A Curator’s Notes – Why Shanghai?
Within the first day of the opening of the Shanghai exhibition on February 12, 2010, a public engagement of unexpected proportions with the art on display began. Individuals have been writing up a storm on comment cards, comment books, news articles, and online blog postings that expressed their emotional responses to the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of the exhibition material. Added to the writings are lots of verbal feedback in various conversations with visitors, stimulating interesting buzz around the museum. I do not want to miss out on this exciting community discussion! This blog series, A Curator’s Notes, is where I will contribute my two cents on, and inside knowledge of, the controversial issues and hot topics presented in Shanghai at the Asian Art Museum.
Hot Topic #1: why was the exhibition presented in this way that you see here at the Asian Art Museum?
The answer has several layers:
- As an art museum, we aim to tell a story (you may call it a history) of Shanghai through the visual materials made by and for its residents.
- The visual materials available to us, on the whole, present an image of the city as eclectic and dynamic.
- So we made the decision to analyze how and why such a public image was created for Shanghai over the past 160 years.
Of course, there are a number of other stories (or histories) that can be told about this city! What the Shanghai exhibition does is give audiences one perspective–as unbiased as humanly possible–on how and why these visual materials look the way they do, whether the images depict historical reality or wishful fantasy.
Do you think neutrality is a fault in this case?
Come back for my next post, where I will try to tackle the challenge of how to regard visual representations of women in the Shanghai exhibition!
2 Responses to “A Curator’s Notes – Why Shanghai?”
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Nancy on March 25th, 2010 at 11:44 pm
Since I did write a critical post about the representation of women in the exhibit, I will be interested to read your upcoming commentary. However, I was also concerned to be fair about the show and point out the good things, along with the areas that I thought could have been handled better.
TW on May 7th, 2010 at 11:25 am
I just saw the exhibit yesterday, which unfortunately presents an ahistorical view of the city. The catalogue seemed to talk about the history of how foreign concessions came to be in Shanghai, beginning with the Opium Wars. But this is not reflected in the exhibit which is what the vast majority of visitors will read.
In fact, the very first placard of the exhibit makes it seem as if the city of Shanghai just sprang into being in the 1840s. Then, somehow, one reads, there was a great deal of foreign influence. In no part of the exhibit did the word “extraterritoriality” seem to appear (admittedly, I did not read every label carefully as I was feeling disappointed by the exhibit’s lack of historical context).
To overlook the importance of western imperial claims and military action in China during this time and the concurrent decay of the Qing dynasty, among other things, seems a grave omission in exploring the fascinating intersection of Western with Chinese esthetics in this city that continues to the current day. Indeed, this omission misses the opportunity to understand the context of China and Shanghai’s current rise.
Clearly, the influence of Western culture on Shanghai is interesting, and the exhibit seems simply to take it for granted. Important events of Chinese history, depicted in the gorgeous posters, are overlooked as well. A poster celebrating China’s steel output in 1958 makes no reference to the Great Leap Forward, which fired backyard furnaces that took household metal and re-melted it into heaps of slag, and the farcical statistics that counted such endeavors toward national steel output.
An exhibit placard recalls a speech given by Chairman Mao about the use of art against one’s enemies. While this famous speech was made in Yannan in 1942, far from Shanghai, its repercussions would be felt throughout the country, culminating in the disastrous Cultural Revolution, the suffering of which no city, not least of which Shanghai, was spared. A haunting woodblock done by a Chinese artist depicts a downtrodden laborer cleaning the street while in the background what seem to be European or American sailors carry off a woman against her will into an establishment marked in English as “Bar Cafe.” The label that describes this wonderful piece makes no reference to the possible nationalistic undertones of the work. These two are but a few examples of the undelying politics of the times that deeply shaped these rich visual representations.
While the exhibit highlights, perhaps romanticizes, the exoticism of Chinese women clad in Western-influenced qipaos, striking seductive poses, in stark contrast to the classical Chinese representations of women, there is a fascinating and rich history found in Western imperial expansion, the decadence of post-imperial China, and in Chinese nationalism realized through the rise of the Communist Party, that must be understood to appreciate Shanghai’s current trajectory. Without this context, the exhibit falls short of its potential.
Shanghai has always been a special city in China; its world famous Bund filled with art deco era architecture- how much of this synthesis of Western and Chinese esthetics (and mores) is simply a product of colonization, and how much of it is due to the particular character of Shanghai and the Shanghainese? That, I would like to know.