Letter from Shanghai - Museum of Contemporary Art

Each week our man in Shanghai,Tim Gifford reports back on the arts and culture that is shaping the new world.

Upon returning to Shanghai after a four-week summer break in glorious England, I found the city seized in the grip of Olympic Fever. This is no surprise, understandably, seeing as Team China was picking up gold medals as if they were on sale and television screens in every bar, restaurant or subway carriage running the events around the clock.
Now, I love the Olympic games as much as anyone else, but I also value having the opportunity to take a break from the high-octane coverage every so often. Unfortunately, in this particular case, that is easier said than done. Determined to find some respite from the world’s incessant athletic achievements, I resolved to go to a gallery – art and sport being diametrically opposed, in my mind at least. So, in search of a sport-free zone in which to spend the afternoon, I donned my flip-flops and braved the 35 degree heat to pay a visit to Shanghai’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Nestled in a leafy corner of People’s Park, MoCA occupies the park’s old greenhouse. The building has been extensively redesigned but retained its impressive exterior – an all-glass shell that gives the impression that the it’s been  carved from a solid block of black diamond.
 I happened to be catching the tail-end of the museum’s latest exhibition, Material Link. It describes itself as “a dialogue between Greek and Chinese artists” leading me to make all sorts of unnecessary connections in my twisted imagination; in my attempt to have a sportless day I had chosen a gallery exhibiting artists exclusively from the home of the Olympics and its current host nation. Maybe I was taking it too far, but who’s to say?

The exhibition was designed to showcase contemporary work that incorporated traditional techniques from two of the world’s oldest, richest civilizations. As I began to wander around the sunlit space,  my eyes were immediately drawn to a piece by Yang Yongliang's Eclipse. From a distance the picture appeared to be a traditional Chinese watercolour on rice paper depicting misty mountains and an ethereal sea stretching to the horizon. Upon closer inspection, however, it took on another, sinister aspect – the magical, misty mountains were in fact ghostly collages of apartment blocks and pylons. The modern Shanghai cityscape, its landmarks and construction sites, appeared as an optical illusion that played upon my preconceptions of Chinese traditional painting. From a certain distance I almost made the mistake of taking it for granted, but from up close I was nigh on disturbed. See for yourself.

I took a moment to rest at a toddler- sized table and chair to do some doodling (the gallery had set up a little corner, apparently for patrons to use, crayons and colouring paper are all thrown in) when a MoCA volunteer approached me and took a seat. Immediately I assumed that she was here to chastise me for ruining a piece of highly-prized installation art, but then she produced a butterfly colouring page and encouraged me to go to work on it with my crayons. As we talked it turned out that the butterflies were for an exhibition in honour of the earthquake appeal. Each butterfly was a thought, a display of affection, for the families still suffering in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake that struck in May. As I coloured and chatted away, other gallery-goers joined us – a middle aged Chinese lady, a group of Californian students on a trip. We sat, mostly in silence, and created sweet butterflies for people we had never met and never would. Everything I had been trying to escape seemed so inconsequential – the Olympics, the heat – as a group of strangers sat together and coloured beautiful butterflies.

Material Link - A Dialogue Between Greek and Chinese Artists, until Aug 31sst
MoCA Shanghai,  People's Park, 231 Nanjing West Road, Shanghai, 200003, China ,Tel: +86 21 63279900, www.mocashanghai.org