Drawer #66: Pinwheels!

Summer breeze thru a shanghai pinwheel

A video posted by @cshmigel on Jul 21, 2015 at 11:11am PDT

The summer blew by without blogging but the Cabinet itself, in its new NC home, did not go unattended. After several years of only opening drawers digitally, it was interesting to re-install all the curiosities back in the drawers & give the whole project a good think.

There were several drawers that were empty when the cabinet shipped out in the late fall of 2010 and several small book projects that were meant to be in the drawers that never got done and a box of things in Shanghai that have been wanting to get into those empty drawers... & so that's what the next months are dedicated to as I get the Cabinet ready for a show opening April 1 in Washington D.C. at the Hillyer Art Space.

Along the bottom of the cabinet are 3 large drawers.

And  it occurred to me that one of them would be a good home for my Shanghai Daily book, seen below as installed in my first "chinese" show, Chinese Garden for the Delights of Roaming Afar, at Laumeier Sculpture Park back in 2005.

The book is a collection of articles & photos extracted from the Shanghai Daily, the government-run English language newspaper, the newspaper scraps taped into the study notebooks used here by school children. In my first years here, I loved reading the Shanghai Daily with its strange facts about things like the percentage of cookware at the market found to be faulty & the obstructive dangers of laundry displays & the doings of the Beijing Opera school (above) & moralizing editorials about visiting your elderly parents...I mean, with all that is going on the world these days, how can you not love "Chicken & Chatting prove keys for long life" from today's edition:

Gong Jingfa wipes the forehead of mother-in-law Li Suqing, 116, at the family home in the Pudong New Area yesterday. Li, who moved to the city with daughter Tian Yulan and Gong from northeast China’s Liaoning Province in 1975, is Shanghai’s oldest resident. She was named at a ceremony yesterday as one of the city’s “longevity stars.” The Chinese character on the wall means longevity. — Zhang Suoqing

I also loved the little notebooks I taped my selections into, with their retro-futuristic covers (as Shanghai's urban philosopher, Anna Greenspan, might call them) and their interior pages gridded & lined in various ways appropriate to their subject.

Eventually, I bound all the little notebooks together into a satisfyingly chunky paperback.

Traditionally, Chinese books are soft-covered with stab bindings. Their profiles are relatively slim, perhaps 1/2- 3/4" thick, which means that a long text might require several volumes. These volumes are then encased in a hard board case wrapper that leaves the top & bottom edges exposed. An example with just a single volume:

My friend Petra Johnson has been making great use of this format to document her Walk With Me project & she graciously took me along to the Chinese Art supply store on Fuzhou Lu where she has her cases made. Not only did they make a beautiful wrapper for the Shanghai Daily book - though it must have been mystifying why one would put a beautifully crafted case around such a mess of a book! - they also sold the kinds of papers I'd been looking for when I first started lining the drawers...Not being able to locate those papers then, I resorted to chinese brocades with their acidy bright colors & I suppose it was for the best...they certainly put the noise & the flash, the neon, into the cabinet in a way these papers wouldn't have.  As seen below: the original version of Drawer 66 on the left & the new drawer in progress with the encased book & new papers on the right...

But those violet sequins are going to have to go somewhere; they are just too luscious!

Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer # 6: University Students

A big thank you to the students from the University of Shanghai for Science & Technology that came to my workshop at the American Culture Center last Saturday! The workshop theme was hat-making out of ordinary household items like the specialty hangers for drying underwear (see row 3, left & center, & below.) Not everyone bought into the idea but a lot of fun & invention filled the day. The students come to USST from all over China, and even from as far away as Ulan Bator, Mongolia (top center) and are as sweet a group as I have met in a long time. (Photos above are thanks to the photographers of the Center's new Media Center...below thanks to a Snake in my neighborhood...)

Jenny Tarlin, the director of the American Cultural Center, does some amazing programming (I say humbly) in her mission to introduce students to American Culture beyond Hollywood & the Big Brands. Two days after my show opened there, we had the wonderful culture-juggling experience of attending a workshop version of Pearl: the Opera, conducted by Sara Jobin.

Named for the daughter of Hester Prynne, the heroine of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the libretto for the opera was written by Carol Gilligan and her son, Jonathan Gilligan. Jobin, the first woman to ever conduct the San Francisco Opera, and Gilligan, the author of In a Different Voice, a hugely influential book on women's notions of morality, have together founded the Different Voice Opera Project; their mission is to foster the production of contemporary operas in which female roles come to something other than the traditional dire end. The music for Pearl, DVOP's first production, was wriiten by Amy Scurria. Click here to hear the "A" duet of the child Pearl and her mother.

(Fair warning: it's a long one...)

Virtual Drawer # 4: Shadow Puppet Theater of Qibao

Julie Kesti, artist, bodyworker, Shanghai-based blogger recently introduced me to the work of shadow puppeteer Annie Katsura Rollins...& Annie's wonderful website on Chinese shadow puppetry inspired  Julie & me to set off to Qibao where years ago I'd seen a shadow puppet performance. Given how things here disappear from one moment to the next, we were thrilled to find the "Qibao Shadowgraph Museum" still in place, still on its old schedule. Performances are on Weds & Sundays at 1 and last aout one hour. The older locals wander in & out of the performances adding to the charm of it all.

It's an easy little trip from Shanghai: Line 9 to Qibao, just 20 mins from Xujiahui, then a few blocks of walking to "Old Town Street."

For a video preview, click here to witness the ferocious fight that leads to that tiger in a cart in the lower left above.

For another vicarious day trip, check-out Art Critic/Writer XhingYu Chen's post about our visit around the Shanghai art scene.

Drawer # 6.7 : Opera Mops

There are not a few days when I wonder what exactly happened to my aesthetic in China, "shanghaied" by a color palette too highly & discordantly keyed for my "real" taste, by a maximalism of decoration & pattern & tacky materials not at all in keeping with my pre-China work. I mean, was there any way to even imagine ten years ago, while welding rusty steel sheet into industrial forms, that I would some day arrive at this drawer?

Sometimes, when I look at this Shanghai work from outside myself, it puzzles me: is it my real work or some crazy detour down a road somewhere between the Beijing Opera Props Shop & the peddler's cart...

There's a piece of art school advice that I sometimes hear in my head. Not a piece of advice I'd think to give, but I've heard it from students who have heard it from their teachers: that the trick to making work that's authentically yours is to make art as you did when you were a a kid. And this work I make now, without much in the way of tools or equipment, certainly is that: a return to making something simply out of what's at hand.

And then there's what I think of as the DP [displaced persons] thing. A friend here, the writer Lisa Movius, likes to point out that while we foreigners think of ourselves as "ex-pats", we're really economic migrants just as much as the "floating population" of laborers come to the city from the Chinese countryside.

Which is an ironic turn in life for me, the child of immigrants, albeit political rather than economic refugees, people who found their way to America post WWII via DP camps. The experience of which was vivid to me as a child as it dominated the conversations of the adults around me. "Oh," they'd slap each other on the back after church & say, "I haven't seen you since Camp." By which they didn't mean Summer.

It struck me one day, at the performance of an english-language theater company, that life here is in its way kind of like DP Camp: a microcosm of the world left behind recreated in a foreign place. Theater erupts as soon as any group of exiles congeals: there was a theater company in the DP camp at Bertesgarten where my mother & her family were interned and even in some of the concentration camps. There's clearly some essential human need that's satisfied by the interpretation of life thru drama. Art doesn't even need community, just materials, as witnessed by the things that made it from DP camp to my parents' house in Queens: from packages of silk stockings, scrap bits of backing board used for paintings; parachute silk for embroidery; aluminum cans for bracelets... not unlike the detritus of Shanghai that end up in the drawers.

That's what I'm thinking when I'm outside the work.

When I'm inside the work, at my best, I'm amusing myself, indulging in the over-the-topness that the material world here inspires...wondering how to turn this latest stripey mop on its head...with an assist from a willing student in an American Culture class... and into Beijing Opera headware. Taking it from functional object to gesture to object transformed... the quotidian become theater.

Last night at the Lit Fest, with this post nearly written, I got to see Chris Doyle, my favorite of all cinematographers, and, with director Wong Kar Wai, the creator of some of my favorite Chinese films, In the Mood for Love,  & Chungking Express. Doyle, his head shaved by Ai Weiwei, in a multi-media presentation called Away with Words, interviewed himself thru his Chinese incarnation, Du Kefeng, about process, motivation, meaning, language/wordlessness. It was transcendent: one of those [rare-ish] moments when you feel the glory of your calling.

I was too transfixed to take notes. What stays in mind is Doyle circling in, again and again, to the need for engagement with where you find yourself,  to revealing the things, masked by familiarity, that an outsider's eye can see and finally (the one quote I did write down) to manifesting "the bridge between what you see and how you respond to it."

So maybe it's not a detour, maybe I'm not as lost as I thought I was. Still, it's kind of a weird aesthetic...

If you happen to be in the northeast far-reaches of Shanghai, please come try on the Opera Mop & other hats made from household goods & pearls at "Shanghai Crowns & Fascinators." Opening Tues, March 19th, 3-5 pm. Thanks to the Center's director, Jenny Tarlin, for the opportunity!

American Culture Center
University of Shanghai for Science & Technology
516 Jungong Road, Yangpu
Shanghai 200093021 5512 3295 (China - Office)

From the top: 1 & 4.  Pompoms from Beijing Opera headware, fake pearls; 2 & 3 fragments from headware (metal screen, epoxy, paint, blue fabric, wire springs & fake pearls) in the pattern of "happy clouds"  See post # 16 for related images. Photo credit for drawer: Bruno David

Virtual Drawer # 3: Beijing Opera Props Shop

The Beijing Opera Props Shop at 654-658 Guang Dong Lu in Shanghai. Always a place of wonder.