philip tinari

Yang Fudong, The First Intellectual, 2000.

I spent last week in Shanghai for the first half of a theory workshop convened by a humanities center from the University of California system. The theme is “Designing China,” and the speakers are a lot of the people whose names circulate enough that I feel like I have longstanding intellectual relationships with them even though we’ve never really talked, or in some cases even met–Yung Ho Chang, Hung Huang, Liu Suola, Leo Ou-fan Lee. For those of us who exist in intellectual professions outside the academy proper, it’s a strange but joyous thing to be thrust back into the seminar room. You quickly catch up on the new words that weren’t yet in vogue while you were an undergrad: “haptic,” “conviviality,” “elsewheres.” You remember that every point made, every question raised (every speech-act, I should say), is to be called an “intervention,” a word that to me at least skews a bit fierce for what are ultimately civil interchanges among mutually respectful colleagues. (Then again, I used to find it annoying that people in the art world called every room a “space,” and I got used to that.) Ultimately you have to cherish the quaintness of a professional community whose comfort and status derives so transparently from its function of preparing the ninety-nine percent of undergraduates who don’t go on to further disciplinary study for “regular” careers staking so much self-worth on the possibility of envisioning itself as deeply critical.

That said, their conversations are to mass opinion as the haute couture shows are to Zara, and I know which I like better. People trade in smart, generally extemporaneous coinages that, while not suited for mass consumption, seem to explain everything for a second or two: “recombinant urbanism,” “every city needs its big idea,” “not deconstruction, reconstruction.” You sit there and listen to folks, your age or a bit older or younger, who have spent the last few years “avoiding the pitfalls of both localism and exceptionalism,” wondering “how to take the surface seriously as an analytical space.” As in any field, the best maxims are those that seem completely trite to the speaker but completely novel to the listener, as in, “Every anthropologist who’s sat in on or led brainstorming sessions knows that they’re closely related to ritual and magic.” I also still relish good post-structuralist wordplay, and am glad to note that the belabored multi-parenthetical zingers of the fin-de-siècle (”medi(t)ation,” “dissemi-nation,” “(gyn)ecology”) seem to have given way to a more brazen form of punning–searching for the “Dasein of design” and locating “the ‘decade’ in ‘decadence.’” Sometimes, people say things that are downright insightful, like Benjamin Lee’s extended analysis yesterday of the reflexivity of financial instruments like derivatives as rehashing the ethnographic conundrum of how to account for the observer’s always-already disturbing presence. (He somehow got from there to Frank Knight’s 1921 distinction between uncertainty and risk, and from there to Knight as Weber’s first translator, and from there to the Protestant Ethic as a response to the fundamental salvation uncertainty of Calvinism. Wow. PDF here.)

For all that smartness, though, people still make the same sorts of pedestrian observations (lane-house-next-to-the-Starbucks stuff) and traffic in the same vulgar pomo/poco contentions you get at most art world panels. The big question–Whither, China?–is still the big question. “Context” as concept looms large, but people don’t find the specific dynamics of how this or that text gets made very interesting, and they still fail to pick up the earnest treatises on Harmony placed at the seminar room entrance by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences hosts. If the art world is, as Jonathan Napack once said, a parody of the real world, then the humanities are a really long conversation about it. Investments differ and affects fluctuate, but at the end of the day, the two are cousins, and we’re all clear on the fact that both beat actually having to “intervene” in anything so specific as, say, an assembly line, a construction site, or even a state-secrets trial in Chengdu.

As this seems to have become an even more regulated and regular subset of the cultural tourist itinerary than the 798 gallery prance, I think it’s time someone set out some standards to insure that every curious foreigner comes away with a similar understanding of Shanghai past and present. Below, some points that the responsible tour guide should cover:

1.) Start with the part about the fishing village and the Chinese walled city. Traders in the mud and such.

2.) Move straight on to the Opium Wars, making sure to conflate the two. Offer a cursory sketch of how settlements were granted, first to the Brits, then to everyone else. (Advanced practitioners only: insert line about how the Zhoushan archipelago, not Hong Kong, was the initial object of British desire.) If the audience is predominantly American, knowingly make the point that “the French like to do everything differently,” leading them not to join the International Settlement.

3.) Veering toward Fuxing Park, field intermittent questions about the trees and those who planted them. Explain that Huaihai Lu used to be called Avenue Joffre.

4.) You must, absolutely must, include the fact that only 2000 actual French people lived in the French concession at its height, and that most of the residents were, even then, wealthy Chinese.

5.) Make at least twice the point about the inexorably wartorn nature of China in the early twentieth century. Pepper with unsubstantiated references to internal demographics of the same period, saying things like, “The north was full of warlords and corrupt officials. Shanghai was for businessmen.”

6.) Walking into a typical neighborhood, (extra points for having your group stand in such a way that they completely obstruct the flow of residents in and out of their compound, and for each dirty look thus drawn) get to the part where refugees flood the villas and their gardens driving opportunistic developers to improvise a form of block housing that draws on Western forms and Chinese fengshui. All hail the lilong!

7.) Moving on to the present, tell at least one moving story about a family reclaiming its real-estate inheritance in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. From there, segue into a discussion of the well-intentioned but ultimately flawed nature of preservation efforts today. Point to, say, a Russian Orthodox church that became a winebar in the nineties before becoming a retirement center in the world-expo run-up, noting that the crosses on the architraves remain, while the icon of St. Nicolas has been removed.

8.) Drop everyone in Tianzifang to shop for “Chinese design,” contrasting the organic nature of this renovation with the situation in Xintiandi. Sniffing the cesspool, explain how one young designer inherited a cramped apartment here from her grandmother, turned it into a shop, and that within a year the whole thing had exploded, a testament to the new vitality of the creative industries. As the remaining locals shuffle by holding chamberpots, tripping over the workers installing sewer mains that will soon make these daily journeys obsolete, marvel at how far Shanghai has come, and how far it has to go.

By this point, everyone should be ready for lunch.

Zhang Enli, Trees IV, 2004. Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm.

Coastal City Mall, 2008, Shenzhen.

Yesterday was one of those magical Pearl River Delta days where the exigencies Koolhaas started proselytizing about a decade ago seemed to resonate even truer than I always imagine they must have at, say, the GSAPP or Documenta X. That old maxim about Shenzhen skyscrapers designed in three days? Sure seemed unchanged as I walked with a designer friend from his studio to a diner down a kilometer-long elevated walkway lined with every sort of retail operation and offering views on myriad foundation-pouring works in progress. This was Nanshan, the new CBD. The walkway and surrounding mixed-use had opened back in December. “They’re imitating Hong Kong,” he told me, which would have seemed less funny if we hadn’t been just a few kilometers over the “border.” We spent a long afternoon proofreading and then ate at the standby Hakka beef hotpot place in Xiasha, a VIC that emerged to service the truckies coming over through the Huanggang crossing, before they amped it up and opened it 24/7 to individual travelers in preparation for a coming subway and rail link.

If you’ve never crossed at Huanggang, you should, but only once. Where Lo Wu propagates this PRD urban fiction of a pleasantly connected stream of city centers, with the KCR light-rail running alongside the through-train to Guangzhou, Huanggang is all fuck-you elbow throws and spitting and plastic burlap sacks. You scale this baroque pedestrian overpass, negotiating poorly designed signage (all in Chinese of course) into the exit hall. After getting your stamp, you are dumped into a giant port-authority-style bus terminal where you must buy a ticket for one or another destination in Hong Kong. Wanchai is as close as it gets to Central, but fortunately I was staying on the Kowloon side, so Mongkok sufficed. Here’s the catch: If you have a suitcase, they’ll make you put it in the lower compartment, but absolutely do not slip into the Airport Express mentality of In-town check-in. After the bus has driven the five minutes through the no-man’s land between border terminals and deposits you in Hong Kong entry land, DO NOT NEGLECT (as I did) to take your suitcase from below and carry it with you through the second crossing. The irony was that the last time I crossed at Huanggang, which should have been the last time I crossed at Huanggang, the hassle of having to reclaim one’s bags multiple times was enough to drive a certain megacurator to cancel a talk and hitch a cab directly from the in side of the border to HKG, just in time to hop AF185 back to CDG.

So there I was, waiting behind ten other “visitors” (i.e. mainland Chinese, to whom Hong Kong belongs, but who are still extremely restricted in terms of entering it) as a very deliberate inspector actually read every line on every entry form (strangest question: place of passport issue), wondering why the e-channel barcodes that work so flawlessly for enrolled foreign-passport holders at the airport had not yet been installed here at Lok Ma Chau. It was at this point that I realized that there was no way I would be boarding the same bus I had been on before; all the Hong Kongers, who made up 80% of the bus population, had swiped their ID cards and cleared customs in seconds flat. Finally through, I could only attempt extreme politeness and precipitate a brief walkie-talkie exchange among the bus operators searching for my bag (I was fortunate to have remembered the exact departure time of the original bus) and then rode the 30 minutes into Kowloon trying not to think about exactly how one would go about trying to reclaim an item that had last been seen in the space between two borders. Miraculously, the bag was there on the curb in Mongkok. Some days, you just get lucky.

Tin Hau, Jeffrey du Vallier d'Aragon Aranita, color photograph, 2003.

Jeffrey du Vallier d’Aragon Aranita was always one of my favorite bit players in the whole rise-of-Chinese-art story. I remember glancing him from afar, surrounded by a big-enough entourage, at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2006. He gave a talk at the Art Salon about his never-quite-clear vision for “MOCA China,” a chain of contemporary art museums throughout the mainland. It was a talk he gave a lot in the high times of 2006 and 2007. One day in April 2007, he wrote at the behest of a mutual acquaintance asking me to join the “advisory board” of his museological corporation. Lots of people got e-mails like that, and some of them made the journey, as I did, to the swank offices of one of the white-shoe law firms which was graciously playing temporary host to JdVdAA’s still inchoate dreams.

Reading this week’s report in The Art Newspaper that he fled town owing a million HKD to his landlord and another million to friends including his former girlfriend and curator whom he left with the legal responsibility for his aborted venture, I felt a little sad. The boom years, in the Chinese art world at least, were marked by a stream of ever grander schemes by people wanting to leverage money and/or idealism into complete control of the history to come. Every dinner would bring news of a new magazine, a new website, a new non-profit space, a new museum. I eventually lost interest in keeping up with it all. The Ullens Center was only one example, albeit one of the very few that actually exists two years later.

But Jeffrey was different, distinguished both by the grandiosity of his vision and his absolute lack of tangible resources. He would sit up in his friend’s law firm’s conference room and propose a museum that could take over Hong Kong’s Central Market–a site long coveted by major developers with actual money and actual employees. Every chance conversation would lead to a brief flurry of e-mails, which would promptly die out. Everyone who encountered him seems to share this story, and it would have been remarkable, were that not so frequently how things go in China. People from “MoCA Shanghai,” opened in a city park in 2005, used to get offended when people would ask if they had any connection to “MOCA China.” That was before chief curator Victoria Lu left for a stint at “Moon River MoCA”–an ill-conceived art space at a hotel and condo complex in Beijing’s far eastern suburbs with Sikh doormen and probably lots of illegal gambling dens that similarly never materialized.

Now we learn from TAN’s summary of earlier reports that:

Jeffrey du Vallier d’Aragon Aranita was born in 1954 in French Polynesia, orphaned at the age of three, and raised by his grandmother—a blind village shaman—in Japan where he spent eight years as a novitiate Zen monk acquiring artistic skills copying ancient paintings and woodblock prints. After returning to Tahiti to live with his wealthy French grandfather, he became a pearl fisherman, then at 17 stowed away on a freighter to Hawaii. He studied architecture at the University of Hawaii and took summer workshops in photography with Ansel Adams and Minor White, later studied at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research in New York, then worked as an academic in the US, a reporter covering the drug trade in Latin America and a private banker. He also claims to have an IQ of 143 and to have met Elvis.

I hope he enjoyed his Facebook-documented trip to “Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Tahiti, and cities in Italy, China, Nepal, Jordan, Israel and Japan.” I hope he’s having fun bodysurfing in his new home of Oahu with his teenage daughter. And I hope he sells a huge screenplay about his youth as a Zen-copyist-stowaway-fisherman-photographer-banker-drug-reporter and pays back all the people he stiffed.

I love the Official White House Photostream on flickr. Particularly when read from Beijing, it offers a fairly compelling vision of transparency, which of course we realize all the while is just a sequence of manufactured moments, always public, but not until now dispersed with such vernacular ease. One friend who worked in the Clinton White House, a key member of our immediate post-9/11 crew of Chinese-studying expats, would fondly recall how she made it a point to stay friendly with the photographer, the better to insure that the money shots of her and 42 would keep coming her way. And they did, as 8 x 11 prints in Manila envelopes to be horded away for special occasions. She showed me her collection once, right around the time when Wang Qishan, pictured above at center, emerged from Hainanese obscurity to take the mayoralty of Beijing as Meng Xuenong took the fall for the SARS coverup one April Sunday afternoon. This was only a month or so after the Iraq invasion, and the images of a slightly earlier America she had squirreled away already seemed decades old. It’s been a long six years. Wang Qishan spent most of it chairing the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, which earned him the distinction of giving the lone interminable speech of the Olympic opening ceremony (and every Chinese opening ceremony needs an interminable speech). Obama went from Springfield to Washington. And digital photographs got much bigger than three or four megapixels. Now Wang gets a basketball, and we all get to watch, even disseminate, with a choice of six different resolutions. Below, Obama and Berlusconi in L’Aquila, a city which exists for me as the major signpoint on the A24, which is what you take for the first half of the drive from Rome to my ancestral hometown of Guardiagrele. I don’t think Wang Qishan has been to the Abruzzi, not yet.