The Selling of Shanghai

Art in America, July, 2001 by Jonathan Napack

When Shanghai's Pudong International Airport opened in 1999, it was meant to symbolize the rebirth of China's largest city as a 21st-century commercial metropolis. A soaring glass structure by French architect Paul Andreu, designer of the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is of a quality and scale apart from other air facilities in China. Inside, travelers can sip espresso while reading uncensored international newspapers.

But the place is depressingly empty. Shanghai's air traffic doesn't begin to fill such an enormous hub, and travelers prefer the musty old Hongqiao airport 20 minutes from downtown. Pudong, by contrast, lies more than an hour away--necessitating a trip across a huge expanse of rice paddies being cut up into factory tracts before one reaches the Huangpu River, the city's head.

In fact, the new airport is an apt metaphor for Shanghai's art ambitions: lots of new infrastructure applied to a place with few of the underpinnings of a modern society, plus an exasperating emphasis on "face" over function. In the last five years, the city government has made a huge bid to become a new Asian culture capital. In 2000, its world-class antiquities museum and high-tech, $150-million opera house were joined by the new Shanghai Art Museum, which houses a collection of post-Imperial (after 1911) painting and sculpture.

Despite these advances, censorship can be repressive even by Chinese standards. The city's arts activities are overseen by the Shanghai Cultural Bureau, a leftist throwback known abroad for blocking the Shanghai Kunqu Opera from traveling to the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 1997 Next Wave Festival. The new opera house often plays half-empty for lack of interesting programming. The art museum, which occupies the renovated 1930s home of the old Shanghai Museum, juxtaposes a budding collection of contemporary Chinese art with propagandistic Socialist-Realist paintings portraying Mao, Deng and other political figures in heroic poses.

Embracing the Bund's Art Deco magnificence on one side and the steel-and-glass postmodernity of the Pudong district on the other, the view from the Huangpu River evokes Shanghai's schizophrenic identity. In the 1920s and '30s, Shanghai, with its reputation as a freewheeling nexus of international money and culture, was easily the most cosmopolitan city in the country. After Japan invaded in 1937, it became increasingly unlivable, although the International Concession (composed of the former U.S. and British zones) remained beyond hostile control until December 1941, and the French Concession was effectively independent even after that. (Established in the mid-19th century, the "concessions" were autonomous foreign sectors with their own legal and military systems.) Following years of civil war, on May 24, 1949, the Communists finally "liberated" Shanghai. The area then became the focus of intense ideological indoctrination, to the extent that it later formed the main power base of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

Today's city, its efficient and pervasive security apparatus left over from earlier times, is more like Singapore than the prewar Shanghai. Unlike Shenzhen or even Beijing, it maintains an economy driven by the state, not by entrepreneurship, often through artificially inflated real-estate projects. The political tension simmering elsewhere in China is lacking; most Shanghainese appear to be happy with the current authority as long as it stays pragmatic and business-oriented But this megacenter of 13 million people must somehow reconcile its global ambitions with its conservative politics.

"Politics in China is not about ideology," says Biennale curator Hou Hanru. "It's about competing agendas, and not losing face." Local Party officials often use cultural institutions as vehicles for personal ego trips. A high-ranking cadre, for example, reportedly interrupted the renovation of the Shanghai Art Museum to order the use of white marble and chrome so "foreigners can see this is a truly modern museum."

Except during special events like the Biennale, unofficial exhibitions have

never flourished. "You can't trace tendencies here, unlike in Beijing where artists band together in movements," says Zhou Tiehai, 35, probably Shanghai's best-known artist overseas. "There's not really a story or a narrative," adds Lorenz Helbling of ShanghART, Shanghai's most important contemporary art gallery. "It's much more individualist. Everyone has to make his own way. Artists here don't form schools, they don't even socialize."

For a while the underground club scene provided a focus, led by DJ Coco Zhao and Generation Y heroine Mian Mian, who besides writing immensely popular novels about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll also promoted parties showcasing new Chinese art and music. However, worries about "decadent influences" that loom with China's upcoming entry into the World Trade Organization led to a crackdown. Popular nightclub areas like Maoming Road were mostly shuttered, and books by Mian Mian and other young writers were banned.