第三届中国城市商业规划和商业地产展览会光大会展中心
Third Exhibition of
Commercial Planning & Commercial Properties of Chinese Cities
Everbright Exhibition Center
August 8th, 2007

Kingdom of Lost Dinosaur
from Zigong, Guizhou Province
an exhibition at Shanghai Science & Techonology Center
August 12th 2007

A panoramic tour of Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, Part V

With the West Lake surrounded by low ranges, Hangzhou (and Suzhou) has been famed for and branded as the Heaven on Earth for a long time. It was essentially the administrative center of Song dynasty. There are a number of dramatic love lorn stories but usually tragic based on the West Lake context. Also, many great poets also derived their indelible poems or rather influenced by the lake effect. Though with height control so as not to 'dominate' the setting or over the lake, the contemporary urbanization is spreading fast, swarming ever closer to the lake. Within this contrast, one can feel the utopian setting when standing on this side of camera angle. Still, the West Lake is really a few great urban setting with charming characteristics I have ever been in China.

Agust 13th, 2007

Exterior Entrance Courtyard
Interior Courtyard

A panoramic tour of Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, Part IV

The photos show the interior courtyard of Suzhou Museum, designed by none other than the very famous Asian American I.M. Pei. There was extensive speculation that this would Pei’s last project in China due to his age. Pei is distinctly a late modernist, shrewd at eclectic adaptation of indigenous elements into modernistic features. Pei is quite remarkably inventive and original at applying practical angular form such as those triangular forms commonly seen in the East Wing, National Gallery at Washington, D.C., Bank of China in Hong Kong, and now the Suzhou Museum in Suzhou.

This Suzhou Museum is another one of his very mature and effective adaptation. The exterior views as well as the interior exude refreshingly charming modern form, and without sacrificing the natural spirit of the historical foundation or its surrounding context. It is a very well configured quadrangle layout for one is easily led around the interior and all around the exterior for one moves around without feeling disoriented at all. The integration of the lake naturally from adjacent property into the interior courtyard is particularly successful, serving more than enhancing the image of the interior surrounding. The reflected image on the lake enriches greatly in visual or pictorial composition. Many visitors were found could not help themselves but snapping away photogenic impressions wherever they posed.

August 13th 2007

A panoramic tour of Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, Part IV

The small scale Suzhou Creek branches into the River Pu. The above shows a section of the creek right by the Two Bay City Development and Moganshan. Many thirty to forty stories high residential tower blocks line along but way too close to the creek; it is but a domineering development attitude with little regard for nature and historical context, and essentially a failure of urban scale or an urban problem without order. In turn, many locals chided the creek as the backyard drainage of Shanghai. Once, like many other developments in haste, the river was badly fouled due to irresponsible dumping directly into the river. After badly plagued for years, the Shanghai Municipality has been making effort to clean up the river. Again, many locals chided that they have found fish swimming in the creek after so many years for not seeing any lives at all.

Despite all, crossing the bridge and immediately turning left into those degraded or abandoned building setting, Moganshan is a place I like to visit. It is also nicknamed SOHO of Shanghai. The former rice warehouse is now being slowly revamped into a very nice cultural niche. Many artists and predominantly painters have taken over the place to flex their artistic skills. With fame escalating as time goes by, together with renting for a studio or gallery, the properties around the immediate area have also appraised in values.

August 13th 2007

A panoramic tour of Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, Part III

Also another former warehouse area now turned into some attractive cultural asset of Shanghai to boost the cultural image of the city. The Shanghai Urban Sculpture Park consists of many different individual buildings, together with many outdoor sculptures sprinkled across the green landscape. Opened to the public not too long ago and sometime at the end of last year, the Park exudes signs of great hope for a better neighborhood redevelopment as well as for the city. On site, there are many buildings still under renovation. Many contractors were hammering and sawing inside and outside those individual buildings. Works are going on around while a few buildings are all set for public viewing.

Considering what were displayed, there are just way too many sculptures that actually milk the concept directly from the West while those deriving their themes from indigenous background could not excel beyond its own cultural bond or context. Many sculptures are not cutting edge enough in design while just as many immature in appearance. After viewing all the sculptures I could find, I still think China has a long way to catch up with the rest of the world for its modern sculpture if Shanghai were to be on the leading edge in China's sculpture design.

August 13th 2007

A panoramic tour of Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, Part II

The above panoramic view to the northwest is taken from the 19th floor office where I currently work. On the right side of the photo, I live in one of those 6-story low rises. You can easily spot the blue roof top building. With a green patch on its left, count two buildings further to the left and the flat top building is where I live. Dongfang Hospital is in the center, butting adjacent to the neighborhood unit I mentioned and live in. You can also see the River Pu on the left. On this left side with many high rises is where the Financial District of Shanghai highly concentrates.

August 13th 2007

A panoramic tour of Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, Part I

This is the typical post card image of Shanghai, however, this one particular is apparently another great sign of nature snarling back at human development. Viewed across the Pujiang or River Pu, the Financial District of Shanghai rose to contemporary height or scale since early 1980s. The city truly rebounds and stands up for its Shanghai Express characteristics despite experiencing many historical social upheavals. In fact, after the West cracked open the closed-door policy of China in recent modern era, Shanghai was only a small fishing village then but rose to its current financial or economic significance.

As indicated, many clustering towers are rising fast but visually disappearing and tapering towards the right of the picture.Whereas, the phallic symbol of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower on the left is also fatefully smothered by the dusty clouds. The above is not at all so sweetly romantic in view though. In fact, it was a very hot afternoon at its most unseasonable global warming occasion. The misty effect could be due to airborne dust particles that had shrouded the city.

August 13th 2007

Su Yang at 4Live

When surfing, I found this Su Yang. Later, I was even more thrilled to see him being featured at length on some CCTV music channel. Guess this particular musician must have weighted much significance in the current music scene here in China. Then, weeks ago, I found out that he would be in town to perform at 4Live. Seizing the opportunity, I went with a Shanghainese friend He Feng to see him performing last Sunday on June 3rd, 2007.

Constituting 4-member musicians, they were enough to occupy the rather miniature stage while half of the thin crowd of fans was up close and getting personal in front of the stage to see him live. Still considered a crowd pleaser with thrifty verbal interaction but very engaging in his singing all the way, Su Yang's fans would sway and gyrate in unison, jumping and hopping all around as the music intensified, and spewing infrequent wooing and wowing or sporadic loud cheers.

Never confounding, slurring and hardly soaring, he sang with brittle, supple and detectable enunciation. With innate but personable Ningxia accent or dialect, he would sang kai or open as kay-i, and lai or coming as lay-i. He randomly sprinkled songs with hei-yo, hei-yo, e-yo-hei-de-yo as repetitive catchy renditions. This must be the apparent vernacular Ningxia tune that naturally creeps from his embracing heart and easily seeps into his rhythmic songs. Su Yang is from Ningxia (that could possibly literally mean Quiet Summer), out in Northwest China.

Reading from lyrics, Su Yang sings about life in Ningxia, about the tough and seemingly impoverished life tending to the unrelenting yellow earth, and about the trying life of cave living. His songs celebrate life and aspire good life. When getting into perseverance and unremitting lifestyle in general, he lyrics speak about genealogical family orders from generation to generation, telling in summary the reminiscent and joyful family activities. Also, he sings about his father's tragic passing but being optimistically perceived as the rising phoenix from fire.

During the very brief break to quench thirst, he explained with great pride that he was hailed from "elow the Helan Mountain and by the Yellow River". In Below Helan Mountain, every line of the lyric expounds with impact about his youthful time in Ningxia giving way to the inevitable aging by the blowing wind.

With Shan-dan-dan flowers as subliminal metaphor, and like any others facing the ever changing life and nostalgia, he laments the temporal beauty of things and people around him, and when the drab hinterland being slowly ruled over by the unforgiving contemporary lifestyle.

One definitely in reggae beat, Su Yang reformats his rock and roll very easily with regional folksy tunes. Su Yang is essentially contemporary but not really representative in regional musical characteristics, besides his definitive regional lyrical forms.

From the TV show, he has been performing around China and has been trying to make it in Beijing. However, to see Su Yang performing live is completely different from what I had seen him being dramatized on CCTV. Rather minute in frame, Su Yang is of course very real on stage.

A guest singer Li Zhi came from Nanjing on the same day to support his fellow musician friend. As another singer with his very individual singing style, Li Zhi sang two songs while Su Yang played guitar for his friend. Friendship and support abound.

For the hour and a half show at 4Live, the entrance cost RMB40 while the Suntory beer cost RMB30. Before the show ended while Su Yang was performing his last few songs, and right before taking off for the night and at the door, I bought two CDs by Su Yang, Xianliang (literally Virtuous and Able) and One and Only Ningxia.

Pictures above show two of the CD covers and a few selected album interiors. The album Xianliang aptly depicts the distinctive Northwest yellow earth lifestyle in general.

Jeremy

Hai Shanghai

June 5th, 2007

Suggestively subtle: on solo exhibition of Lin Hairong
Shine Art Space, 50 Moganshan

Many years ago, my American friends always playfully chuckled with harmless racial tones about how all Chinese looked the same. And now, it is even more ironic to see how evidently all Chinese still looked the same: in how Chinese painters themselves had elected to portray themselves in duplicative look and in expressive unisons.

Even if the subject treatment may all be so remarkably different, the perpetual consistency of the same painted images can be irritable, intolerable and redundant, and when originality breaks off its edge of originality; you see one and you see them all. It can be irksome to look at these mechanistic, robotic, factory churned out pudgy or puffy dollies productively repeat in the same painterly manner and recycled in other painters alike. Of course, all this is purely an overview of visual narrative and generalized interpretations that reflect some artistic genre.

The genetic reproduction of these visual images does depict life in China in truthful, if not metaphorical manner. The ubiquitous echoes of monotonous images seem to prolong to reiterate, inevitable or not, the profoundly and deeply entrenched collective values and psyche about China and National Chinese, ensuing, possibly those overseas Chinese and descents alike.

In this case, Lin Hairong has continued to hybrid or compromise with the traditional visual form by very effectively repeating her contemporary subject matter or visual images. Majority of paintings are set with subject matters floating on the canvas plane, within their individual vast monochromatic backdrop of emptiness or void, while a countable number of paintings are only suggestive of three-dimensional perspective. An ever-lasting painting tradition, human nature as a part of the universe has always been portrayed this way.

Whether or not intended to downplay the overall presentation or simply a style of her own, Lin's very womanly subject is very revealing via her artistic training. All the paintings speak so strongly that the painter is a woman, all about her definitive gender role but more on her contribution of human strength.

She exhibits her multitudinal roles: sharing ideas with peers; marrying to be a good family pivot; commanding individual respect and winning admiration; affirming her faith to the family and exerting loyalty to the country. She dances, entertains, defends and works. She is an intellectual; she is modernistic; and she develops her personal wellness. Unquestionably, she is able to do all kinds of things like everybody else.

On closer examination at the paintings - painstaking in composition, sparing in color choice, economic in tonality, rather precise and tender in brushstrokes, earnest but solemn in painterly application, and fairly variable in thematic selection – Lin's paintings and its characteristic style and subjects all demand a form of respectable quiet charm and restrain with natural feminine attributes. With her as herself and as a painter, Lin is all simply subtle in articulating her understanding about the world around her.

All smaller frame photos are from www.shineartspace.com.

Art Explication
Jeremy Tew
Hai Shanghai
May 18th, 2007

Suzhou Museum: I.M. Pei and a pair of chopsticks

Using a pair of chopsticks can be an art form. A very basic understanding together with a little creative maneuvering the pair of parallel form is essential. Especially those made of polycarbonate, a pair of timber or metal chopsticks is still not my best device in delivering table manner.

Food, if greasy and slick, could be slip sliding away. The hearty round table rendezvous is always coupled with struggling and giggling in attempting the feeding frenzy, and some brutish or primeval fingers alternative is always readily ensuing but practical. To many, an attempt could spell helplessly disastrous, and ending with some embarrassing acrobatic feats. Many horrific if not personal experiences are always some hilarious sequences tirelessly depicted in many comedies.

When turned around and used on the other end, a pair of chopsticks takes on some very subtle and amusing dimension of table manner or social etiquette. Besides acoustic drumming, and to name a few, prying, stirring, slicing, beating, tapping, pressing are some ingenious patterns in maximizing to best use of a pair of chopsticks.

Reading from I.M. Pei's biography many years ago, if not erroneous in recalling some specific details at this moment, Pei was greatly inspired by the structural strength of a pair of chopsticks. In this case, when designing the Bank of China in Hong Kong, a pair of chopstick has served more than food picking or food sweeping.

To I.M. Pei, and now the Suzhou Museum, using chopstick in parallel with architectural design is an art form elevated to another art form. In fact, a pair of chopsticks is more than a primeval innovation by itself and most architectural or structural engineers would comprehend this better.

Without much sunshine during visitation hours, the whitewashed and slate colored framing Suzhou Museum was shrouded all over in monochromatic gloom, diminishing its structural bearing for equilibrium and kaleidoscopic geometric bracing. This is more revealing when the series of shots were later displayed on computer screen. On Saturday, May 12th, 2007, it was a day with heavy over cast.


Jeremy
Hai Shanghai
May 17th, 207