2 days in Suzhou and one day taking part in meetings at Fudan

This was intended to be a break from the screen project, but of course I have screens on the brain at the moment, so it did not work out that way!

First, leaving through Shanghai Railway Station, I couldn’t help but compare it and its screens to those in Shanghai South Railway Station, which we are studying. The station is much more dependent on the sheer concrete architecture for channelling flows, although the same LEDs are found throughout. In the waiting room, I noticed the combination of red, green and yellow (rather than orange) are used here. I wonder if the orange at Shanghai South is deliberate, or is it just a variation on yellow, so to speak. I could see a logic within the context of the waiting room: red LEDs showing through which gate passengers will go to get on the train, turning to green when they are checking tickets and passing people through the gate, and then to yellow when the gate closes just before the train leaves. However, as I looked at other LEDs around the station, colours were being used in less evidently logical ways, again. I’m not at all sure there is a strict colour code logic at work.

Also, in the waiting room, there was a very large LED in one corner playing a TV channel. The producer of the channel (which mixed what seemed to be children’s cartoon programming with ads) was not clearly marked by a logo. The sound was on. This seems to me to be different from what was on all the screens at Shanghai South Railway Station. Once on the train to Suzhou, there was another LCD showing a similar (but different, I think) channel. I wonder if this is specific to the HRC (Highspeed Rail China) company that runs the bullet trains? There was a bar at the bottom of the screen with info about arrival times at stations, etc etc. The same information was also running across a “zouzi” LED above the doorway of the carriage. All this raises the question of how many different channels there are on different trains and in different stations across the Chinese railway system and why.

After arriving in Suzhou, we went to Yuqian’s very upscale apartment block (owned and run by the same developers who ran the Crowne Plaza Hotel next door, where I was lusuriating, I mean staying). I noticed immediately that inside the “xiaoqu” (community), there was an LED. In this case, the red lettering announced in Chinese and in English details of a yoga class, which tells you a lot about who lives here. The Crowne Plaza also had “welcome” LEDs at the door. The blackboard culture really is everywhere! Focus Media also had their screens in front of the elevators in the lobby of Yuqian’s apartment building. The sort of people who live here are exactly the kind of valuable upscale-but-difficult-to-reach demographic they are targeting, I would imagine. Even when we went out sightseeing, we found “welcome” LEDs at the entrance to some of the sights.

In the evening of the 6th, I was treated to a very nice dinner in a very fancy restaurant overlooking the Jinji (Golden Rooster) Lake. In regard to the idea of the lightscape and enchantment, it was interesting to notice that a very elaborate light show lit up an island in the middle of the lake until about 9 p.m., when it was turned off. This seemed divorced from any direct commercial effort. Rather, it is perhaps construed as a contribution from the city government to its citizens, upgrading the quality of their lives. Next door to the restaurant is the Suzhou Science and Cultural Arts Centre. Designed by Herzog and de Meuron, the same people who did the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium in Beijing, it is inevitably known as the Suzhou Bird’s Nest. Its outer skin had a very elaborate light show playing across it. First it changed from one colour to another, going through a rainbow range. Then it sort of went crackers and did multi-coloured patterns. Yuqian said she didn’t mind the single colours but thought the rainbow display was too vulgar. I think I’m getting more vulgar about these things…

Yuqian’s father very kindly drove us around town. This included a new shopping mall (called “Times Square”!), which has what I was told was the longest “tianping” (sky screen, or canopy screen) in the world over it. According to one article I have read online since, there are one 2 others, one in Beijing and the other in Las Vegas. It was only playing ads for itself when we were there, but there weren’t many people around mid-week on a very cold and windy evening, so I guess that is not so surprising. There are at least 2 Youtube clips of this, so if you’re interested, check them out:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfbUvAMJwqc, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a-yXUGbNbw&feature=relatedl. Close by there was also what I was told was the largest ferris wheel in China. It used a lot of coloured neon, and, even more spectacularly, had a sort of hub in the middle where ads were being projected/screened. This certainly gives the London Eye a fun for its money. Wikipedia’s entry on Ferris Wheels lists it as the fourth largest in the world, and says that another one in Nanchang is the tallest in China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferris_wheel.

On the 7th, we spent most of the day far from screen territory around Tai Lake. But when we came back to town and walked along Shantang Street, we noticed that as well as being popular with tourists, this “traditional” street along a canal (Suzhou is the “Venice of the East”) has lots of wedding photo shops, including one which advertised its services not only with an LED “zouzi” across the top of the entrance, but also with an LCD flat screen showing a CGI video fantasy of the ideal wedding and wedding photo service.

When we got back to Shanghai on the 8th and went to the ticket office to get Yuqian her ticket back to Suzhou in the evening, we found that human ticket sellers had been replaced by perhaps 30 self-service machines that are touch-screen operated. We both commented that they seemed a lot easier to deal with than the usually surly ticket sellers! We arrived at Wujiaochang in time to catch the morning taiqi class and the dancers inside the Wanda, doing their stuff before the shops opened.

The 8th was given over to my talk to PhD students and another seminar concerning translation. Zhang Shujuan (my former TA from when I was at Fudan a long time ago) was there. We had a discussion in which she raised the idea of screens as concealment in some very interesting ways. She said she’d been thinking about how the egg at Wujiaochang both displays light but also conceals the roadway within it, and also how the big screen on the Bailian Youyicheng also constitute a kind of glittering screen behind which the alleyways and little stalls and restaurants around the Atlantic Department Store are hidden, too. I think this idea of the screen as something that draws the eye away from something else at the same time as it draws the eye to it is very interesting. Thank you, Shujuan!

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