artistic opium

When visiting a city, we are used to reading it through the eyes of its arts, its exhibitions and artists. In Shanghai, this is quite easy, and a rather difficult thing at the same time. On the one hand, the city has understood the tourist demand for a "gallery quarter", where nice-looking young locals sell something that can be hung to a Western wall and explained as the result of a certain city spirit. The area around Taikang Road in the French Concession area fulfills this demand. Loads of small, quite cute galleries here, together with arts-touristy amenities, such as the good breakfast café in the (hear the revolutionary undertone!) "Comune". A lot of the arts here is mostly affordable, although one is surprised by some prices: around 5000 euros for a piece that seems rather well-meant clearly shows that there is a thirst for stuff from Shanghai. A lot of the things at sale are dealing with Shanghai landmarks, mainly architectural ones, but also with the Chinese past. All this rather colourful, tastful, but, and this is the problem, at the borderline to kitch.

What about museums? Well, there is, as in all major metropolises, a Museum of Contemporary Art (which, laying open its own ambitions as much as the city's, calls itself "MOCA Shanghai"). Current show is on "Merging-emerging Art, Utopia, Virtual reality". Some of the artists there are in fact quite interesting, but as a whole, the show looks a bit too much as arts school teachers think it should. We are dealing with interactive media here? So lets give them some buttons to push, or an address to send a text message to, whereupon something happens. The least interactive piece is also the most impressive one: Zhong Kangjun’s "City" (2008), a skyscraper hypertropolis with steel models of towering icons from Shanghai, but also Beijing, such as Koolhaas' CCTV tower. All of them burnt, the world after an attack. You can walk through this model, thereby being confronted with the question whether the catastophe that happened to this city is not you, us.

The fact that the city is Zhong's topic makes perfect sense. In Shanghai, you get the feeling that the urban and the artistic are two very different principles, acting upon each other, needing each other, but also fighting. And more often than not, the urban seems to win.

Interesting, then, that one apparent centrepoint of local artistic productivity is an ex opium den in Weihei Road. The arts, pushed to the very bottom of architectural representation. Loads of studios here, and galleries such as Stageback, currently showing "Five Shanghai Germans". The atmo in the 1930s drug madhouse, which used to be an auto parts warehouse in the recent past, is as laid-back as it is chaotic. The building sucks you in. Probably this is what has to happen if the arts are to represent and engage critically with the vibrancy as well as the superficiality of this city. More opium please!