Cabinet on the Move

Another long hiatus here on the blog as the Cabinet of Curiosities made the Big Move from Saint Louis, Missouri to Bakersville, North Carolina...along with all the stuff we've had in storage for the past 10 years (!!)

All this time that I have been posting about it, the Cabinet has been quietly minding its own business in the beautiful downtown StL loft of my friend, architect and professor, Peter MacKeith.

Former Associate Dean at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art at Washington University in  St Louis and now in Fayetteville as Dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas,  Peter wrote a wonderful thoughtful essay, This Phenomenal City: Christina Shmigel's Shanghai, in St Louis 2011, for the catalogue of my show at Bruno David Gallery.

The journey of the Cabinet from Shanghai to StL was quite the travail. First stuck in customs in NYC, then caught in blizzards, it finally arrived two weeks late for the actual opening of my show.  On the night of the second opening, it nearly got snowed out again. So I'm very grateful to Peter for offering post-show to give it safe harbor & for all the years it has had in the good company of John Watson's sculpture (far right of photo above) and Peter's collection of blue shirts...

Now the Cabinet is in my new studio, buried under boxes of all the other work from that St Louis show - plus boxing bags & golf clubs & dozens of other things for which we can't believe we paid storage fees...it's like having the Goodwill truck deliver donations... 

The Cabinet of Curiosities goes on the road again (oh the weight) in the spring for my show in Washington, D.C. at the Hillyer Art Space. Opening 4/1/16: come open drawers, live and in person!

Native Repair #1

I've been giving a lot of walking tours lately. On various themes: Art Deco on the Bund, Shanghai Off the Beaten Track, Creative Shanghai (Art & Markets near the Bund.) I love doing the walks; they bring me close to the textures and details that make the city inspiring to me. (So please contact me if you are game for one!) 

What I love best is that every walk, no matter how well planned, offers itself up as improvisation. I  think of it as the walk throwing out a few gifts & I walk with curious anticipation. As we turn to exit from a derelict building, suddenly, there's a wedding shoot, the bride in a voluminous strapless gown voguing in the doorway, brilliant scarlet against all the concrete grey. Or, as I stop on a corner to show images on my iPad of Little Victories, an mobile art gallery created by artists from the Swatch Art Residency, a posse of rough&tumble three-wheel-deliverymen gather around for a rousing discussion amongst themselves about...well, I don't know exactly what but they sure are excited to see their tricycles on my screen.

Or just something perfect like this:

An improv known from my travels in Africa as "native repair."


For more chair repairs, ones that put my favorite pink plastic string to work, click here. For many more images of variously patched up chairs in Hong Kong, see Michael Wolf's wonderful collection of photographs, Bastard Chairs. And finally, to come make art in Shanghai, click here to apply for a residency at the Swatch Art Hotel.

The Smoke Flowers of Cai Guo Qiang

In Chinese, there are firecrackers, 鞭炮, bian pao, in whose name the second character gives a nice little onomatopoetic blast. And there are fireworks, 烟火, yan huo, which literally translates as "smoke fire", which I misheard early on as the very poetic 烟 花, yan hua: "smoke flowers."

But in the case of the fireworks performance of the artist Cai Guo Qiang... they really were smoke flowers. Eight minutes of colored smoke (environmentally safe food coloring) on the themes of "elegy, remembrance & consolation" that gave me that feeling one sometimes feels so powerfully, of being privileged to be right here, right now, at this very moment in time.

Here's a little gif of images shot during the opening salvo of his current exhibition, "The Ninth Wave," at Shanghai's Power Station of Art. Thru 10/26/14.

Click here for the artist's video of the full performance ('cause it's really not the same without the pao!),  here to experience Cai Guo Qiang's artistic power & charisma,  and here for Peasant da Vincis,
an early project of Cai's in Shanghai, that I also truly loved.

What Do You Love Most About Shanghai...

...is the question I most dread while Stateside (where I have been these past few months.)

What, if anything even, do I love about Shanghai?

Do I love the food? Not especially & sometimes not at all.
The people? Only a statistically insignificant percentage of the population.
The air quality? Like Rick about the waters in Casablanca: I was misinformed.

Makes me feel like a complete curmudgeon.

So, in the face of The Question, it was a very good thing that, yesterday, I went for a walk.

(Actually it was a few days ago but technology has stymied me: the photos below are meant to be the slide show found here.) 

Because, as I walked, I was reminded that there really is a thing I love most about Shanghai & it's also the thing that the Cabinet of Curiosities is about.

The walk that I walked was mapped by the artist Petra Johnson for her multi-city project Walk with Me. Accompanied by another walker, usually a stranger to her, Petra walks a predetermined route. At 15 fixed points or "islands," her companion is given a small slip of paper with a prompt that frames the next section of the route: "observe a moment of kindness" makes the street a very different place from "identify a moment of tension" (which was marked on my walk by two parked bicycles suddenly falling over of their own accord.) The responses to the prompts are noted down & kept in an archive called the Composition of the Ordinary.

Starting at a kiosk on Shaoxing Lu, a very sweet street, well known to me as the street where Petra lived when I first came to Shanghai (& she was among the very first people I met here & was often a guide in those early years as well...) we wended our way thru streets unknown to me until, finally, we arrived, several hours later, at the Power Station of Art, the former power station that now houses the Shanghai Biennale & other mega-sized shows of contemporary art. Skirting new high rises, flashy commercial developments and broad traffic-filled roadways, the route ran like a hidden river, along streets & lanes seemly unchanged since I first encountered Shanghai 10 (!?!) years ago.

I walked with Petra (top photo) and sinologist & curator Anja Goette in real time but while I walked in Shanghai, they walked in Berlin. Anja opened the prompts in Berlin, & by way of WeChat, we overlaid the two cities with moments of surprising synchronicity. This world is a strange and mysterious place.

What startled He-Whom-I'm-Trailing & me the most, and constantly, when we were newly here was the intimacy with our co-inhabitants that the city imposed upon us: a man scrubbing inside his boxer shorts at a fire hydrant, a woman at the curb washing her hair, a child testing the aerodynamics of scrap of  paper in the sprawling sidewalk chaos of his family's fruit stand, sleepers of all genders & ages sprawled on cots & lounge chairs, escaping airless rooms for the slightly cooler air of the street... The line that divided private space from public space seemed hardly to exist.

But with the modernization of Shanghai, that feeling of intimacy subsided. The sense of a being one in a "school of fish" that I loved in the daily swarm of bicycles (see post re: Little Pink) disappeared with the advent of metro lines & automobiles; the open-air street life shuttered up into glass-fronted shops & air-conditioned mega-malls. Mobs of trendy(ish) young couples trawling for international brands replaced the small posses of card-players with their undershirts rolled to air their bellies in the summer heat.

And so it came upon me with a rush of feeling when I found that curious and disconcerting intimacy in tact & thriving on the streets of Petra's walk. It raised in me a revery of tenderness towards the city & its details, toward particular individual lives. It returned to me the sense of wonder & amused affection with which I began the Cabinet of Curiosities, the desire to preserve various small moments of extreme & delightful ordinariness, to build a collection of physical objects that would trigger this extraordinary mundane of which I already anticipated losing track. 

As seen on WeChat, Berlin, a vibrant place in my imagination, seemed quiet, historical, spare of objects & beings, almost stunningly so. Helsinki, on my first visit there recently, with its calm & order & the purity of its design sensibility, had me nursing a secret nagging wonder: wouldn't I, over time, feel lulled into boredom there? 

                                                                        

But Shanghai: the sheer busy-ness of what a Chinese friend calls "the not-so-organized" space, the unpredictability, the constant (or incessant & unremitting) stimulation. To walk out the door & see: a plastic basin of eels tip over, eels slithering by the dozen down into the sewer drain; slightly dated dresses catching the breeze on a laundry line, perhaps those of one of the park's ballroom dancers, a woman trying to retrieve the opportunity lost for lipstick & high heels during the androgynous monotony of the Cultural Revolution; a family on low stools, shelling peas, their son fully concentrated on his homework at a card table, the scrawny cat at his feet working over a fish head; a net sack full of bullfrogs 3 times the size of my hand. So many very particular details so very close, so available to one in a flood of strangers.

Petra's walk returned to me the opportunity here for ceaselessly just plain noticing. The crazy density of textures - not necessarily of beauty or culture or history - just of everyday life. The closeness of all these individual souls living out their individual days as part of a huge anonymous blob of 22 million beings living all together in this one spot. 

So now next time someone asks the dread question I've got the answer...

(Much thanks to Petra for designing the opportunity & to Anja for the company! That really was a great walk!)

iDTown Residency #2: The Beach

Finally, a series of long overdue posts to bookend the post introducing the cast of characters at the iDtown residency...an amazingly productive time for all & here's what got made...

I was so entranced by the factory that I might not even have mentioned that we lived a stone's throw (or really, a leap over the prefab worker's shelter on the far side of our garden) from the beach of the South China Sea. But, interestingly, for all four of the Chinese artists (out of the seven of us), it was the ocean & the beach that were the thing. 

Ed Lo, perhaps answering his ancestral call to sea, spent his days on the beach harvesting sound. You might imagine this sound as that of the waves breaking on the empty shore during the lonely off-season but you would be entirely off the mark. This is China & even in a deserted village there is ceaseless human activity. Each day of even marginally good weather the beach filled with wedding photographers & dressers & stylists & their prey, the [very young!] newly- or soon-to-be- weds.

photo credit: my bad studio snap of Ed's beautiful b&w photo...
for more beautiful images go to "Ears & Eyes" at www.auditory scenes.com

In Ed's black & white still, it looks like La Dolce Vita but it's actually Happy Island Photography, working to the susurrations of the charismatic photographer's "xiao xiao Xiao." (smile smile Smile.)

At the end of residency, everyone's studio box became their exhibition space...a new experience for all to remove the traces of a working studio & transform the space into gallery. The transformations were lovely in every case but it was in Ed's studio that I stayed on & on, listening to the stones & cement speak the quiet that was in hiding at the beach... Click here for something of the experience in Ed's "Eyes & Ears: Homage to Rolf Julius." And here for his take on the tranquility of the factory, "Eyes & Ears Special Project: Concert for the Empty Loft."

While Ed was trying to grasp the current moment, Jiang Hong Qing had flown off in his mind to the future history of Guang Hu, to a time when China is the world's only superpower & deeply invested in the genetic engineering of humans.

Photo credit: Collected from our WeChat exchanges...I think it's shot by Vivay, Glorious Barista.

On Guang Hu Beach, employing a plastic doll allegedly modeled on the Chinese-American basketball star, Jeremy Lin, and a slew of props ordered from the amazing Chinese online marketplace Taobao,  Jiang Hong Qing staged "Dust Harbor," a short animated film that somehow managed to fully capture the inner life of a young soldier yearning for home. Seemingly abandoned by his command, yet continuing to serve out of a sense of duty, he ponders the meaning of existence & of selfhood as reflected in the individual grains of sand on the beach. 

Jiang Hong Qing received a classical academic art training but eventually turned to video & animation. Film, he says, allows him to explore what he feels is the essential human condition, our existential loneliness, the way in which we are each ultimately unknown to the other. But, as He-Whom-I'm-Trailing observed, it was probably Jiang Hong Qing's skill as a figurative sculptor that gave the plastic doll the range of expressive postures & gestures that allowed one to so fully empathize with the young soldier, so completely believe in his identity and personality.

Li Xiao Fei whose work is all about factories - to date, he has filmed in some 190 of them - was often away from our factory, filming in the nearby industrial cities of Guangzhou & Shenzhen. Not so surprising as it's the factory work life that fascinates him & our factory was hollowed out of all but us "creative industry" types. But, in the end, it was not the factories but the stories told by the Guang Hu villagers about the dark tankers that hovered off the beach that inspired the video Li Xiao Fei showed in his studio box.

Juxtaposing the wonders of wedding photography & the silent menacing presence of the tankers illegally dredging sand offshore, Li Xiao Fei's video was poignant & amusing & quietly provocative in the mix that makes all of his work so absorbing to watch. As with Jiang Hong Qing, there's a central premise that informs Li Xiao Fei's Assembly Line videos, an epiphany that came to him as he rode the Circle Line Cruise around NYC, the reality that all of us in our way are on an assembly line, each of us finding meaning where we can in what we do. He writes: "Assembly lines, large or small, uphold social systems and maintain a surface appearance of order... This order is constantly being cut up, restructured, transformed and rebuilt into an illusory reality."

photo credit: all above snapped by me from videos playing in the artists' studio boxes

The little bell sound that Taobao's Chat makes is now forever associated in my mind with the artist who made it possible for us all to be at the iDtown residency in the first place, Chen Hang Feng. Those of us who don't read Chinese kept him so busy ordering materials on Taobao that he unfortunately never got to make any of his own work. But he did get to the beach. To all of our awe, in a wetsuit bought on Taobao, for up to an hour each day, Hang Feng swam in the cold cold sea.

Next up, what the factory inspired...

iDtown Residency: The Artists

The floating corners on the left side of this image belong to the floating boxes that are the six studios set variously slant inside the shell of one of the former factory buildings at the iDtown residency. Inside the studios are:

Chen Hangfeng, a Shanghainese artist working in sculpture, installation & video, is the artist who invited all the rest of us. His recent 4-channel video documents an ancient Chinese village known in the Qing Dynasty for the beauty of its landscape, and in this dynasty, for its xmas ornament industry: it really changes your idea of "made in China" to see all the handwork & invention that goes into the "cheap crap" you buy at Walmart. Hangfeng's work walks a quietly political line between the art & traditions of China's past and the realities of its current culture of consumption. www.chenhangfeng.com

Edwin Lo is a sound artist from Hong Kong. I am very curious to see what he captures here as the landscape seems to corresponds to so many of his themes. He writes about an earlier project: But something that is pretty hard to express are the emotion, isolation, solitude, nostalgia and romance associated with places I had been, which are unexplainable or even understandable. It probably is one of the key moments in my life that I really want to express and tell something anyhow...Ed comes from a seafaring family, with a fisherman for a grandfather & an oil tanker captain for a father, so it falls to him at every meal (and I mean, every) to answer the "what's this fish" question. www.auditoryscenes.com

Jiang Hong Qing, a conceptual artist working in various media & teaching video in Shanghai, has out done us all for cool (la feng le in Chinese) with an exceptional pair of bicycle glasses. His quirky way of seeing the world slant comes thru in all of his work, including a project inspired by Roland Barthes in which he weighed against each other, on a scale, volumes of the Bible as translated into various languages. As we all hide from the [unseasonably yucky] elements at the local coffee house, Jiang Hong Qing is storyboarding a mythic history of the village, past & future, and ordering all sorts of curious props on Taobao...issoart.canalblog.co

Commercial break: seriously, the coffee house here in this village is a complete outlier, like no other cafe I have ever been to anywhere. Molika, a.k.a. Vivi, who owns it, knows things about coffee that I didn't even know there were to know. In the evenings, she gives coffee lessons that include the science of brewing. She's been training a young man named Ah Baung, but, try as he might, his coffee has a bitterness that hers never ever has: it's all in the temperature, she says, so you can't really get a steaming hot cup but oh it is so sweet & smooth... and then there's the being whose favor we are all courting, the coffeehouse cat, Nai Pao...

Li Xiaofei,  artist and founder of a number of art spaces, does spectacularly grand - think of Frederic Church's icebergs - documentations in video & photography of factories that process elemental materials like salt & coal, & also incredibly touching interviews with the people that work in these factories. His is the kind of work that brings me sharply up against how narrow is my understanding of the world's realities. www.lixiaofei.org

Girolamo Marri is an Italian artist who worked in Shanghai for a number of years before heading off to the Royal College of Arts in London to do an M.A. in sculpture & performance. He's the Artist as Trickster, turning assumptions & pieties on their heads, in ways that are anarchic, funny, and revealing. Girolamo brings a whole cast of characters & false facts to every meal, recently  introducing into the English language, a Punjabi word, useful in art criticism, that describes dung so lowly that even a dung beetle refuses to roll it. www.girolamomarri.info

Savinder Baul, from the U.K., works in video animation, inspired by early film technologies like the zoetrope & the stereogram. Savinder taught in Shanghai for a year. In one of the videos that came out of that time, she attached a traditional Chinese kite of a falcon, a silhouette you often see in the Shanghai sky, to the ceiling fan of her flat. The bird rode around & around on the fan in a continuous loop. The existential futility of it could make you panic...or it could make you laugh. www.savinderbual.com/flight.html

And then there's me, the chirp. Writing this up, it strikes me that all these artists share a deep seriousness, a great sense of humor/appreciation of absurdity & an intense engagement with the human condition. I feel so honored to be included among them. Now, if only the rain & cold would quit so we could get ourselves from the coffeehouse to the studio...

At the coffee house.
From the left: me, Molika, the barista; Ah Baung, her student; Edwin Lo; Chen Hangfeng; Jiang Hong Qing.
Coffee house photo courtesy of  Savinder Baul; top photo, me.

Drawer # 3.7 : Coral by Sand & by Design

This drawer, with its bits of coral collected on a beach on the Chinese island of Hainan, came to mind as I walked today along a different beach, this one at the edge of a small fishing village on the coast of the South China Sea, just west of Shenzhen. I had imagined, while I packed to come here, sunny weather, temperatures in the mid-70's. But it's raining. And, in order to stay warm in the chill wind, I'm wearing just about everything I brought in my suitcase. Still, it is quite lovely in the quiet emptiness - so unusual for China! - walking along the beach bathed in the violet light cast by my new purple umbrella, purchased at the single shop in Guan He village, the Guan He Department Store, a proper old-fashioned five & dime.

I'm here as one of 6 artists invited for the inaugural residency at iDtown, "an arts district betweens the mountains & the sea." We arrived last Tuesday to find studios not quite ready (surprise) for occupancy but the former factory compound has been wonder enough, leaving me too gobsmacked to even shoot many photos. I'll post more about the factory & the other artists soon but for now here's the view from my studio box out to the end of the studio building, including one of the "la feng" (chinese for "cool") bicycles we use for the 5 minute ride between village & factory...when it's not sheeting down with rain, that is...

The two circular objects included in the drawer are cast ceramic filters for I-know-not-what, purchased in a shop full of other unidentifiable ceramic wonders. Their delicacy & the logic of their design appear to me as the human mind channeling the cleverness of the natural world's design.

In good weather, the village beach is crowded with the froth of brides posing for wedding photos. At the farthest end, there are a series of tableaus, mixing up, like this drawer, the natural & the man-made, in one direction the sea, in the other a factory, plastic gardens in between.

The natural world the manufactured world the invented world colliding into each other...

Drawer #3.7: From top, boxes 1, 2 & 4:  coral collected on Hainan beach; box 3: particle filters made of cast porcelain purchased in the hardware market in Shanghai. Drawer liners: chinese brocade in wave pattern.
Photo credit for full drawer: Bruno David; all others are mine.