Local Remodeling

At the Network Research Meeting organised by the Institute for Public Art (IPA)1 at Shanghai University’s Fine Arts College, Prof. Zhuo Min, Dean of the Department of Urban Design at the Beijing Academy of Arts, conceptualised public art as a contemporary ideology that produces a new iconography of “lost spaces”. The compartmentalization into spaces for life, work and business and connoted by the absence of collective memory, projects a utopian image of the city based on the improvement of its inhabitants’ quality of life.

Influenced by reflections on western modernity and its temporal tripartition, I visualised Renaissance ideal cities that represented the prestige of territories and their lords through urban modernity, but in a continuity of classical studies, where the future was imagined according to a visually set perspective, beyond the vanishing point. I saw the modern and global face of Shanghai in darkness, with its luminescent skyscrapers reflecting their sci-fi forms in the river Huangpu, from the terrace of a fashionable bar in the Bund, surrounded by an urban landscape suspended in the present and constantly evolving.

Public art in China seems to be a symptom of and reaction to a complex phenomenology of the present, characterised by the conservation of traditional cultural values and a rapid modernisation resulting in a drastic social transformation. In 1991 the city of Shanghai, which in the nineteenth century was already known as the “Great Athens of China”, launched economic liberalisation reforms that sparked the mixture of public and private that underpins the present proliferation of spaces dedicated to contemporary art. In that sense, the attention to community-led artist projects and the establishment of the art-technology binomial, indicate a greater attention to the quality of people’s lives whilst also identifying public art with an effective means of cultural transit and of art-in-engineering [1].

The goals entrusted to public art point to the centrality of its role: the regeneration of the urban and rural environment, in which the perceptions and functions of renewed space can galvanize the public concerned, who will then interiorize them as new values of place; the evocation of the spirit of a place, through the symbolic presence of the past and the use of narrative forms recognizable by the community, which enhance their sense of belongingness; the attribution of a soul to redefined spaces, through work on urban and rural landscapes, nature and the ecosystem, in order to protect and preserve them for the future, as in Red Ribbon in the Green Forest, a project by Yu Kongjian, Ling Shihong and Ning Weijing at Tanghe Park in Qinhuangdao, a biological fibre glass terrace 500 metres long which forestalls the gradual erosion of the embankment, preserves indigenous vegetation and redesigns the riverscape. As explained to me by Zhou Xian, editor of Public Art China, public art in China is “the unification of the imagination and reality, of each different side”. Based on the Chinese orientation towards “Real Life”, it is seen as an opportunity for citizens to experiment directly with the artisticness and beauty of life.

According to the Sister City Program Summit, Beijing launched its first production of urban sculptures in 1982, followed by a project for the spiritual civilisation of the city5, and culminating in 1997 with the foundation of the Capital City Sculptural Art Committee [2]. In 1995 in Taiwan, the public administration introduced The Percent for Art Program, followed in 2005 by Taizhou (Zhejiang), where 1% of the total budget of investments in cultural facilities is allocated to cultural projects involving public participation.

Since 1991 Shanghai University7 has promoted the development of public art, in the absence of regular government support, where many projects by the Fine Arts College are supported by the Shanghai Education Committee. The University accentuates the relation between public art and the social issues on which it has developed its Landing Remodelling, its “operative system” hinged on the promotion of place making, training and research. Formative programmes, based on the transdisciplinary study of public art and culture, involve students, too, in the production of projects such as Public Art for Shanghai Metro, where they did 85% of the murals, the transformation of the Expo area and Beautiful Rural Village project in Yuhuan (Zhejiang). Shanghai University promotes the knowledge and debating of public art on a global level by supporting the International Award for Excellence in Public Art (IAPA), co-founded in 2011 by the magazines Public Art (China)10 and Public Art Review (USA), which selects projects carried out anywhere in the world that have distinguished themselves for the social effects of redefined places, the creation of community forms, for innovative design and the quality of its implementation.

The interstitial spaces which this state of transition produces could be the ground on which to create different relations between places and inhabitants and to identify different “publics”. In Hong Kong, the South Korean collective Oasis, in collaboration with Woofer Ten, developed the Squat Geography Information System (SGIS). By subverting the sense of the function of GPS global control and monitoring, this system mapped abandoned or derelict public or private real estate, in response to the need for numerous artists and creatives to have a space in which to work and exhibit.

The interactive installation, neORIZON, by Maurice Benayoun, on view in Shanghai for the 2008 eArts Festival14, sparked a critical debate because it made visible the present codification of life and the translation of human identities into the geometric and abstract (hence modern) forms of the IDWorms sculptures and of the urban landscape into an architecture of QR codes. As affirmed by Lewis Biggs, Chairman of the IAPA Organising Committee, “If a controversial artwork is placed in a community, people who would otherwise not be speaking very often gather round a table to talk”, thus creating the right conditions for the artist to get ahead and create new realities. On my way back to Italy, the image of Shanghai lingering in my mind is that of a steadily evolving, dynamic utopia.

© all rights reserved

[1] Hsiangling Lai, Huey-Fen Chu, The Way to Knowing Happiness, in Local Remodeling, Shanghai, Shanghai University, 2014
[2] Sister City Program Summit on “Strategies for Public Art,” New York, February 17–18, 2005. Report available here: https://www.nyc.gov/html/ia/gp/html/summit/main.shtml