the leap
Cai Guo-Qiang, Du Wenda’s Flying Saucer D on top of the Rockbund Art Museum, 2010. Photo by Lin Yi, courtesy Cai Studio
Of course one sometimes does thought experiments that involve substituting Beijing for New York or London. They’ve become harder in recent years, but I still believe in the delightful ridiculousness of taking the Chinese city at its own word as metropole. In that spirit, I bring you notes from the shanzhai fast lane, the one in which you overtake peasant-built sports cars.
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The Shanghai government did a brilliant thing by making the World Expo a reason for a long vacation. This is what my deputy editor Aimee and I realized on Sunday afternoon as we made the leisurely Air China hope to Shanghai aboard a near-empty 777. She dropped me at the newly opened Minsheng Museum–where we had been a few weeks earlier for a carefully orchestrated opening, but with all the people, unable to properly see the show–and headed back to her place on Xiangyang Lu to unload a suitcase and hard drive containing 120 gigabytes of pictures from our Beijing launch party last week. A few hours later she and I were reunited on the site of the new Rockbund development in Huangpu district, along with our advertising director Philana, fresh in from a day with a client in Kunming.
Beyond the Expo, the Rockbund is the talk of the art-world town these few weeks. A strip of buildings expertly–albeit not yet completely–renovated by architect David Chipperfield, it revolves around one that housed the Royal Asiatic Society back in the 1860s and has just now been rechristened a museum–the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM for short), with Taipei MoCA alumna Lai Hsiangling installed as its inaugural director. The fuss was for a show by Cai Guo-Qiang of works from his latest “Peasant DaVincis” project. If this sounds like it needs some explaining, it does. Back in 2005, Cai curated the first Chinese pavilion at Venice (along with NAMOC director Fan Di’an) and one of the key works was a piece by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in which a peasant named Du Wenda attempted to send a homemade saucer into flight. The art world, rather cruelly, stood around drinking champagne, puzzled and derisive. Cai has reappropriated this concept, finding a whole army of peasant inventors who have made everything from aircraft carriers to submarines, peering out from the austere new museum’s various terraces and public spaces.
It was a bubbly affair, with food stands denoted by China’s various regions–Sichuan! Dongbei!–serving local peasant delicacies to the assembled nouveaux riches. I must have gotten sick on a yam taken from a wicker basket, because after the rest of a night that included drinks at El Coctel on Yongfu Lu and a quick visit to the curiously named Club Obama beneath the Yan’an Elevated Road, I spent the entirety of the next day in my hotel room at the curious Moller Villa (that multi-towered Austrian curiosity you see as you drive in from Hongqiao) trying to work up the energy to catch the evening’s other openings. It was the last “weekend” night of the five-day break for the Shanghai crowd, but I called it an early evening after a look around Yue Minjun’s show of deserted landscapes at Three on the Bund and a simple Shanghainese dinner on Maoming Lu.
On Tuesday I woke early to catch the first Dragonair flight to Hong Kong, then remembered how much I love the SAR as I sped through the immigration “e-channel” with a bar code and a fingerprint and booked my hotel room for the evening aboard the Airport Express over the city’s ubiquitous PCCW wi-fi network. I decided to sample “East,” the newest member of the Swire Hotels group, right around the corner from our Hong Kong office in Quarry Bay. To my surprise, “boss” Thomas Shao was also working from Hong Kong, so we arranged for dinner at a new Japanese restaurant in the Heritage 1881 complex on the Kowloon side, the latest addition to Glibert Yeung’s small empire of Hong Kong eating and drinking establishments, which most famously includes Dragon-I. It was a very Gilbert evening, as dinner faded into drinks back on the Island side at his Tazmania Lounge. I found myself deep in conversation with a structural engineer who had abandoned wind-resistant design for a hedge fund and his girlfriend Nadia who staffs Gagosian Gallery’s HK office.
Wednesday was one of those PRD days, with a morning run through a few of the current Hong Kong exhibitions in preparation for the supplement we are preparing for the Art HK fair later this month and even an iPhone purchase on behalf of a colleague. My 24 hours in HK ended in a quick coffee with critics Robin Peckham and Venus Lau before a hurried boarding of the KCR through train to Guangzhou. Back aboard the Chinese train, I spent two hours on the phone with our Beijing office as the attendants came by with instant coffee, thankfully not to the disturbance of my fellow passengers, all of whom were similarly engaged.
In Guangzhou I was slightly thrown off by the relocation of the East Rail Station’s cab stand to the far side of the plaza, next to a massive waterfall. I walked the three hundred meters through the humid air and hopped a taxi straight to the Garden Hotel to meet Charlie Koolhaas, just returned from London, about her contribution to our upcoming Africa issue. (Charlie, a photographer, has done extensive research on the southern city’s African community.) We selected images over Campari and soda in the Lotus Pond bar, surrounded by traders in town for the commodity fair. Dinner was with her cousin Rem D and his wife Ferrari Koolhaas Xiao, principals of the shoe brand United Nude which is headquartered in Guangzhou. A lavish Korean banquet with the Kool clan and their team ensued, diligently waited upon by the Canto-Korean owner. Back at the Garden Hotel I spent an hour on the phone with my brother, about to leave Senegal for Mauritania, working on his contribution to our next issue. It was all I could do to get my four hours before heading to Baiyun for good old CA 1310, the first link of the day back to Beijing and the world of work waiting there.