|
Published 22/01/02
Letter from Shanghai
Ever since the Treaty of Nangking opened Shanghai
to foreign trade in 1842, the city has become a trading centre not
to be ignored. The setting up of the International Settlement in
1863 and free-trading concessions opened the way for this previously
minor, estuarine community to expand and exploit its special position
commanding intercontinental Pacific trade and internal export potential.
For some ten years Shanghai has been opening up its barriers again.
Recently, there have been dramatic new signs that this great city
is once again fully current in global culture, and is also returning
to major centrality as a financial centre. Beijing is always both
patronising and jealous about the potential of Shanghai, with its
cosmopolitan, expansive identity (however suppressed) while Hong
Kong has long held sway with its special status. The recent collaboration
and exchange between the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank and the city’s
own Shanghai Bank augurs well for the further liberalisation of
Shanghai’s financial institutions.
One major development has been the remarkable plan – now approved
by the city’s planning bureau – for the development of
a great ‘bioport’ covering some 165 square kilometres
of silt on Chongming Island, at the opening of the Yangtse River.
Chongming has long been held to be the ecological ‘garden’
of heavily industrial Shanghai. Mindful of the populace’s will
to see this great ‘lung’ preserved, a challenge existed
for the Shanghai authorities as to how to populate this extensive
maw of wetlands without destroying the delicate ecosystem which
prevailed, unspoiled, for centuries. The interesting thing is that
two western design groups, that of the British-based Studio BAAD
(from Yorkshire) and the venerable Philip Johnson’s New York-based
Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie Architects, together with Toronto-based
environmental consultant Jeff Stinson, have secured the project,
against French competition.
The challenge effectively includes a new town for 80,000 people,
disposed around a combination of marina, with hotel development
and a university campus. The ecological innovation is the creation
of a massive, floating metallic carapace as island, together with
a wing-like satellite communications dirigible. Studio BAAD was
impressed with the existent accumulation of ecological data already
established by Shanghai's academic researchers working together
with the Planning Bureau. Chongming Island is already recognised
as the world’s largest alluvial island, accruing some 500 hectares
of silt from the Yangtze River each year. This dynamic process of
alluvial growth has run for some 1500 years unchecked. As time goes
on, the zones of saltmarsh, wetland, grass areas, and well-oriented
woodlands planned by the architects will consolidate an already
burgeoning ecology against the forces of urban settlement. Presented
in July, the project officially takes off this coming year.
Shanghai's cosmopolitan status was greatly aided by the establishment
of various international trading concessions in the middle of the
19th century. At first, these were to the British and the Americans,
and then, following the International Settlement, to the French.
The concessions granted these western trading communities both autonomy
and extra-territorial rights.
The city, now with a population of over nine million, still boasts
the famous Bund waterfront, a thriving and expanding financial hub
of global reach. This year the march was stolen from other western
countries by Austria, in a surprising and bold initiative developed
between Vienna and Shanghai. Neither the United States, nor Britain
or France, were able to seize the initiative to mount such a major
visual arts exhibition: Austria saw the opening and moved expertly
to secure the potential goodwill offered by such a venture, enthusiastically
welcomed here by Sun Jiazheng, Minister of Culture of the People’s
Republic of China. Vienna had moved with centuries-old diplomatic
skill, in this cultural initiative led by the architect Hans Hollein,
who has been a Commissioner for the Venice Art Biennale for many
years as well as having been the Director of the l996 Venice Architectural
Biennale. The Exhibition of Art, Architecture and Design ran here
in Shanghai at the city’s Shanghai Art Museum through November.
It attracted major national and international attendance, amply
fulfilling the hopes of the Austrian State Secretary for Arts and
Media, Franz Morak. Li Xiangyang, the Executive Director of the
Shanghai Art Museum, saw his confidence in this unique Austrian
cultural world – both international and yet intensely regional
in a European context – absolutely fulfilled.
Considering that the population of Shanghai easily exceeds that
of the entire Federal Republic of Austria, the Chinese appraisal
of what Austria could offer was remarkably intelligent. Likewise,
the idea of including all the visual arts, with architecture and
urban design, came as highly prescient. Vienna in particular has
gone through a series of plans for development along the great river
Danube, and the fruits of this experimentation, including that for
Donau-City, were highly informative for Shanghai commentators and
for the public here, now seemingly attuned to the fast-changing
dynamic of Shanghai's new growth.
Perhaps in Shanghai’s view, Austria is really just one big,
sophisticated city. Somehow, that is the way its advanced, contemporary
culture permeates Europe and America. Recent exhibitions in Austria
have revealed the extent to which their ideas and culture spread
across the Atlantic in the 20th century, achieving a disproportionately
high influence in architecture, as with philosophy. Such a record
is particularly interesting to us in Shanghai, where we must establish
– not across an ocean, but within our own great country –
our own harmonisation of Chinese history, within a reconciliation
for the future following turbulent social and economic change. If
the Austrian ‘world view’ can be construed as being a
somewhat ironic expression in terms of contemporary art and architecture
(based upon its own imperial past successes of the former Austro-Hungarian
Empire – and its cataclysmic finale) the Shanghai equivalent
is not so different. Perhaps what is not the same, however, is the
mood of optimism emerging from Shanghai, founded again on economic
strength. This allows us to embrace the contemporary culture impacting
from non-Asian countries. In this connection, the remarkable progress
in Austrian contemporary visual art and architecture that we are
aware of actually encapsulates for us the pleasures and pitfalls
of these fields in the early 21st century. From Austria we have
gained much, and it is hoped that for Austria and for Europe the
cultural adventure this November will also yield dividends and further
exchanges.
The scope of the exhibition
Hans Hollein, as curator, defined the scope of the exhibition in
this way: he placed a great emphasis on the contemporary extension
of the ancient phenomenon of ‘crossover’, so much an accepted
feature of western classical tradition, yet one also familiar within
the unity of ancient Chinese art and architecture and its extension
through calligraphy. In the work of such advocates of the process
as Hundertwasser, Hollein notes this essentially long practised
Austrian characteristic. There is a particularly fluid exemplification
of such transitions which occur between painting, sculpture and
architecture, but also now in computer art and installations, not
so unlike the correspondence between calligraphy and say painting,
and architectural or tectonic meaning within the written sign. This
community of interest and intention was always visible between Hollein,
himself a superb graphic artist, working in architecture, industrial
design and also as an installation artist, and his contemporary,
Walter Pichler.
Contents surveyed
This survey of the exhibition, which occurred at the Shanghai Art
Festival, cannot do justice in the space available to the two dozen
or so artists and twenty or so architectural groups exhibited. But
it is possible, using selected examples of the work, to convey the
overall excellence of the venture, quite apart from the problems
of transferring such a wide range of work from Austria to the Chinese
context.
Architecture for export
As regards the architectural part of the exhibition, the focus
upon high-rise building as a theme, comprising both sculptural and,
one might say, totemic characteristics and intent, achieved a telling
relevance in the light of the New York World Trade Center attacks
of September 11. Rather than seeming obsolete, the Vienna tendency
offers a robust range of structurally dramatic alternatives that
contrast vividly with the banality of proposals in Berlin or London.
Such diversity suggests that high-rise urban cores will continue
to be a feature, and will be further pursued in cities like Shanghai.
The urban design presentations covering areas in Vienna such as
Wien Mitte, G-Town (Gasometer City) and Donau-City also involve
presentations by students.
The Millennium Tower built by Walter Peichl (Peichl Podrecca Weber)
in 1999, consists of an elegant composition of twin cylinders some
206 metres high. It helps to pinpoint the new area of development,
a landmark for the future. Hollein's own Media Tower is located
along the Danube canal opposite the historic city centre. He manipulates
urban scale with dexterity, combining three basic levels together
from different periods without conflict of scale or proportion.
In Donau-City again, Heinz Neumann achieves formal elegance with
an elliptical layout. Another elliptical solution to the tower is
that of Wilhelm Holzbauer, whose Andromeda Tower seems to encapsulate
the essence of what a tower can mean. Two schemes by Coop Himmel
(b)lau present varied consummation of such metaphorical leanings:
with the SEG Apartment Tower an idea stands where two houses are
superimposed so creating an interesting, multi-use space at the
actual intersection of the two. In a second presentation, they tackle
the mass of the G-Town Gasometer B by offering three new volumes:
one acts as a shield to the existing tower, the second provides
a kind of ‘apple core’ cylinder inside the Gasometer,
and the third spatial intervention comes as a multi-functional events
hall at the base of the enclosure. The old fabric of the gasometer
is retained, and acts to unify these separate elements in a highly
sculptural assemblage. Projects by Zaha Hadid, Gunther Domenig and
Rudiger Lainer introduce widely varied architectures; that by Raimund
Abraham shows how, in realising every Austrian's long-felt dream
to build in America, his design for the Austrian Cultural Institute
in New York ‘soars’ above East 52nd Street, completed
in 2001 and inspiring as a revocation of the spirit of New York.
But perhaps the ultimate architectural footnote to the exhibition
is the superb model of the award winning project (l998) by Hans
Hollein and Heinz Neumann for the National Grand Theatre of China.
The visual arts corollary
Returning to the theme of crossover in the visual arts, the work
exhibited by Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000) ‘The
City’ (1953) summarises the myriad opportunities and constraints
of the urban context, whether of Shanghai or Vienna. It is also
a touching requiem to such an artist of ecological concerns (he
died on an ocean liner close to Australia in February 2000). The
installation by Brigitte Kowanz, ‘Morse Code’ (1997),
made up of acrylic glass tubes and fluorescent lighting, inadvertently
makes us think of Hundertwasser’s passing, and the signals
transmitting news to Vienna of this sad occurrence. The works of
Arnulf Rainer, Hermann Nitsch, and Eva Schlegel all show that mixed
media with oil achieve new levels of attainment. Perhaps ‘The
Lady from Shanghai’ by Hubert Scheibl makes the city more cryptic
by a skilful use of monochromatic paint. The work of the master
graphic artist Walter Pichler (b. 1936) is inseparable from such
a comprehensive display of Austrian talent, and there has remained,
even since the l967 Visionary Architecture exhibition in New York,
a definitive ‘crossover’ essence that cannot but link
Pichler with his old colleague Hollein.
A more than typical achievement
The achievement represented by this superb exhibition may seem
typical from a central European or Viennese standpoint, but for
Shanghai City, today reaching for the heights of dynamic urban growth
and incremental culture that will – in time – far exceed
the pace and flair of even Vienna, this injection of succinct Austrian
talent is just such a catalyst as Shanghai has urgently been in
need of. We can, from Shanghai, now absorb the meaning of a transitional
global culture more selectively, from here, perhaps through the
same sceptical but exacting set of criteria that the Viennese have
always applied towards the overweening contemporary razzmatazz,
and so succeed, hopefully, in the pursuit of excellence as a 21st
century cosmopolitan centre.
|
|
