Visited Shanghai Museum at the People’s Square, with Rachel. There were five floors of ceramics, bronze, painting, calligraphy and so on, very few screens and those that we came across for information weren’t in English. A very traditional museum, somewhat untouched as far as we could see, by contemporary display methods.
Janet Harbord
We trekked out in search of a panorama for Rachel that we had been told about. The rather unlikely subject of the museum was the Chinese national anthem, a museum mostly riding on the knowledge that the anthem had been written in Shanghai, therefore this was a scene of birth. Despite the slimness of the topic in intellectual terms, the museum was rather fantastic in its use of new media. Various loops of old films and photographs playing on screens downstairs including Paul Robeson singing the anthem, and upstairs an assemblage of various ‘texts’: an interactive book which turns the pages as you glide your hand over its surface but it is a projection, a bank of one minute films of contemporary people who have a relationship with the anthem (the films start speaking when touched and can run simultaneously), wall texts showing the chronology of the anthem, and many, many photographs and film posters of poet Tain Han, who penned the lyrics initially for the film ‘Children of Troubled Times’, and Nie Er, composer of the music. In 1935 it is recorded and therefore distributed across distances along with the film version. Its significance in a national resilience to imperial invaders (Japan) was, according to the museum, critical. Nationalism born in a time of adversity, like most of the ‘best’!
The central theatre-piece was a panorama, recently made, lasting about ten minutes. The sequence was predictably chronological, opening with the silhouette of a boy with a trumpet, running around like a shadow puppet. The range of dissolves, shifts in colour and rhythm and sound affects made it a powerful experience.
Janet Harbord
Today we visited Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology in Pudong, a huge, monumental building with overtones of Mussolini as Chris notes, an ambitions again of the architecture of airports: cavernous, diminishing human form, light-filled. The first exhibit we saw before passing through the turnstiles was a touring exhibition of penguins and other arctic animals. The products of taxidermy, they looked tatty and moth-eaten, past their best even in their after-life so it was a strange greeting.
Through the turnstile was a screen offering information on the museum at the present moment, statistics about how many visitors were in the museum and how the museum gauged the flow (few people = smooth on this morning). The first exhibit we entered was about robots and computers and the first exhibit was a row of three robots ‘dancing’ in pre-programmed unison. Children and parents were watching and taking photographs at this display, remarkable for the likeness of robot movement and human bodily gesture. On the wall was a description of robots as the natural extension of puppets: puppets were animated things that appeared to take on a life of their own. One might deduce from this and Chris’s comments about China reclaiming its own narratives of development, that this was a national re-telling of robots as part of a ‘long tradition’ in China. There were other robots that you could play games with, again machines poised to mimic human movement (a long neck with a downward ‘head/face that is moved from side to side and up ad down in response to the moves made by the human opponent). On the wall here were descriptions of the history of robots and the ethical concerns in human-robot relations (a writer had proposed rules that defined a robot-human contract).
Also in this exhibit was a game about computer processing and the dispersal and re-assembling of information, set out in the form of a game. Many children were playing this. We played a game of assembling an animal description and, if we assembled an existing animal, it strolled across a large screen. In the centre of the second room was a tree of TV and computer monitors. None of them ‘worked’ and so were rather unexciting compared to other exhibits, but they were all dated and showed an evolution of screen technologies at least in terms of differently shaped objects.
The following room was concerned with ecology, and was lit by ambient orange and yellow and green lights. The wall displays described the effects of pollution on flora and fauna, animals and human populations. A small semi-circular tableaux with a moving painted (animated at times) background, and in the foreground three mannequins who each came to life to tell the story of different moments in the polluting and clean-up of the Souzhou river (a peasant, a worker from the 1980s, a contemporary specialist in a suit with ‘clean’ engineering skills to offer).
Outside of this display was a number of circular glass tanks packed with gold fish and other kinds, also some stuffed birds that had become extinct in the Shanghai region. The incongruousness of the stuffed birds (like the penguins and seals) next to the high-tech displays was notable. The museum had a subliminal question running through it about different forms of life, or even what counts as life, a question raised by a futuristic relation to technology. All kinds of possibilities were packed into this space: people, robots, computers, stuffed animals (dead things), animated mannequins, animated pictures, live fish.
The last section we spent time in was about conceptual ideas and bodily experiences of energy: currents, balancing and weight in movement, energy created by cycling shown graphically as enough to run various appliances. Perception and energy were also addressed in certain displays. This room was fun and the few visitors there were all engaged in doing things, notably with attendants on standby to assist. I was impressed by the mostly sophisticated way that games displayed complex concepts. Not many of the displays seemed gratuitously ‘interactive’ for the sake of engaging the attention of the young.
Janet Harbord
Today we went to Shanghai South Station mid afternoon. The approach seemed odd at first as you are denied a view of the station on the approach. You blindly follow signs including up two escalators where you can’t believe you’ll find trains in so elevated a place. But then the scene opens out at the top of the escalators as a futuristic, circular building of huge proportions, more like an airport than a station, full of light through the stadium-like domed roof and hard surfaces reverberating the sounds of human traffic like a swimming pool does. The structure is tiered as an outer circle where anyone can walk, a security check system through which you can go without a ticket, and a further inner circle where a ticket is required to pass through the gate and down into the centre, a lower space that the upper circle can look down into. This area was full of rows of seats in front of gates to the trains, holding pens where people looked dazed and vacant in a not unpleasant way. At the ends of each gate area were screens displaying the same content to all gates: advertising, train journey advertising/information, and a ticker-tape line of news along the bottom of the screen. In the centre of the lower circle a middle aisle displayed another screen with a message to the citizens, written in characters and without images.
As we watched we thought that the station had provided a space of relief from the anxiety that travel induces (getting to the station in time, being prepared, avoiding contingencies and so forth). Getting there, travelers were funneled into particular places at particular times, and it involved waiting at each stage. But waiting looked like light relief in this huge space where everyone was visible to everyone else, and the people who reached the central holding area automatically became the object of attention for those in the outer circles. The screens seemed to reproduce this sense of being on automatic pilot (the repeated loops of content), and also reassuringly bland in content (not demanding too much consciousness).
My over-riding impressions: guards blowing whistles not when the train is about to leave (the train isn’t visible) but at people lining up in a non-linear fashion, people carrying washing bags full of goods on poles balanced across their shoulders, people carrying plastic drums of oil and other stuff, teenagers with smart haircuts going home, a very alert baby strapped into a basket on a man’s back, a small drunk man persistent in his begging, rows of people filing onto the upward escalator as though they were scaling the heights, the whole scene organized as though it were choreographed for visual effect.
In the evening we had dinner at a French restaurant near the hotel, and then cocktails at a tower on the ‘other’ side, looking over at old shanghai. A mist came in and the lights were shaded out eventually, but it felt like a new information and banking area (Docklands) looking over at an old imperial quarter as if it were a relic. We had a long discussion about shopping malls and the history of the concept (I was trying to think through its relation to department stores via Friedberg), and enchantment as illumination, aspirational culture and boredom in stations (Rachel on Heidegger’s essay on boredom that opens at a station).
Janet Harbord
Visited the Museum of Urban Planning at The People’s Square. This is a municipal building at the centre of the city and imparts a strong sense of civic pride presented in the newest designs. It reminded me somewhat of Foster’s gerkin building on the south bank, with its displays of planning and overview of the city, but on a more ambitious scale, of course! On the exterior and over the sliding doors is a huge screen showing public information films and notices.
Inside, the entrance hall a huge screen in front of a fountain dominated the lobby, screening a show-reel of city life (to be seen in various parts of the city all week, for example on screens in the subway, it featured alongside public information films and news). Like a modern day city symphony film edited together with a corporate gloss, the various aspects of life were triumphantly shown: leisure in public spaces (a middle age couple dancing together in a park/street), workers in a new ‘clean’ technologically-driven workplace, an assembly line of robots making cars, painted faces and traditional dance performance leading into upbeat ‘disco’ performance to represent art and culture, and various types of sport, all shot with increasing emphasis on activity, fast paced cuing and a rousing soundtrack. I was gripped. The concept: a monumental city where everything working together (harmony), where everything is vibrant but also clean and new.
The theme was repeated upstairs in exhibits about the economy, industry, transport, all in stages of construction and development. This was one of the overwhelming sensations of the city, that it is under rapid construction and is already working efficiently, that massive investment in transport, education, information and service industries, ‘clean’ manufacturing, is taking place. There is definitely a sense of before and after (before is old industrial labour and production suggestive of dirty factories and pollution coupled with remnants of imperialism, after is the new cleansed workspace of robots labouring and IT workers and engineers in primary-coloured workstations, and a new post-imperialist, post-communist China). In addition to before and after, the ability to imagine the future is paramount, and the urban planning museum makes this clear in its ability to persuade the visitor (me at least) that this huge development is indeed planned, controlled and centrally managed. It is a vision that is rapidly becoming materialized (the transport system for example, and the building of Pudong).
The central space upstairs was filled dramatically with a model of the city (a model city in both senses), a microcosm of the rows and clusters of apartment blocks, iconic high-rise buildings at the centre and along the river opposite the old imperial banking district, the raised highway running through the middle, the display being lit variously (and to some unknowable remit) as we watched.
And as we watched this display, with Chris and Rachel discussing displays and panoramas, ‘as if by magic’ there was a circular raised ‘box’ behind us, to one side of the model city. This was a 3D ten-minute film of the city as an animation, a fly-over and through starting with the old airport and ending with the new. We stood in the middle next to a railing whilst the film started, its captivating principles being its shift of direction (suddenly you go this way and then it reverses and you instinctively turn around to be in the wake of the movement), and its ability to change levels of perspective, to swoop down and beneath underpasses, low over trees, high around the sky-scrapers.
In the afternoon we visited shopping malls, eating in a food hall with a perplexing payment system and multiple food options. Escalators dominated the central pillar of the mall as though people ascending and descending were part of the spectacle. Many global brands of shop (Starbucks, Addidas, Mango) as well as brands that were as expensive as these but not familiar. Stopped for tea with Lu Xinyu and a discussion of documentary film. By the end of the day and as the light faded, we had taken the metro out to the Wujiaochang (five corner square) in the Wanda area, the site of the egg, and the place where local people ballroom dance outside the mall, itself a lower grade mall than the others we had been into. The egg itself was larger than I had imagined from photographs and more of spectacle in terms of its light displays. I also hadn’t realized that there was a quite large road between the egg and the mall where the dancing happens, so that the space is even more incongruous for a social gathering of dancers. We walked up the road to look at the new IT area being developed which seemed nicely landscaped but quite familiar in a mediacity generic way. We walked in the other direction to look at the extensive Fudan University campus. By this time it was dark and the various light displays on almost every building took over the landscape: the lights that block-outline high-rise offices and apartments, the ‘falling rain’ light displays across the whole surface of a building, the multiple colours and patterns that change and pulse, and defy you to look away until you have understood the sequence. The illumination of the city was far more elaborate and beguiling than anything I’ve seen in other cities.
We were pacing and stretching time in the hope that the dancing might start, but it didn’t. Maybe it was too cold, we were.
Janet Harbord
Arrived mid morning and checked into the Donghu Hotel in the French concession, ate lunch in a Vietnamese restaurant. In the evening we met the photographer Chris has been working with, Wenhao and his wife, for dinner (food highlights were yam cut into straws with some berry sauce, Chinese cauliflower vegetable cooked with spices, fish soup). First impressions of the city: very calm, relaxed, unaffected by the presence of foreign visitors, beautiful fusion of a fading 1930s deco architecture and traditional Chinese buildings, a city of height and lights being constructed by the minute.
Janet Harbord
