Journal Archives

Welcome to Andrew's e-journal!


This is the website of Andrew David Field, long-term Shanghai resident, historian, teacher, and scholar of Chinese studies, author of Shanghai's Dancing World:  Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954 (Chinese University Press, 2010)

and co-author of Shanghai Nightscapes:  The Making of a Nighttime Metropolis, 1910-2010 (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press).  I try to keep up regular journal entries on my tours, experiences, ideas, and insights into urban culture and society in China's great metropolis.  Please enjoy this website and feel free to provide your own comments.

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Sunday
Mar112012

A "fan letter" from a reader of Shanghai's Dancing World

I received this message in my email inbox today.  It's always nice to hear that somebody has a personal connection to the subject matter of my book.  Also it helps answer the question I've always had of what happened to the women after they "graduated" from the dancing world.  At least in this case, the dancing girl in question earned a ticket to America!  I wrote back and asked Eileen if she'd mind me posting her message on my website, and she gave me a positive reply, so here it is (in its original uncapitlized format--I'm too busy to edit it right now):

hello andrew,

my name is eileen young and i am a chinese american living in seattle (you taught in tacoma, right?). my parents were born and raised in shanghai and although i don't speak chinese, i have lived in shanghai for a total of a couple of years in 3 different spurts!
my daughter visited a friend in hong kong and saw your book. now she is at the uofw and found it in the library.
my grandfather, ding sai chen, was born in the late 1800's in souzhou. he went to law school at the university of michigan and returned to shanghai. he built a home on xinhua lu. (we first went to china in 1978 and his house was a run down sport's center, on subsequent trips it reached it's pinnacle as the "restored to original blue print" WTO conference center, but last year it had become some sort of private association and the guards wouldn't let us in!). we think that my grandpa became legal counsel to some of the clubs. i have to ask my 90 year old aunt about more details.
at any rate, he and his son succumbed to the lure of the clubs. my grandpa had a wife and later a concubine, who died giving birth to my twin uncles. then he took up with a "dancing girl" as my mom put it. she was younger than my mom by a few years. when the war came, my grandpa and this woman fled to chongqing, and before liberation left for taiwan, leaving my grandma to die in the xinhua lu home. 
my grandpa made his way to princeton, new jersey and that is where i met him. by now this woman was my "ahboo", the only grandma i knew. she couldn't speak english and we couldn't speak chinese. eventually, they returned to taiwan where my grandpa died. ahboo got a new boyfriend. when he died, my uncle who was assigned to ahboo as her son, although he wasn't her son, moved her to shanghai where she is now playing mah hong in an old folk's home.
just thought you would like to know where one of these ladies ended up!
as for the my grandpa's son, my uncle who i met only once, he left his young wife and daughter in shanghai when he fled to taiwan. he married two more times and never amounted to much. in fact, we heard that his sons were gangsters in taiwan. 
so you can see why your book is of so much interest to our family. thank you for writing it. 
sincerely,
eileen young

 

 

Thursday
Jan262012

"Global Nightlife" and "China Under Mao" course readings online

Earlier this week I set up two new pages on my website for my NYU spring semester courses, "Global Nightlife" and "China Under Mao."  These pages feature reading lists for each course.  Readings for each week are downloadable as PDF files.  I've reorganized my Global Nightlife course to feature a greater variety of articles on different topics.  The China Under Mao course will also feature weekly readings of articles from leading scholars in the field of Mao Era historical studies featuring a range of topics.  I encourage colleagues and lay people out there to provide feedback and suggestions.

Wednesday
Jan112012

"Down: Indie Rock in the PRC" Accepted into Thin Line Film Festival

I open the 2012 annals of this website with the exciting news that our rock doc has been accepted into the Thin Line Film Festival in Texas.  The screening of the film will take place on Friday evening Feb 11 at 8 pm.  For more details on this film festival, visit the Thin Line Film Festival website.

Monday
Dec052011

Global Nightlife Tours the Bund

Last Friday I took my students from my NYU Shanghai "Global Nightlife" class on a daytime walk along the Bund, showing them where the bars, clubs, and restaurants that make up the night scene are located, and relating the history of these establishments and of the recent recreation of the Bund as a nighttime commercial venture and as a showcase for contemporary art.  We also visited some of the historic landmarks of the Bund such as the HKBS building with its fantastic mosaic (photos aren't allowed and the security guards are very alert to remind you of this), and the Peace Hotel and Astor House, where elite partiers once danced the night away while China and the world engulfed in a cauldron of war.  

We started our excursion with lunch at the restaurant called Lost Heaven, which offers an exotic blend of decor and cuisine from the province of Yunnan.  The bathroom of this establishment, as one student noted, is almost a temple and could be used for meditation and yoga.

Since we'd visited the Waldorf Astoria already, we passed it by this time but did stop at the entrance door to snap a group photo.

Our first visit was the building known as Three on the Bund.  In 2004 this was the first building on the Bund to undergo a major renovation by the architectural firm of Michael Graves, launching a trend of redevelopment on the Bund that has continued to the present day.  We walked up the stairs in the cavernous open interior of the building, one of the elements of the redesign, and stopped in at the Shanghai Gallery of Art on the third floor.  The current exhibition showcases three artists:  Jiang Zhi, Heidi Voit, and Gao Weigang. 

Here's an example of one of the oil paintings by Jiang Zhi, originally based on a malfunctioning computer screen, an interesting play on colors and geometry.  I suppose that the originality of this artwork comes through the connection to computers.  But in the world of art these days, how does one determine "originality" and why is it important?  For centuries, Chinese artists copied the ancient masters, adding their own subtle touches to the great masterworks of the past.  I believe that's what's happening in the world of contemporary Chinese art today.  The artworks made today by many Chinese artists are certainly inspired movements and trends in European or American art from the previous century, but they are creating their own unique variations in their ongoing dialogue with modern and post-modern Western art.  Whether there is any mark of "traditional" Chinese art in paintings such as these is another question, but certainly one worth contemplating.  Also intriguing is the question of how the Mao Years have affected and continue to affect artists in China today.  These are all issues that I am now wrestling with as I continue to learn more about the intriguing and baffling world of contemporary Chinese art.

My students were impressed by the "rug" made out of cheap digital watches by Heidi Voit.  However, the constant beeping of the watches proved very annoying after a minute or so.  I suppose that's an intentional aspect of her artwork.

The canon overlooking the Bund is one of the pieces by Gao Weigang, which reminds us of the violent history of British and French imperialism that created the Bund in the first place.  One also thinks of the Japanese imperialists who occupied the city in the late 1930s-early 1940s.  Maybe the canon is aimed at their warships.  Or maybe it's focused on the garish skyscrapers that have gone up on the other side of the river.  In the same room are two marble stands, atop which should be a male-female pair of mythical Chinese lions.  Instead, the lions have apparently left the room (out of fear?  disgust?) leaving only a ball and their fecal remains.  Marble poo is a new one for me.

Next we visited Bund18, home to the famed Bar Rouge, probably the most successful club in the recent history of Shanghai nightlife.  We checked out the art installation on the second floor atrium, then visited the gallery on the fourth floor, which was featuring a solo exhibition of huge-scale polariod images by the artist and film director Julian Schnabel.  

The manager of the gallery took us around and explained some of the images as well as the process of making them, showing us the camera he'd used, which is the size of a large refrigerator.  Most of the images are of friends of the artist (Max Von Sydow and Lou Reed were among them) or of his own studios in NYC and Montauk.  If there was a connection to nightlife here in the gallery, it was fairly indirect, but you could definitely argue that Julian Schnabel was part of an arts community in Manhattan that met frequently and gained a great deal of their energy and spirit in the clubs of the times.  

Jean Michel Basquiat was one of those artists who thrived in the city's nightclubs, such as the famed Mudd Club in lower Manhattan.  Lou Reed is an obvious connection as well, part of a larger movement in music that came out clubs like CBGBs.  All of these are covered in our course, and I emphasize the connection between nightlife cultures and avant-garde art movements, so it was entirely appropriate that we were touring the art galleries of the Bund.  The connections between art, music, fashion, celebrity culture and high society are certainly apparent on the Bund.  I should also point out that if people went there on certain evenings, they might witness opening parties for these galleries and other art events that are a big part of the Bund's nighttime culture as well.

After that we headed over to the recently restored Fairmont Peace Hotel (once the Cathay Hotel and Sassoon House built in 1929 and financed by the Jewish tycoon Victor Sassoon), where we toured the building up and down.  I told them about Victor Sassoon's wild costume balls in the eighth floor ballroom (they'd already seen the film Sin Cities: Shanghai which also mentions these parties) and about the Jewish clubowner Fredy Kaufman who once ran the famed Jockey Club in Berlin, then escaped the Nazis for Shanghai and set up a club in the green pyramidal tower of the Cathay Hotel.  (All of these stories are also related in my book Shanghai's Dancing World).  We took the elevator up to that section which now houses a small and elegant restaurant, and took this group photo outside on the walkway surrounding the tower.

As we passed over the Garden Bridge on the way there, we saw this dredging operation going on in the Suzhou River.  And I told the students that the Suzhou River was once the main river of Shanghai, and that Ming dynasty water engineers had redirected the Huangpu River to exit at the mouth of the Yangzi and widened and deepened it, thus paving the way for Shanghai to find its destiny as an international port city.  

Our final stop was the Pujiang Hotel or Astor House, the oldest hotel in Treaty Port Shanghai, which today boasts having hosted famous icons such as Albert Einstein, Ulysses Grant, Bertrand Russell, Charlie Chaplin, and Zhou Enlai (their photos all hang prominently in the main lobby of the hotel).  As usual, a wedding banquet was being held in the ballroom of the Astor House, once known as the Peacock Lounge, where Shanghai's elite society first learned to do the new dance called the Tango (the first Tango tea was held there in 1913).  Here's an image of an ensemble of Russian musicians who played there in the 1920s.

All in all, I think this tour was a grand success, and hopefully my students will be inspired to return at night for another look at the Bund in all its gaudy glory.

 

Monday
Nov282011

子曰--王燮达个人作品展 Sages' Sayings: Wang Xieda Solo Exhibition @ James Cohan Gallery

On Friday afternoon I was walking around the French Concession with my friend HY, researching a walking tour of that area's art galleries.  We stopped in at the James Cohan Gallery located near the corner of Yueyang Road and Yongjia Road.  Surrounded by capacious mansions that once housed wealthy Chinese capitalists and gang bosses, this neighborhood is one of the most picturesque in the city.  The James Cohan Gallery, which was started in New York and is still headquartered there, opened here a few years ago and is one of the leading contemporary art galleries in Shanghai.  Upon our entry we were greeted with this vision of metallic sculptures looking very spidery and spindly, which immediately reminded me of Giacometti.  But HY remarked that the sculptures resembled ancient Chinese characters.

We moved into the next room, with a beautiful semi-circular alcove fully exposed to the outdoors by the bay windows with their Deco iron grillwork.  A Chinese man with long hair tied up in a bund, classical style, who we immediately identified as the artist, was busy filling in the shadows of another piece hanging from the ceiling that looked like an ancient pyramid hanging upside down.  Below it was pure white sand, and he was marking the shadows projected by the piece in black sand.  This was Wang Xieda.  He immediately rose and greeted us with a smile, like an old friend, or 一见如故 as the Chinese say.  

We spoke briefly about his artworks and remarked on their resemblance to ancient signs and symbols, which was apparently his intention.  He is fascinated by fourth century calligraphy of the period of Wang Xizhi (who isn't?) but also ancient symbolism and the universal quest to communicate meaning through symbols that led to all of the writing systems in world history.  For the hanging sculpture, he used  rattan.  Upon the walls of the gallery hung some of his artworks, abstract ink paintings resembling calligraphy in some respects but not making up any particular characters, just lines and splotches that could be read like Rorschach tests.  We left the artist to his work and wandered into the stairwell, where another sculpture was hanging that resembled (in my opinion at least) a crane-like bird with a stout body and long neck.  

At that point, the gallery operater, Arthur Solway, stepped out of his office and engaged us in a discussion of the artist, inviting us to attend the opening event on the following day.  We had stumbled in on a sneak preview, but they were very obliging about our intrusion.  Arthur gave us a brief historical rundown of the building, telling us how he'd found it and who occupied it previously (a story that I will let him tell you if you visit there yourself).  The slogan appearing above the entrance to the gallery might reveal a clue as to who the previous occupants were.  

The Qing style imperial ceiling of the main gallery room and the Chinese rock garden with rocks dredged from Lake Tai (Taihu) suggest that the pre-Liberation occupants styled themselves Orientalists.  

The vantage point of another Wang Xieda installation outside in the courtyard garden area affords a nice view of the building housing the gallery and is very nicely placed among circular brickwork of the garden.  

For contemporary art lovers in Shanghai, this is an exhibition not to be missed.