In the first half of the twentieth century, Shanghai was a city that attracted performers, writers, artists and designers from around the world. A breeding-ground for new art forms, such as oil painting, cinema and poster art, this ‘high time’ of Shanghai’s past has long been considered the city’s cultural and artistic zenith. Today, Shanghai’s cosmopolitan heritage is under restoration. Over the past five years in particular, a growing number of international artists have made Shanghai their base.

Since its establishment in 2006, the new media art collective, Liu Dao (aka island6), has become something of a stalwart of the Shanghai art scene and beyond. The collective’s creative and operational centre is its production studio and exhibition space in Shanghai’s m50, also known as Moganshan arts district, where individuals from different backgrounds come together to engage with and comment on contemporary life in Shanghai. The collective’s signature LED art, interactive art and sculptures makeup only a fraction of Liu Dao’s ever-expanding repertoire. Meanwhile the tone of the work is often humorous, delivering social commentary in unexpected ways — see the LED display, Puxi Fluffer (2012), pictured above, which references the city’s dependence on an army of ‘ayis’, or domestic cleaners, for a cheeky example.

With its international member-base and technically and conceptually experimental practice, Liu Dao embodies the vision of cosmopolitan Shanghai. Liu Dao’s collaborative structure, valuing communication over egocentrism (their approach has been likened to film production), provides a model for cross-cultural and collectivist approaches to art making, curation and arts management in China.

In the spirit of Liu Dao’s uncompromising collectivist ethos, the following interview responses were submitted anonymously by its members.

CHANGSHA

The following is an excerpt from the introduction to CHANGSHA, the forthcoming photobook from Rian Dundon and Emphas.is Press.

I first went to China on a whim. I didn’t really know what I was getting into. It was 2005 and I was 24-years-old. I made a one-year commitment to stay in the country. In the end I stayed for six.

At first, when I didn’t speak the language, I would hang out in pool halls and practice counting balls in Chinese. I couldn’t talk but I knew how to play and I knew how to swap cigs with the hustlers and lookers-on. Later my Mandarin came and I could go to dinner with people or hit the karaoke clubs. Mr. Tian was a whiskey wholesaler and one of our first friends. His brother owned The Red East – a popular nightclub and karaoke house where I got my first taste of provincial nightlife with the bar’s cast of boozers, working girls, and off-duty cops. I photographed. During the day I moved through the city digesting what I saw. I began to develop an idea for the kind of pictures I wanted to make in China, but I knew it wouldn’t be possible in just one year. It was important that I avoid the typical images – the Mao posters and soldiers, the futuristic cityscapes – and remain true to an experience separate from politics. I wanted to make pictures that didn’t necessarily read as China. Personal photographs. Private photographs.

In October 2008, photographer Wang Jiuliang began a project investigating waste disposal in and around Beijing. Following the trucks that collected his daily rubbish, he discovered eleven large-scale refuse landfills scattered around the close suburbs of the city, each one growing daily alongside the skyscrapers, housing developments, and general urban boom that surrounded them.

Beyond this, Wang also uncovered an underground industry in which rubbish was being removed from the inner city and taken to hundreds of illegal dumpsites around the urban fringe. Here, people were making their homes and their living, building houses from discarded construction materials, wearing clothes they had gleaned in the trash, and making their dinners from the city’s food scraps. They raised pigs on leftover organic matter. Local shepherds brought sheep and cattle to graze between the bottles and plastic bags.

If Documenta XI hadn’t supported Yang Fudong in the completion of his film Estranged Paradise in 2002, we might have lost an important contemporary artist. More than five years into the film’s production, Yang was considering leaving the world of contemporary art to take up a career in the commercial film industry – and then the Documenta festival stepped in.

As it is, we’ll never know Yang’s feature films (although we can be sure they would have been beautiful). Instead we have his delicate and poetic film and video pieces, and ongoing questions about where they should best be shown.

Chen Shuxia is a Sydney-based arts writer currently completing her Masters on Chinese contemporary art history at the University of Sydney. She spoke with Yang recently in Sydney, where he was attending the opening of his exhibition No Snow on the Broken Bridge showing at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) from 18 March – 4 June 2011.

Many thanks to Chen for this interview.

At a small bar in Beijing, called D-22, sixty years of rock history are currently being mashed up in one thrillingly experimental moment. It’s almost like the entire canon of pop music has fallen out of the sky – punk, folk, reggae, rock, noise, rockabilly – and young Chinese musicians and their audiences are making of it what they will, taking a bit of Johnny Cash with a bit of Radiohead, Bjork and Joy Division and jamming it into something of their very own.

For the past four years, New York photographer, Matthew Niederhauser has been documenting this musical scene, posing his subjects against a red wall in the back room of the club or capturing them in action on stage. Joyside, P.K.14, AV Okubo, Carsick Cars, Hanggai and countless other Chinese bands have passed beneath his lens, mythologised by his consistent style and focus on D-22.

A selection of these photographs have recently been published in a book, Sound Kapital, which conveys the colour and dynamism of this scene. Click ‘Read More’ below to see some of these pictures, and to read Niederhauser describing what he calls the ‘creative orgy’ currently taking place in Beijing.

Zhang Ding in Last Words (Phase 1)
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
July 16 – August 28, 2010.

Born in 1980, Zhang Ding belongs to the most recent generation of Chinese video artists, growing up beyond the shadow of the Cultural Revolution and in a world saturated with images of the West and a new aspirational China. Rather than commenting on China’s history, or even its recent economic reforms, Zhang’s work is marked by feelings of alienation from contemporary society, a sense of retreat into fantasy, and an ongoing struggle with desire. For Zhang the political is personal, and highly mediated. Mixing video art and installation, Zhang creates worlds of light and sound, surreal cinematic dreamscapes, and intimate performance pieces. Originally from the Western province of Gansu, Zhang now lives and works in Shanghai, a city he has made something of a muse for his work.