Shanghai, The Old French Concession Area, Art and a parasite

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9.23am - I’m going to catch the bullet train bound for Shanghai. It’s fast.

I want to check out the Old French Concession area for two reasons. The first is that there is an exhibition with a Bill Viola piece that I want to see and secondly, I’m thinking of moving to Shanghai and I’m going to check out the areas with galleries in to try to get a snap shot sense of the place and how it instinctively feels.


Somehow, I’d forgotten what it’s like to catch a train in China. I forgot about the pushing, shoving, huddling, surging and this is when everyone has a pre-booked numbered seat. For every station, there are hundreds of trains, for every train, there are hundreds of passengers and for every passenger, there is at least one big bag the size of a small car. These people and bags have to shove through the barriered area, squeeze through one small open glass door into the entrance of the station, and then put all the bags through the security scanner machine. Then everyone resumes surge mode and drags bags and pushes each other up escalators and down stairs through the station. I have no idea how I could have forgotten this when it has been the same at every station that I’ve been in across China.

When the boarding gates are opened I move with the tide of people and a woman pushes in front with a wheelie trolly bag with a dead pig’s leg sticking out - nothing unusual there but it still makes me laugh out load.

Everyone almost waits patiently behind the white line for the train to pull up alongside the platform but only because they are held back by the whistle blowing attendants who blow loudly when anyone steps over the line. The whistles are going pretty much constantly.

As I get on the train, the train smells of pee.

After sitting down, as expected, a rather unsavoury looking character sits beside me but he’s instantly moved on by the woman who’s seat it is. He then sits directly in front of me instead and I know that he has been following me for a while. I maybe white but I’m not green, I’m not just off the boat.


The train takes 34 minutes to get to Shanghai. Pretty impressive. All the way, I am chatted to by the woman at my side hoping to get her daughter into China to teach.

In Shanghai, immediately, the atmosphere feels very different to Suzhou and I like the anonymity of it all.

25 minutes later, I’m walking up and down YueYang Road looking for the James Cohen Gallery. When I find it, it’s tucked down a lane in a gorgeously pleasant area that reminds me of the late 80’s in Peel Street, behind Kensington Church Street when I used to visit Chris at Brian’s house but this area is full of Chinese and it also has a French feel.

The gallery is housed in a beautiful building and I feel that the work is lost. All I can sense is the smell of polished wood and lemons and I look around at the beautiful old floor, walls and ceilings. No one is around, there are no invigilators, no receptionists, the work is open to anyone and anything and I’m left wondering how it is safe and managed. Viola’s piece is in a central room flooded by light from the external room which is next to it. The work doesn’t stand alone in this space, there is too much ‘noise’. The piece is silently presented on a plasma screen but the room does not allow it to build a mood - too much light, too much noise, too much clutter even though the room is bare.

Instead, I can hear the whisper of the air con, the sound of the men plastering outside, an electric bike alarm and the staff washing pots. The piece does not hold me and I remember the great projected pieces that I have seen in Durham cathedral in the dark, taking my breath and imagination in the mid 90’s. This piece doesn’t do that for me and my attention turns fully onto the architecture of my surroundings.

I’m told that the building was built in 1936 by the French before the Cultural Revolution, the Vice Premiere lived in it in 1939 and the Japanese took over it in 1945 to 1949, nothing much else is known. It is now rented from the landlord who rents it from the Chinese Military base. It’s really beautiful.

I’m invited into the director’s office and I move excitedly around bouncing in a very elegant chair, jumping up to look at beautifully mounted very old photographs from Shanghai which is placed on a stunning black original mantle piece whilst looking directly across the room at another smaller Viola piece presented on a table top sized plasma screen.

I manage not to touch anything. This room is also very gorgeous and is filled with elegant things that are all placed a in very considered manner - something I realize I have missed but don’t need. I notice everything and take it in in a nano second.

I move on before I step into really cheeky mode and ask to look around the other floors of the building.

I look at the surrounding streets in a blink of an eye - the houses, the apartments, the small lanes leading to gorgeous old buildings, the tree lined avenues, the people, the shops and I feel content.

I walk down to Art Labor - a small gallery on Yongjia Lu and meet Martin Kemble, the Director. He’s passionate, charismatic and oozes this whimsical charm. He knows his stuff. I think he could also be a fair but tough cookie. I like his gallery and what he is trying to do. He gives me a gift - a tactile, turquoise, fold-out card art guide of Shanghai. I remember that before I left the UK, I was a little fed up of art, then I remember the last exhibition I saw just before leaving last year - Cy Twombly at the Tate Modern and how that deeply moved me (and Patti). And then the time before, when I saw his works on paper at the Serpentine - maybe 2002. Art is embedded within me, or rather an appreciaton of a certain kind of creativity, a making of marks with either pencil, pens, crayons or light - sometimes it’s latent but it’s ever present. It’s how I see and feel the details in life. I understand this when Martin reawakens my interests towards a complete pleasure in art and its inspirational feelings.

After getting my art fix, I walk to Taikang Lu. It’s fantastic, all old and new and jumbly mixed up with plenty to see. Walking up Maoming Lu past the Shanghai Lyceum, I have an aim to visit the Lomography shop in JinXian Lu. I nearly bought a plastic pinhole Diana in Guangzhou last year but felt more responsible about life, now I don’t have to feel the responsibility of making sure I pay everything for two people.

The lomo shop is so cute that it shines like a ‘buy me, buy me beacon’ and after much deliberation about the unbelievable plasticness of the Diana camera I am considering buying when I have previously owned a very old Kodak baby hawkeye pinhole and also used both twin and single lens medium format cameras, this one seems at best ludicrous and at worst a stupid buy but I want it. I really want it. The lure of 120 roll film in a pin hole camera with no real knowledge of what is in the frame until the print arrives is exciting and I remember real pleasure in the unknown image and having fun with a pinhole. Oh my god, just having fun with a camera.

At the train station, I’m surrounded by about 3000 people in just one of the 10 waiting rooms, I lose myself properly for the first time in weeks. I forget where I am, what time it is and who I am because I’m reading the lomo Diana book that came with my camera.

The interview with Mark Sink is particularly capturing. Here are a few of his words. ‘the plastic sound of the winder is best. It does everything cameras are supposed not to do. It has vignettes and edge blur, unreliable shutter speeds and it’s fragile. It melts in the sun.’ This made me laugh out load. When I saw it and held it, I said, “My god, it’s so fucking plastic”


I love it already. I know where I can get the roll film processed and printed and also have it digitized in Shanghai, hopefully I’ll just play with it and if I’m lucky, just very lucky, I will get one great shot.



Here’s Mark’s haiku on the Diana Lomo

Flight with light plastic
My love huntress Diana
Lightbox of my soul.



After my trip, I feel more normal again, happy and relaxed. I didn’t think about him once in Shanghai because it’s no longer about him but on the train home, my thoughts turn to yesterday and his mean threats towards me and his total refusal to pay me the money that he owes me and I will leave these final words for him…

You scratch every day through life collecting more and more dirt under your finger nails. You have lost your soul. You are a parasite.

Parasite

1. Biology. An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.
2.
a. One who habitually takes advantage of the generosity of others without making any useful return.
b. One who lives off and flatters the rich; a sycophant.

It’s 11.30pm - 16 April 2009 exactly one calendar month since I read your texts from her. You’re welcome to it all. Live your life based on lies and in a parasitical way.

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Comments

[nicola]

cant you erase that parasites name off your travel blog tracey? x

[TraceyDoxey]

parasite
it's gone