50 Moganshan Lu
My uninformed belief when I arrived in Shanghai was that the city would have a thriving art scene to match its thriving capitalist pursuits. To me, there’s no better venue for artistic study than a society once stifled and now moving at warp speed towards the epitome of modernity. But, after visiting the aptly named, “ShangHai Art Museum” (if in abbreviation only), I was terribly disappointed to find that this city mainly values the media of architects and couldn’t care less about the brush. I spent all of twenty minutes visiting the four levels of the space, which, at the time of my visit, was dedicated to what appeared to be an ode to stock photography. In fact, on one of the walls, I recognized a photo of a baby making a crazy face that I’d seen in an old sample stock photo book of my mother’s, most likely dating back ten years or so?
I’ve even read since that day at the SHAM that the city really is a vast desert when it comes to China’s modern take on the arts. Apparently, Beijing is the place to go to see how China’s contemporary artists are remembering the dark days of the Revolution, but I still couldn’t give up on my quest for creative expression on a smaller scale and I looked for openings, exhibits, studio spaces, and galleries tucked away in the older neighborhoods of the city.
My guidebook directed me to an address that happens to be very near my apartment: 50 Moganshan Lu. The name was promising, given my little adventure in Moganshan with Monica, Angelene and Christine, and so, after a class outing this past Thursday, I made my way to 50 Moganshan Lu. The guidebook wasn’t to enthusiastic about the place, but a few sentences struck up an interest in me. I was told that the area was an old warehouse district and that many of the studios were nestled among tiny stores and humble abodes. In other words, these artists were working among the people. No aircon, no glitzy views of Shanghai’s skyline, difficult for foreigners to find, an oasis for the germination of gritty, real representations of life.
The heat on Thursday was oppressive, but the sun was shining and had obliterated any signs of pollution. The sky was perfectly blue with big, billowy white clouds and the air, if not humidity-free, was at least, easier to breathe. I walked from the Metro stop at the train station towards Suzhou creek and once I had crossed the bridge, turned right and walked back towards the creek. The road leading to Moganshan Lu was under construction (surprise!) and I picked my way through broken tiles, dirt piles, clumps of drying concrete and oozing tar, looking for any signs of artistic life. The first building I came to was a huge warehouse with one big roll-up door, which was only halfway up. I crouched, entered, and found several dusty, poorly hung canvases on the walls. They were huge studies of small doodles. In fact, the style looked disturbingly familiar. Tiny abstract shapes fitting into the spaces of each other in one or two colors. I felt like I was looking at blown-up drawings from the backs of my literature books from high school. Each canvas had a small card next to it on the wall and the earliest date I could find was 1997. None of the titles were in English, so I’m not sure how much meaning the artist had attached to the studies.
In the next room of the gallery, I found a few nude studies, a giant ink drawing of a grasshopper called, “We had nothing to eat” and two smaller multimedia pieces that I really liked. Both pieces were approximately 16”x16” and my favorite was titled after a Chairman Mao quote talking about the “collective good versus the individual evil”. The artist had punched the quote into tin with letter stamps, but had placed the letters backwards so that reading the quote took patience and time. On the other side of the piece of tin was a photograph of ten or fifteen men and women, workers of a sock factory. The photo looked to be taken on a very cold day, as the workers were bundled up and had pinched, painful looks on their faces. The photo was dated 1947. The artist had applied a dark wash over all of the faces in the photo, save one. The one face belonged to a young man in the upper left of the photo. There was a placard next to the piece and a description in Chinese. It was more fun to come up with my own idea of the artist’s meaning, but then again, after my little game was up; I wanted to know what was behind this artist’s meaning, and what his own experiences had been.
I thought this was what I should expect for 50 Moganshan Lu, but I turned out to be wrong and was pleasantly surprised. Just beyond this particular gallery, there was a huge gate that led to a whole district of warehouses. A teahouse stood at the entrance, as well as a poorly placed water sculpture. Cars were parked in front of the sculpture, and I couldn’t help but think that the electricity generating the moving water and silver balls in the water was a big waste. The area had a nice mixture of old warehouse feel, with a subtle “cleaned” up aspect. I walked along the first dark hall of studios and found little rooms chock-full of canvases of smiling faces, or landscapes or traditional-looking calligraphy and ink-drawn scenery. In these areas, artists were away and studio “managers” sat sipping tea and reading books or newspapers, completely oblivious to the visitors. In one room, a woman was listening to an English radio program and studying an English textbook. Needless to say, she attacked me as soon as I entered and asked all kinds of bizarre questions. She seemed lonely and obsessed with Western culture. Ironically, she was the manager of a studio that made knock-offs of ancient Chinese furniture. Once she had her fill of what I could offer on American culture, she repeated over and over, “American can come to Shanghai have lots of money can buy lots of furniture can afford to send it to America.” I told her I didn’t have a home for the furniture even if I had money to buy the furniture but I don’t think she believed me.
I was mildly unimpressed with what I saw, not because it was bad art, but because I really wanted to see art that expressed something about current conditions for artists in China. I got what I was looking for and it was actually a little scary.
I went upstairs and through another corridor, noting all the while how empty the whole area seemed. There were enough people for a Thursday afternoon, but the studios themselves seemed unusually dead. I kept going further and further into the recesses of the upstairs space until I came to a long skinny gallery space. No windows, incense burning and very interesting Chinese chanting music playing from mounted speakers. I loved this artist’s work. There were ten to fifteen canvases hanging. Each one was dated from between April of 2006 and June of 2006. The paintings were studies of giant abacuses. But, the beads were replaced by a perfectly round, smiling countenance which I found to be the artist’s, when I met him. I thought the faces were little stamps that he had made, there being so many, a face for each bead on the abacus, but on closer inspection, each face had something different about it. A wink here, a missing tooth there, a mole or birthmark, a few extra wrinkles, a raised eyebrow. It was amazing. Another series showed the artist in traditional Chinese clothing, simple, white and black, but wearing traditional Chinese shoes with the Louis Vuitton trademark stamping. Or, a helmet with the same LV stamping. It was brilliant – amazingly executed, but also with a sense of humor. I took the artist’s business card and shook his hand.
The next gallery was also blaring Chinese music and the artist was a complete character. He was singing at the top of his lungs while performing acrobatics with his painting. He was all over the place. The canvases he was showcasing were the exact opposite in mood of the studio. Bleak landscapes with either Pudong or the Imperial Palace off to the side, in the distance, as the focal point of the one-point perspective layout of the canvas. Then, in the foreground, a huddled mass of bodies with enormous, cartoonish round heads, hovering above the ground, a single red flag waving above the group. He pointed to the canvas he was working on, which had the ghosted-out face of Marilyn Monroe in the skyline, and he said in perfect English, “Marilyn, Mao, they will disappear. The children of the Revolution will not.” I also took his card and shook his hand.
There were other studios with more thought-provoking pieces and one gallery informed me that there is an opening this evening at 5pm. I plan on attending to see if I can talk with some of these artists and get a sense of why Shanghai is so indifferent to their endeavors. Before that, I’ll go for a little tour of a Jesuit bibliotheca just outside of the city that has a collection of illuminated manuscripts available for viewing.
One last bit about 50 Moganshan Lu: I found a shop selling old posters from the Revolution, and framed, and hidden away from the main gallery area, I found a poster titled, “The US, they won’t so easily forget their own killing of our people”. The poster showed various scenes of brutality, all in a cartoonish manner, with very bright colors, and in the foreground, a US general resembling FDR (Why FDR?) stood with yellow fangs dripping blood, green skin like a lizard’s or snake’s, shirt open exposing lots of gold chains and carrying huge rockets in his hands. I shuddered when I saw the poster. It just gave me the creeps. The strangest part of it was to not understand the context of the poster. It didn’t list a specific event where bloodshed and killing occurred. I’m assuming too, that the poster was made during the Revolution and the makers were less concerned with factual accuracy than in instilling fear and anger towards the US. Sometimes I think this kind of fear and anger is still deep down in the hearts of some of the people I bump into on the streets.
