Team Photo

A stiff hike up a wooded path leads us to a restored but not-yet-open-to-the-public stretch of the Wall. Grace from Guangzhou art-directs a photo which will be used on the British Council's intranet, along with a story of why we're here. 
Basically, we won an award for Best Team Contributing to Cultural Relations - for the UK Now fest last year, the prize-money paying for our awayday. Except the team you see here is only about a third of what it was. So here's to the rest of you wherever you are. The sun is out, the foliage is turning amazing hues of gold and red, and we have the place to ourselves.

Modernism by the Wall

Today we moved the arts meeting to The Commune at the Great Wall. It's less a hotel, more a private collection of contemporary architecture nestled in the hills around the Badaling section of the Wall, north-west of Beijing. There are 40 villas designed by 12 Asian architects, all commissioned by China SOHO in 2001 (and exhibited at the Venice Biennale the following year). I stayed in one of Antonio Ochoa's five Cantilever Houses (see right), while other colleagues were in one of Kengo Kuma's Bamboo Wall villas. 
Beautiful, tranquil place, with most of the buildings blending in sympathetically with the surroundings. That said, I found some of the more austere, modernist examples somewhat jarring, the interior fit-out of our villa a bit of an afterthought, and a few were beginning to stain and surrender themselves to nature. The whole concept reminded me a bit of Le Corbusier's experiments in Chandigahr in the '50s.

Constructed Situations

Strategising with the team, followed by a trip to 798 to see three exhibitions at UCCA. Wang Keping's so-so wooden sculptures; Taryn Simon's chilling A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters which documents bloodlines through photographs and text (much of which appeared to be censored); and Tino Seghal's two installations or 'constructed situations' as he calls them...
The first is a pitch black room in which you grope your way into, slowly realising that there are people in there, chanting & dancing. The second a huge white hall with nothing in it except four people: a young boy, a twentysomething woman, an older man and an oldish woman. The boy asks you "What is progress?" and you start a conversation as you walk around the gallery, passing from one person to another. It reminded me of Turn Left Turn Right's You Once Said Yes which I took part in in Edinburgh two months ago. One was presented as 'art'', the other 'theatre'; one inside a museum, the other in multiple public spaces (but definitely not in a theatre); one you can sell to a collector (usually a museum), the other you can't. Ah, the vagaries of the art world...

RIP Lou Reed

Transformer was one of the first albums I owned, forever associated with Ziggy-era Bowie, Mick Ronson and that Herbie Flowers' bass riff (much to his disgruntlement probably). After that I bought the less accessible Berlin and then discovered the Velvet Underground. But for me he'd lost it by the mid-70s. There was a welcome blip with New York in '89 and Songs for Drella (with John Cale) in '90, and the hype of the VU reunion a year or two later (which I didn't catch)... and the surprise of his marriage to Laurie Anderson. Anyway, I shall play Walk on the Wild Side, Satellite of Love, Perfect Day and all in his honour tonight. "It's time to say goodbye, bye bye"

Chinese Painting Comes to London

Court ladies preparing silk, 12th Century

The V&A's Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900 exhibition opened in London today. I wasn't there but I gather it was a hit. Amazingly, it's the UK's first major exhibition of Chinese painting since 1935. The western telling of art history tends to focus almost exclusively on Europe and (later) North America, and yet here is evidence - if it were needed - of sublime art from the east which has been otherwise pretty much ignored. Depictions of Buddha dominated early on (just as depictions of Christ did in Europe), but court life, landscapes, wildlife and other subject matter follow, much like in the west. It's true that there are differences: painting in China was generally on silk, rolled up in a scroll and viewed occasionally, not on framed canvas and hung permanently on walls; much of the development of western art has been about technique and perspective while Chinese art is perhaps more about the poetry of expression. But what do I know. In any case, sounds like a great show.

Super-smog

This week a super-smog has covered Harbin in the north-east of China. It seems that a combination of the switching on of the coal-powered municipal heating system (temperatures plummet to -40C in winter) together with, ironically, an unseasonably warm week, plus the usual car exhaust and other pollution issues, has resulted in the PM2.5 level rising to an incredible 1,000 micrograms per cubic metre, forty times the recommended daily max. Today visibility dropped to 50m in much of the city and the international airport, highways and 2,000 schools have been closed. 
Last week the WHO's cancer research agency officially classified outdoor pollution as carcinogenic. Hey ho. 

West Bund Cultural Corridor

Running around Shanghai, finishing with a jaw-dropping visit to the new (or what-will-be) West Bund Cultural Corridor.

Even in the context of China's booming economy and ambitious town-planning, the West Bund project is, to coin a phrase, 'awesome'. It seems that the half-a-dozen major new museums that have opened around town in the last year or two aren't enough. So a long strip of semi-industrial land on the west bank of the Huangpo River, opposite the Expo 2010 site, is being transformed into what officials hope will be a cross-between Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural Centre and London's South Bank. It will take 10-15 years but they're not hanging about. In December, two private museums will open: billionaire investors Liu Yiqian & Wei Wang's Long Museum 2, and the Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneur Budi Tek's Yuz Museum. They are a mess of construction and yet they are due to open their doors in 6 & 8 weeks respectively. Of course they will do it. 

Next up will be the public West Bund Museum (designed by David Chipperfield) and Waterfront Theatre (designed by a Swedish company). Then there's the massive US-Chinese Oriental DreamWorks film production centre.

But my main purpose was to check out the Shanghai West Bund Biennial of Architecture and Contemporary Art which just opened, staged in a series of fabulous derelict factories and oil tanks. No time to go into it in detail, but it was well curated and impressively presented. I was particularly interested in the sound art exhibition called RPM. David Toop was in town last weekend to give a talk and I didn't know.