I Love Shanghai

A great city is also a great lover, always changing, complicated, surprising and seductive, no matter how much time you have spent together. And Shanghai, according to Martin Kemble, the curator at Art Labor, which is currently hosting a group show titled I Love Shanghai, certainly qualifies as a great lover.

"Most people love it, and some of us love to hate it at certain moments. But just like Londoners or New Yorkers, with all those cities' litany of misery and issues, one can never quite quit it," Kemble said in introduction to the show, which brings together the works of 13 artists, hugely varied in form, background and personal relationship towards Shanghai.

At the entrance hangs the work of Li Lihong, four silver jigsaw pieces, shining like little bubbles of mercury, roughly recognizable as wo ai shang hai, the four Chinese characters that make up the exhibition's title, "which is apt because Shanghai glitters like gold and jewels too yet is more than a little toxic to many who spend a while here," Kemble said.

But they can also be read as "Love My Shanghai" or "Shanghai Loves Me" and so on, leaving the phrase open to interpretation.

Some of the works on display are so blatantly funny that any further explanation would be redundant. Part of Eric Leleu's Subtitles series of fake Chinese propaganda slogans, "This is a Photo Opportunity" is a photo of a red banner emblazoned with the title phrase strung up on the Bund reminding tourists to snap a picture of Pudong's glitzy skyline.

Wang Qing's painting Ship of Fools is also an easily accessible piece. On board a big black ship are horses, boxers, Peking Opera performers and young girls who are happily jumping into the sea. Since no one is steering the ship, it seems it will be stuck forever in the middle of the sea and the present chaotic carnival will go on and on.

Past and Present in Future Time

Past and Present in Future Time, taking its title from Burnt Norton, the first poem of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, is among the more obscure works on show. The empty underground railways coming from unknown places and leading into the darkness afar is an understandable metaphor for time, but a station-like building where monitor screens and half of a boy's face can be seen makes the whole thing surreal. "The print is based on a Shanghai metro station near People's Square. In my version it has been rebuilt out of plywood reclaimed from Brooklyn, NY construction sites; note the graffiti, as though it is an elaborate clubhouse," John Jacobesmeyer, the creator of the woodcut painting, explained.

More Brief Encounters

And some works are just emotionally overwhelming, such as More Brief Encounters by Shay Kun and Nocturne by Emma Fordham. Both depict night scenes, when the city is most colorful and cold. Nocturne is dominated by a green hue, an accurate reflection of the city if you have seen the giant, almost tomblike high-rises under construction at night. In More Brief Encounters, a car beaming its red lights is like an animal or UFO seen through a rain-spattered window. Whether this encounter with another car means anything is left to the silence and rain between them.

"My work deals a lot with memory and perception and one of my first memories was watching Blade Runner as a child and asking myself if this is China or some sort of apocalyptic future," Kun said. "How distorted our memories of these events are is what I am trying to capture. The reality as it happens - looking out of a window on a rainy day - is never remembered exactly as it was."

The most erotic love letter to the city at the exhibition is Important knowledge for healthy relationship between local and outside races human, deliberately taking the form of badly translated blackboard propaganda, the six sections of which seem to be unrelated and nonsensical, but all have something to do with sex, such as a Chinese dragon having intercourse with a dinosaur, with a bilingual endnote concerning weather and destiny.

Two visitors talk to each other in front of artist Lu Xinjian's Shanghai City Light. Photos: Courtesy of Art Labor Gallery

"The city is certainly dressing itself up and for going 'out into the world' - by this I mean being included in the phrase 'New York, London, Paris, Tokyo...' - with all sorts of the accoutrements of modern lifestyles, but at the same time, it seems to skip over necessary growth phases which lends itself to a certain make-believe feeling, being dressed up, but lacking depth. Feels like an adult who went straight from adolescence to adulthood somehow," Kemble said.

"The piece in the show I most enjoy is Lu Xinjian's Shanghai City Light," he added. "The piece is on a flash program and lights in the middle at first and expands ever outwards in a nonstop repeating pattern, just like this big city we call home for the moment, ever expanding, bright colors and brilliant lights, as long as the power keeps flowing through the wires."

Date: Until January 5

Venue: Art Labor Gallery

Address: 411, Building 4, 570 Yongjia Road 永嘉路570号4号楼411室

Admission: Free

Call 3460-5331 for details