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.
Sunday, March 11, 2012 at 09:15PM 
