontaneous, unpredictable and uncontrollable
medium. The more you learn to control it, the more obsessed you
become with the material. It is like making love with your husband or
wife. The outcome is unpredictable and the same results are never
guaranteed. Furthermore, in using gunpowder

I can explore all my concerns: the relation to notions of
spirituality as well as an interest in spectacle and entertainment,
and the transformation of certain energies—such as violent explosions—
into beauty and a kind of poetry. An artist should be like an
alchemist using poison against poison, which is very much a
philosophy from Chinese medicine. Turning something bad into
something good…countering the force. It's the whole idea of the
alchemist, using dirt, dust, and getting gold out of it. From
gunpowder, from its very essence, you can see so much of the power of
the universe—how we came to be. You can express these grand ideas
about the cosmos.

TAN: Did using gunpowder allow you more creative freedom?

CG-Q: Initially I began working with gunpowder to foster spontaneity
and confront the controlled artistic traditions and social climate in
China at the time. Using gunpowder and making burn drawings were an
extension of my childhood dream of being a painter. Also from my
childhood I remember the sound of fireworks going off. In my
hometown, every significant social occasion of any kind, good or bad—
weddings, funerals, the birth of a baby, a new home—is marked by the
use of fireworks. They even use fireworks when they elect Communist
party officials, or after someone delivers a speech. Fireworks are
like the town crier, announcing whatever's going on. I also remember
the sound of artillery fire from a nearby army base directed at
Taiwan. Gunpowder in Chinese means "fire-medicine", it's potentially
therapeutic.

TAN: In 1986 you moved to Japan. Did you find greater artistic
freedom there?

CG-Q: In Japan I did find and enjoy artistic freedom, but the catch
is that you still need to be given the opportunity to do so. The
contrast between China and Japan is that in China, it was easy to
access materials—such as gunpowder—but there was less artistic
freedom. In Japan, there was more freedom, but the materials were
harder to find.

TAN: Since 1995 you have lived mainly in New York. What have you
learned in that city? You still do not speak much English after all
this time. Would it not help you to integrate?

CG-Q: New York is like a global square where I have the possibility
of running into my friends from all corners of the world at any time.
Not being able to speak English has been one of the biggest
frustrations of my life.

TAN: Why did you move there?

CG-Q: The opportunity that brought me to New York was a grant from
the Asian Cultural Council to participate in a year-long residency at
PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, as a representative

of Japan.

TAN: Your Guggenheim exhibition will travel to Beijing to coincide
with the Olympic Games, where you are in charge of visual and special
effects. What themes will be presented in the opening ceremony and
how do you define the role of an artist in the Olympic Games? What
are your priorities?

CG-Q: It's not an easy undertaking, but it's absolutely necessary.
The Olympics combine the entire country's efforts, and can do a lot
of previously unimaginable things. You can display your work in front
of an audience of billions, but at the same time it can feel like
you're making the work for yourself. Through this event, one can
contemplate and better understand what "Chinese culture" is. One
needs to think about the past, present, and future of China and its
relationship with the world. You can use this platform to tackle the
topics of ritual and ceremony. In brief, it can be an opportunity for
self-growth.

TAN: How tolerant and supportive are the authorities towards the new
cultural and artistic boom?

CG-Q: The higher the level of the official, the broader their vision
becomes. They tend to pursue newer things and are more ambitious and
tolerant to new culture than their subordinates. The Chinese
government has changed more drastically than it appears to the
outside world.

TAN: Do you recognise the so-called new China that everybody is
taking about, where changes are taking place at such great speed?

CG-Q: This new China is not changing that fast, and it's not that
serious a problem.

TAN: You are a consummate experimentalist who has combined
traditional materials and methods from the east (from the historical
and living cultural traditions of both China and Japan) with
strategies from western art history. How important are these Chinese
traditions for you?

CG-Q: Just like western art is important to westerners, Chinese
traditions are important to me. However, while they are my origins
and foundation, they are not my main purpose in making contemporary
art. The main purpose in making art is to have fun and to redefine
the nature of objects. Where are the limits when an object becomes a
work of art? Making contemporary art can throw up obstacles but it
does not worry me. I am eternally optimistic;

I am Chinese.

TAN: Your new book, published by Ivory Press, is called Danger Book:
Suicide Fireworks. Why?

CG-Q: It goes beyond what is traditionally regarded as a book. It's
more an art object containing drawings and gunpowder paintings. It
will be on display at the Guggenheim in a special chapel. It is a
book that fuses the opponents, life and death, with the ephemeral
value of beauty.

TAN: But a danger to what?

CG-Q: I used gunpowder to draw pretty images of fireworks, but
included in the design is the possibility of committing suicide. If
the owner pulls the string that is attached to a bundle of matches,
it ignites the gunpowder on the pages and explodes the book. Even if
the owner does not pull the string, there will always be the
potential for danger and thus he or she will always have a dangerous
relationship with

the book.

TAN: What was your biggest concern at the making of it ?

CG-Q: I wanted to make something that was hard to possess permanently.

TAN: Is discipline the foundation of your life?

CG-Q: Perhaps it's because I am disciplined that I chose gunpowder as
a medium.

TAN: In your work, you deal constantly with the ephemeral. One year
of work can disappear in 15 seconds. Do you ever feel frustrated by
this?

CG-Q: I feel good with the volatile nature

of gunpowder; I am looking for the unchanging through the always
changing. Nature always changes but the fact of change—or evolution—
never does. I also associate it with the discipline and spontaneity
of calligraphy, that most honoured Chinese art form. In calligraphy
the artist is a "perpetual amateur". This is the model

I identify with as an artist. n

Translation by Alicia Lu and Anni Lin

Biography

Born: Guangzhou, China, 1957. Lives in New York

Education: Shanghai Drama Institute

Selected solo shows. 2006: Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin 2005:
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 2004: Massachusetts Museum of
Contemporary Art 2003: Asia Society, New York

Coming up: "I Want to Believe" retrospective, Guggenheim Museum, New
York, February-May