intro, day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, last word
So I'm back in London now, having survived the long flight over the mountains of China's interior, Mongolia, the deep snow of Siberia and the vast red Gobi desert. I've managed to get to grips with the biennale, but what about Shanghai itself? How did my view change from the initial impressions?
The artist Marlene Dumas said, when she saw the city at night for the first time, that she didn't need to see the biennale itself; the city was spectacle enough. Certainly such extraordinary sights as the blue strip-lights illuminating the underside of the glossy white flyovers have a jaw-dropping effect on new visitors. Their effect is completely futuristic, utterly superfluous, and quite fantastic. Biennale curator Hou Hanru described it, only half-jokingly, as 'flyover pornography'.
These are the things that grab you as soon as you arrive in Shanghai: its colors and its vertical sprawl. But street level turns out to be equally extraordinary to foreign eyes. For example, crossing the road in Shanghai is a bewildering process. Rule one: pedestrian crossings don't mean anything. Rule two: traffic will only stop if the crossing is manned; that is, if two officials blow their whistles and step out into the road holding their palms towards the traffic, fixing drivers with a don't-even-think-about-it stare. Rule three: even these officials have no effect on the most numerous vehicles - bicycles (including mopeds, scooters and three-wheeled motorcycles).
But what happens if the crossings aren't manned? In this instance, the process is somewhat more straightforward. Step one: pluck up courage. Step two: walk out into the moving traffic. And that's it; vehicles will either swerve round you or stop just before they hit you. There is no other way to do it. Crossing the road is a leap of faith: you simply have to assume you will not be run over. This flow of traffic - motorized, pedal-powered, pedestrian - is astonishing to watch. It's like a sentient form of Brownian motion, with particles flowing in amongst each other but, crucially, never colliding. Well, rarely colliding. But if it didn't flow in this organic way, the sheer volume of city-center traffic would lead to total gridlock - which would be the British solution.
To escape from the currents of traffic you might duck indoors off the street, and find yourself in a large room with crowds of people watching rows of numbers on a screen. Around the back of the room are small monitors, with numeric keypads and magnetic credit card swipers attached. What is this place? The screens look like something from the stock market, but surely not. Well... actually yes. Like betting shops in the West, Shanghai has establishments allowing you to pop in and have a flutter on the stock market. This sophisticated form of global capitalism - somewhat jarring when you remember that you're in a communist state - seems to be played by a fairly elderly group of locals, each of whom carries their own jar of odd-looking tea (which can be any kind of vegetable matter in boiling water). You can understand why Marlene Dumas felt that the city and its society were ten years ahead of its official culture. It was something many people seemed to be thinking.
But despite all of this technical innovation, there were still extremely traditional aspects to the city, such as the animal market.
One of the problems confronting visitors to international exhibitions is that the question of ethics and morality within art become muddied when confronted with work that springs from very different cultures. This is something that Hank Bull, Director of the Vancouver Center for Contemporary Asian Art, pointed out in the biennale's conference: 'You need to consider not only the context that art is produced within, but also the context of your own judgment'.
This ethical relativism - different cultures are ingrained with different ideas of right and wrong - obviously comes to the fore when you're confronted with other aspects of the society. The animal markets in Shanghai would hardly win any World Wildlife Fund awards for most humane treatment, but this is the way things have been for a long time here. And if I were to complain about the bucket-loads of terrapins, I'd be open to accusations of cultural imperialism: imposing my own beliefs on a different culture. But then this leads to an impasse. So extremism from either side will lead nowhere. Discussion is the only way forward, and discussion takes time. But at least the biennale has started this discussion in some small way.
And the beauty of cross-cultural discussions is that they bring a greater awareness not only of other cultures, but of your own too. So the animal market gets you thinking about the ludicrous situation in the West where every Hollywood film ends with a line about how 'no animals were harmed during the making of this motion picture', while the cinema kiosk sells burgers made from factory farmed, offal-fed cattle. Western liberal sensibilities about animal welfare have led, not to the abolishment of cruelty, but to the cruelty inherent in Western lifestyles being hidden from view. And this will have to be part of the discussion too.
Trade is something unavoidable in China, from the explicit celebrations of major new deals heralded in the state-run papers, to the implicit message of the ubiquitous skyscrapers. The Chinese, of course, have a very long history as powerful traders. It is only since the infamous Opium Wars of the mid-19th Century - when the British created unforgivable social problems by forcing the Chinese to allow them to import the only product that they, the British, could sell to them, opium - that China has been on the 'receiving end' of trade relations with the West. Many historians will point out that the West's technological, economic and military superiority has only really risen over the last century or so: a mere blip in the long history of Chinese culture. There is a feeling that this blip may be passing, and certainly the Chinese authorities are confident that the future belongs to them, perhaps taking the West's model of capitalism and perfecting it.
And what impressive changes were happening in the West during the opening of the biennale? Well, the US was setting about trying to choose a new President. The extraordinary farce that this soon became was all the more amusing when you consider how narrow the political spectrum in the US is: as the American intellectual Noam Chomsky has pointed out, choosing between the Democrats and the Republicans is about as meaningful as choosing between Pepsi and Coke.
Hunting for an English-language channel in the in the hotel one night, I came across CNBC who were talking, of course, about the election. A US bond trader - of all people - came out with a line that stayed in my mind during the whole visit: 'It doesn't matter who you vote for; the Government always gets in.' Which is all rather ironic when viewed from a one party state.
Will Western Capitalism be known in the future as Eastern Capitalism? Many of the Westerners at the biennale expressed concern that Shanghai seems to be embracing Western practices that they themselves are deeply dubious of. The cry seemed to be 'don't follow us'. But it seems clear that if the East does embrace Western capitalism fully, soon enough the West will be following, not leading.
The Jin Mao tower is a deeply ambiguous icon. On the one hand it symbolizes an exciting development: the confidence not only to build big, but to truly hybridize the international skyscraper style with a Chinese twist. It is by far the most distinctive of Shanghai's new buildings - awesome in many ways. And yet it also stands for corporate elitism, defining the new power in China as money rather than politics. The building is uncomfortably high, utterly disconnected from the rest of the city. If there is low cloud, hotel residents can't see anything at all, and have to ring the front desk to find out if it's raining at street level. Although there are windows everywhere, none of them open - it is a sealed space, a microenvironment. So if the biennale is all about exchange, then this should not be its symbol - and yet it is reproduced on the biennale's introductory leaflet.
It is odd that such a tower should be built within a political system that, theoretically at least, is about equality. It is also odd that at the airport a coffee should cost the equivalent of $5 - high by any standards, let alone in a city where a hearty meal with drinks can be had for the equivalent of $3. It would seem that the gap between rich and poor is skyrocketing, quickly reaching - surpassing even - Western standards. Doesn't anyone remember why Chinese Communism was born in Shanghai? Western capitalism, rampant in the town during the 20s, left the local workers so defenselessly exploited that they started the revolution. It's surely not an extraordinarily smart thing to say that this current capitalist boom may well spell trouble.
So the Jin Mao, despite its impressive qualities, would not be my icon of Shanghai. What would then? Perhaps it's not the city's achievements that are most interesting, but its current state of achieving. That is, it's the scale of the building work that astonishes, more than anything that might end up actually being built. If it is dynamism and development that makes cities interesting, then Shanghai is a model city. So the evident flux of such a fertile situation is one thing that sticks in the mind. The other is scale. The scale of China is difficult to get your head round: it is more populous than both North America and Europe combined. Now Shanghai is obviously not representative of the whole of China, but that sense of scale is there. The vastness of the municipal works, obviously achieved in a short space of time, shows a will and ability to make gargantuan things happen. Leaving aside the question of whose will this represents, the simple fact of the work is astonishing.
However, there is one image that will stay with me as an icon of Shanghai, simply because I can't imagine seeing it anywhere else. My cab back to the airport left at 7am. Shanghai was waking up and the vast highways out of Pudong were of course deserted. But we weren't the only people on the roads; teams of people were cleaning the highway. As we approached I realized that these teams consisted of elderly ladies, and they were sweeping the highway with brooms made of tied twigs. This bizarre collision of massive infrastructure and traditional, domestic cleaning seemed a fitting image to leave Shanghai with. It's frightening to think what might be achieved here, because if a city can do this, it can do anything. And I guess that's the feeling I came away with: watch out world.
intro, day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, last word— End —