Shanghai: exhibiting, teaching & learning
Flower boxes on streets. Drawing by Nora Kovats.
Reflections in a mirror glass building.
Like in a dream that is both utterly familiar and strange at the same time, the city of Shanghai struck me as a parallel world where the foreign and the well-known are fused together in the most confusing way.
In October this year I visited Shanghai to take part in an exhibition titled “NOW-NOW” held at San W Gallery, together with nine other South African contemporary jewellers. The city-centre gallery is accompanied by a vast studio on the outskirts of the city, directly next to the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts. With the gallery and the studio, owner Yiwei Wu single-handedly constructed a platform for contemporary jewellery in Shanghai – a city that, despite its contemporary feel and China’s rich and diverse applied arts traditions, does not offer too much in terms of art jewellery. It was a pleasure to see the potential of that immersive space, imagining exhibitions, artist residencies, lectures, workshops and all kinds of novel and interdisciplinary approaches to the field of contemporary jewellery.
Poster for “NOW-NOW” exhibition.
Preparing for the exhibition opening at San W Gallery.
Detail of one of the displays at “NOW-NOW”.
While there, I also gave an enamelling workshop at Studio San W. This was my first time teaching with a translator during a workshop, and I was almost a little apprehensive at first. However, since I was surrounded by helpful studio assistants and gracious hosts who were prepared to translate between the worlds, we managed quite well. On a side note, it is actually astonishing how much can be communicated without words, just with gestures, with demonstrations and body language and little pencil sketches. A new sense of confidence filled me after that experience – a realization that the magic of working with one’s hands can be understood universally, even without words.
The home of San W Studio in the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts complex.
Step one: washing your enamel powders, demonstrated by yours truly.
A multitude of enamel test plates.
In place that is completely foreign, I find that you experience a kind of profound freedom, as you detach yourself from all expectations and plunge into adventure and bare yourself to the unknown. While bewildering or scary at first, I find this sensation so liberating that it acts as a type of reset button. It’s what I look for in travel – it resets my curiosity levels in a way that allows me to see my own familiar city with newly-washed eyes on my return. I re-appreciate my treasures, receive the gift of a gilded church steeple in the sun or a beautifully paved street or the dynamism of a flock of birds in a pale sky for the second time.
Colourful bike-sharing rides.
A colourful street; pale polluted skies with a hidden sun.
In Shanghai, I was struck by the silence of the chaos. It really enhanced that dream-like quality of my experience. The bustling traffic at intersections was uncannily quiet, as if someone has simply turned the volume button down. Which is exactly what happened – almost all motorized vehicles have been replaced by electric ones by now. I kept thinking about this strange dissonance between the crowded streets and the muted traffic, and it became a metaphor for my entire experience there in that complex and strangely paradoxical composition of chaos and order.
Busy-busy commuters on the street.
I spotted many people taking naps in and on their vehicles, presumably on their lunch breaks.
It’s a place where the most exclusive luxury brands are glamorously displayed in shop windows like statues of the new gods, where every public place is adorned with cascades of flowing greenery, while these flowers are constantly replaced in a continuous cycle of artificial renewal, never wilting. A place where beautiful and unfamiliar vegetables are piled next to sacks of live toads and glass aquariums full of squirming eels, where every leaf on the sidewalk is painstakingly swept up by never-resting street cleaners, while the air is so polluted that the inhabitants check the daily pollution forecast like people elsewhere check the weather report. It’s a place that is both unfree and freeing.
A bag of toads.
Stacked kebab at a Friday market in a muslim quarter of Shanghai.
Fabric market.
I found it thoroughly inspiring and loved how the daily experienced knotted themselves into a mesh of vivid dreams each night, although I found it everything but easy to grapple with the idea of life in a totalitarian consumer society.
I’ve seldomly felt so disconnected and alienated from my own world back in Berlin, obviously also due to the heavily censored internet traffic and communication channels, but at the same time, this allowed for a brief but deep immersion in a parallel world.