Philippe Parreno, Marquee, 2008. Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2008.

Yes diary, one trick is to stay somewhere where people will be happy to come to you, and The Ace Hotel is, as they say, so very something. It starts with the lightbulbed marquee over the entrance, which just says HOTEL, an object that works more or less like the minimalist pearly white marquees that the French artist Philippe Parreno likes to put above entrances to “announce something” without saying quite what, as he famously did in an exhibition entitled theanyspacewhatever last year. The bell captain has one of those 60s haircuts with extremely closely shorn sides. The dark and cavernous lobby, diary, at any time offers at least six possible haptic scenarios for two people to drink an espresso, ranging from lazy couches to uptight barstools. In the rooms they give you bedside music paper, because you are apparently expected to dream in transcribable movements. Downstairs, the baristas dress like characters from the 1992 motion picture Newsies! Like one friend I see when I’m in town says, hoteliers are the auteurs of our moment, creating spaces in which narratives can be staged. And narratives did we stage.

A design object potentially confusable for a work of art, 2010.

I had lunch with that friend in the bar on West Broadway where they filmed the Jiang Wen short in the 2008 motion picture New York, I Love You, the one where Cui Jian is playing on the radio and the guy tries to pick the girl up by translating the lyrics to the former’s famous ballad Greenhouse Girl in which “greenhouse” is actually an anatomical metaphor. And then we went past the Ghostbusters firehouse and up to his loft where his one-year-old was watching a made in Brooklyn instructional speak Chinese DVD featuring someone named “Pim,” with a properly multicultural cast and repeating words like toothbrush well ahead of the curve. When the segment ended, dad put on Kings of Convenience and the kid began to dance in front of a wall of books with a ladder on wheels as we strategized over his pre-school applications. Diary did you know that lactation consultants in Manhattan, of which my mother was once one in the Philadelphia suburbs, bill at USD $400/hour?

Ah yes, ART. Well, for starters I ran into the unsung hero of the Arte Povera movement at a sample sale on Orchard Street, and we traded observations of his one-off collaborator Ai Weiwei’s ambivalent megalomania as I was trying on raincoats. That morning I saw a really nice gallery show or several, disaster-scene photos by an obscure Swiss policeman that Harald Szeemann put into his last big show but which failed to really gain traction. Leo Koenig is trying again. Then there was the Jo Bear/John Wesley show at Matthew Marks, her stylized minimalism bouncing so perfectly off of his visual jokes. I saw a guy in glasses not unlike my own stand in front of a Wesley pun about silhouettes on currency, laughing ostentatiously out loud. And I’m not sure what the big deal is with (2009 Venice Biennale Icelandic pavilion sensation) Ragnar Kjartsson, if there was a big deal. MoMA, now there’s a museum! I got a purloined copy of the TOC for their forthcoming Chinese documents anthology from some young curators, only to stumble upon the entire family of my first Beijing friend–mom, dad, bro, newly engaged sis–lounging in the lobby where that Barnett Newman used to be in front of a Yoko Ono shout into the microphone piece which seems like a really weird thing to put on the site of the Abramovic starefest so soon after the fact. In the architecture gallery they have a show about the lower Manhattan estuaries of 2100, and walltexts that simply presume that the island will go perhaps 61% under.

John Wesley, George Washington and Three Indians II, 1963. Ink and graphite on paper, 52 x 46 cm.

Of course the reason for the trip was a wedding, a three-night extravaganza which began on Thursday with fourteen men eating a set menu of “Beef Seven Ways” at the latest project of Momofuku’s Danny Chang in the Chambers Hotel. The Milk Bar upstairs at street level purveys an astounding array of dairy products including “Cereal Milk.” When the woman at the next table asked what we did, I explained that our friend the anthropologist was to wed and that half of us had just flown in from China. They believed us only upon seeing a tote bag inscribed with Chinese characters. We made our way to an assortment of downtown bars at various levels of in-ness, and then finally to a karaoke place on 17th Street where a song is two dollars and we sang a lot of them.

The wedding toast, according to the Paris Review advice column, is one of our great American folk rituals. I gave one at Szechuan Gourmet on West 56th Street on Friday. There are some funny discursive issues to be thought through with wedding toasts, first and foremost your place on the batting order. I was up early, and gave one sort of like the proclamation they encant at the beginning of Midnight Mass on Christmas, in our archdiocese of Philadelphia at least, that situates the nativity in the context of salvation history. I like that phrase, “salvation history.” Perhaps not as much as “eschatology,” but almost as much. And these are precisely the sorts of contexts, on the second floors of Chinese restaurants in midtown Manhattan surrounded by aunts and uncles, in which a sweeping statement or two about our generation and its uncertainties can do a bit of work. I told them that the reason we live in China is to prevent war, which is more than partially true.

The next night, they had a bluegrass band beside their chuppa on the bluffs above the Hudson in a state park way way uptown. Orthodoxim on nearby benches looked on in disapproval as the setting but not yet set sun turned the lovers into silhouettes. They looked stunning, saying their seven prayers in Vera Wang and John Varvatos. Wallace Stevens was the scripture and the self-written vows included the phrases “condition of possibility” and “future anterior.” When the groom drank from the cup of blessed wine, he made the wine-tasting face. The shawl their fathers wrapped around them at the very end said on it “Property of Congregation Beth El, Great Neck” in black permanent marker. We walked down a hill into the WPA-era maintenance shed turned bistro for vodka ginger martinis and rock shrimp, then sat down and ordered our mains as if at a restaurant. There were more toasts, then dancing in a circle with joined arms.

Adam Bund and Carley Ross, A Particular and Poignant Instantiation of an Archetype, 2010.

Later the sweet strains of bluegrass rang out as they rendered Michael Stipe’s straightforward lovesong which includes the line “I count your eyelashes” and the bride and bridegroom danced a routine, a routine with a higher degree of difficulty than most pre-instructed wedding dance routines. Soon it was 4 a.m., and then 9 a.m., and then 12 p.m., and before I knew it I had eaten a bagel toasted with cream cheese and drunk a carton of Tropicana Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice and taken the NJ Transit Northeast Corridor line to Newark Liberty International Airport and passed the TSA inspection and was aboard Continental 89 with nonstop service to Beijing.

Cover, LEAP 1, February 2010. Shown: Huang Yong Ping, Sand Bank/Bank of Sand, 2000.

In light of Evan Osnos’s link earlier today, I’m going to quickly post something to counter LEAP’s lame slowness in getting a website up and running. This is the editorial statement (call it a manifesto) I wrote back in late January, as we struggled to get our first issue together. It was later harmonized to about half this length (a story for another time) but here you go anyway. We are now one more all-nighter away from finishing LEAP 3, and I’m hard-pressed to believe that half a year has gone by since the snowy day when I sat down to write this.

We have been up all night, my editorial staff and I…you’ve heard that one before, right? Actually we haven’t. Our genesis was strategic and our quick formation contingent on the ready mobilization of corporate capital. We’ve got a parent company, an official publishing partner (and the censors that come with such), distribution channels, a room of new computers, a ratecard, revenue targets. Pretty standard stuff, really. What’s different is that this is a magazine about art in China, or rather art and China, that aims to do things ever so slightly differently from the dozens of art magazines which have emerged here in Beijing since auction fever began in 2006. And yes, it’s a print magazine, with a web presence, but with the bimonthly rhythms of paper. Sounds retro, but we’re no hipsters. Our company, remember, is called Modern Media, without a lick of irony.

So what makes us different? For starters, we don’t sell coverage. Sounds like the sort of thing you wouldn’t need to put in an opening statement, but that’s the context we’re up against, New York and London friends. Next, we take to our work with a basic understanding that serious criticism, serious journalism, assume sometimes incompatible registers in Chinese and English. Which is why we believe in editorial standards, a curatorial sensibility, and the very best translation, as translation is the only metaphor anyone should believe in anymore. We believe that the fundamental aesthetic quality of this time and place is its eclecticism, and our editorial choices reflect that: artist portfolios, woman-and-her-work profiles, rigorous reviews, panels re-rendered as cartoons, timely Chinese translations of key texts from Artforum, and a fashion shoot, unproblematically juxtaposed. Because our hang-ups are not quite yours.

Then: we’re not nationalist, mostly because we believe that “China” is more than a nation. We don’t particularly like the word “Asia,” mostly because we haven’t figured out where it is, and deep down we don’t believe there’s any more connection between what goes on in Tehran and Seoul or Ekaterinburg and Phnom Penh than between, say, Buenos Aires and Johannesburg, or for that matter, Cleveland and Hefei—which is to say, all and none. We do believe that China, owing to its distinct culture (yeah, yeah) and informational strictures (that just this week asserted their persistence), is its own context, and a Beijing-centered one at that. We have seen the cracks in the wall, we understand the skewing logic by which knowledge makes its way in and out, and that’s right where we intend to work.

We fantasize about Rauschenberg’s visit to China in 1985, and Warhol’s in 1982, and Gilbert and George’s in 1993, in dreams that jump from there right to the Ai Weiwei/Xu Bing basement apartment on East 7th where they shot Beijingers in New York in 1992. We’re not ardent patriots, and we’re certainly not detached Sinologists, but we believe that the moment has come for a magazine deeply of this place and this scene, presuming the sort of background knowledge that you won’t have unless you’re an insider, the better to create new and better insiders. We’re junkies for old exhibition announcements and interviews with avant-garde almost-beens. We are not looking to promote “Chinese contemporary art” (Oh! Those three words!); we just believe that enough people believe in them already (first it was foreigners, who are no longer necessary to the concept’s prolonged existence) that it’s time for a smart take on a special sphere. Ours are no rose-tinted glasses, although if you want a pair of those, we know a great place on the East Third Ring. We don’t deal, but we’re not so innocent or aloof to deny that everything here is transactional. We realize there are more interesting bars on four blocks of the Lower East Side than in all of Shanghai, but instead of claiming that this will all change in five years, we’re interested in why it never may.

We presume a readership like ourselves, which is to say, one that doesn’t necessarily exist in great numbers—the Dongbei lady with a Goldsmiths master’s and a non-object-based gallery, the Jonathan Spence Ph.D. who gave up teaching American undergraduates to interview Chinese tycoons, the art-school professor in Chongqing who wants to feel part of the action in the big city he visits a few times each year, the HON Circle curator who devours a thousand pages with every long-haul, and maybe most of all, the college student up in Haidian who speaks perfect English despite never having left the country and stumbles upon us at a Taiwanese café named after some director’s memoirs.

What’s in a name? In Chinese we’re called Yishujie, which just means “Artworld,” with all the implications of relationality and contextuality that Danto intended when he coined that phrase back in 1964. LEAP, which we like to write all in caps, is the Derridean supplement that completes the circle by standing just outside it—a four-letter word that evokes dialectical progress, hapless futurism, and historical tragedy, with the slightest hint of the country-specificity that is our original sin. Our magazine is structured with a top, a middle, and a bottom, each with its own team and style. That’s just the beginning. We publish on the first of every other month, and hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Philip Tinari
Beijing, January 25, 2010

Cai Guo-Qiang, Du Wenda’s Flying Saucer D on top of the Rockbund Art Museum, 2010. Photo by Lin Yi, courtesy Cai Studio

Of course one sometimes does thought experiments that involve substituting Beijing for New York or London. They’ve become harder in recent years, but I still believe in the delightful ridiculousness of taking the Chinese city at its own word as metropole. In that spirit, I bring you notes from the shanzhai fast lane, the one in which you overtake peasant-built sports cars.

***

The Shanghai government did a brilliant thing by making the World Expo a reason for a long vacation. This is what my deputy editor Aimee and I realized on Sunday afternoon as we made the leisurely Air China hope to Shanghai aboard a near-empty 777. She dropped me at the newly opened Minsheng Museum–where we had been a few weeks earlier for a carefully orchestrated opening, but with all the people, unable to properly see the show–and headed back to her place on Xiangyang Lu to unload a suitcase and hard drive containing 120 gigabytes of pictures from our Beijing launch party last week. A few hours later she and I were reunited on the site of the new Rockbund development in Huangpu district, along with our advertising director Philana, fresh in from a day with a client in Kunming.

Beyond the Expo, the Rockbund is the talk of the art-world town these few weeks. A strip of buildings expertly–albeit not yet completely–renovated by architect David Chipperfield, it revolves around one that housed the Royal Asiatic Society back in the 1860s and has just now been rechristened a museum–the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM for short), with Taipei MoCA alumna Lai Hsiangling installed as its inaugural director. The fuss was for a show by Cai Guo-Qiang of works from his latest “Peasant DaVincis” project. If this sounds like it needs some explaining, it does. Back in 2005, Cai curated the first Chinese pavilion at Venice (along with NAMOC director Fan Di’an) and one of the key works was a piece by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in which a peasant named Du Wenda attempted to send a homemade saucer into flight. The art world, rather cruelly, stood around drinking champagne, puzzled and derisive. Cai has reappropriated this concept, finding a whole army of peasant inventors who have made everything from aircraft carriers to submarines, peering out from the austere new museum’s various terraces and public spaces.

It was a bubbly affair, with food stands denoted by China’s various regions–Sichuan! Dongbei!–serving local peasant delicacies to the assembled nouveaux riches. I must have gotten sick on a yam taken from a wicker basket, because after the rest of a night that included drinks at El Coctel on Yongfu Lu and a quick visit to the curiously named Club Obama beneath the Yan’an Elevated Road, I spent the entirety of the next day in my hotel room at the curious Moller Villa (that multi-towered Austrian curiosity you see as you drive in from Hongqiao) trying to work up the energy to catch the evening’s other openings. It was the last “weekend” night of the five-day break for the Shanghai crowd, but I called it an early evening after a look around Yue Minjun’s show of deserted landscapes at Three on the Bund and a simple Shanghainese dinner on Maoming Lu.

On Tuesday I woke early to catch the first Dragonair flight to Hong Kong, then remembered how much I love the SAR as I sped through the immigration “e-channel” with a bar code and a fingerprint and booked my hotel room for the evening aboard the Airport Express over the city’s ubiquitous PCCW wi-fi network. I decided to sample “East,” the newest member of the Swire Hotels group, right around the corner from our Hong Kong office in Quarry Bay. To my surprise, “boss” Thomas Shao was also working from Hong Kong, so we arranged for dinner at a new Japanese restaurant in the Heritage 1881 complex on the Kowloon side, the latest addition to Glibert Yeung’s small empire of Hong Kong eating and drinking establishments, which most famously includes Dragon-I. It was a very Gilbert evening, as dinner faded into drinks back on the Island side at his Tazmania Lounge. I found myself deep in conversation with a structural engineer who had abandoned wind-resistant design for a hedge fund and his girlfriend Nadia who staffs Gagosian Gallery’s HK office.

Wednesday was one of those PRD days, with a morning run through a few of the current Hong Kong exhibitions in preparation for the supplement we are preparing for the Art HK fair later this month and even an iPhone purchase on behalf of a colleague. My 24 hours in HK ended in a quick coffee with critics Robin Peckham and Venus Lau before a hurried boarding of the KCR through train to Guangzhou. Back aboard the Chinese train, I spent two hours on the phone with our Beijing office as the attendants came by with instant coffee, thankfully not to the disturbance of my fellow passengers, all of whom were similarly engaged.

In Guangzhou I was slightly thrown off by the relocation of the East Rail Station’s cab stand to the far side of the plaza, next to a massive waterfall. I walked the three hundred meters through the humid air and hopped a taxi straight to the Garden Hotel to meet Charlie Koolhaas, just returned from London, about her contribution to our upcoming Africa issue. (Charlie, a photographer, has done extensive research on the southern city’s African community.) We selected images over Campari and soda in the Lotus Pond bar, surrounded by traders in town for the commodity fair. Dinner was with her cousin Rem D and his wife Ferrari Koolhaas Xiao, principals of the shoe brand United Nude which is headquartered in Guangzhou. A lavish Korean banquet with the Kool clan and their team ensued, diligently waited upon by the Canto-Korean owner. Back at the Garden Hotel I spent an hour on the phone with my brother, about to leave Senegal for Mauritania, working on his contribution to our next issue. It was all I could do to get my four hours before heading to Baiyun for good old CA 1310, the first link of the day back to Beijing and the world of work waiting there.

On our cover this month you’ll see an image that might not make sense at first. From a corner, our photographer—Shanghai artist Song Tao—captures the workshop in which sculptor Zhan Wang’s stainless steel scholar’s rocks come to life. Under his direction, a team of highly skilled workers bring the unlikely objects into existence, first hammering out shapes against existing stones, then welding them together, then buffing and polishing until the sculpture becomes seamless and shiny. If you look closely at the rock-in-progress, you can see that trademark sheen just beginning to emerge.

This is a state we at LEAP can relate to: the past two months have given us time to refine our process and product, continuing to ask ourselves the key question of what it means to make an international contemporary art magazine in, for and about China. The mass of our magazine, in all its contoured complexity, is there; what remains to us now is the crucial and no less difficult task of making it shine.

Appropriately, then, our second issue revolves around the question of what it means to make things. Our cover package asks this question directly, taking the almost comically overdetermined site of the Chinese factory not as a means to an end but as a realm in its own right. While the question of production has become a commonplace in art criticism over the past three years, we attempt here to approach it from a less polemical position, interested less in questions of authorship or social relations than in the compelling stories behind these charged sites. If we can conclude anything from these investigations, it might be that a very special power lies with the people who actually do the work.

The rest of the issue does not stray far from this mark, first with an in-depth look at some of the art made for the upcoming World Expo. Director Tian Gebing talks about making a work of theater on a site far from home. Our portfolio recalls a time sixteen years ago in which a daily newspaper offered a rare forum for artists to exhibit far-fetched proposals for fabricating new domestic spaces. We also introduce new elements, chiefly an ongoing collaboration with the fine folks at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, who have amassed a remarkable well of interviews with key figures from the 1980s. Up front, you’ll notice new design elements and some new columns, including “Leapt,” which looks at lesser known moments and movements in the ongoing story of advanced art in China.

From the window of the Shanghai hotel where we stay during the final phase of making our magazine, one can see the still unfinished World Expo Garden stretching out toward the banks of the Huangpu. There are just forty days left until the world descends on the city, expecting something great. Sure, there is a lot of work still to be done, and not long to go. But our experience tells us that in China, in 2010, things have a way of coming together just in time.

Philip Tinari
Shanghai, March 22, 2010

This doesn’t change the fact that the damning pictures which supposedly prove that Koolhaas had unspeakable things on his mind when designing the party spaceship were taken completely out of context. The basis for Xiao Mo’s argument seems to be a 2004 post on Art218–coincidentally an old-school pre-ba-ba art-world BBS named after the address of the China Academy of Art (218 Nanshan Lu in Hangzhou)–in which an array of possible “covers” was posted as if they were in fact the front pages of specific magazines. That post featured individual jpegs of each possible cover, when the two-page spread which actually ran in the book looked like this:

In which you see that none of these covers actually ever existed in the sense of running on the front of an issue of a magazine. They were sketches, like any produced in Rotterdam. (And apparently, as OMA has now stated, rejected sketches.) But more interesting still is this rendering, which accompanied a China Daily front-page story on Saturday. Credited simply as “file photo,” it presents a vision of CCTV that only CCTV itself could love.

The grid looks about right, but seems to be articulated as a network of extruding cornices, rather than inset gaps between panes of the curtain wall, a fairly massive distinction both aesthetically and conceptually. It’s CCTV as the Eiffel Tower, which is what everyone says it is/wants it to be anyway. I can’t say for sure, but this image occurs nowhere in, say, the 2005 a+u special issue on the project, nor in Content, nor in any other OMA-published source I have at hand. If I had to surmise, I would say that CCTV produced the image as part of its own press kit on the new headquarters project some five years ago. This raises questions like, Why do you run a rendering when the building actually exists in built form? And what’s up with the skies of puffily clouded blue? Gu Dexin actually had some very good things to say about those, albeit in the context of a scathing critique of authoritarianism at Galleria Continua earlier this summer. Drive by Zhongnanhai and look at the construction barrier that runs along the south side of Chang’an, and you’ll see what he meant.

The next entertaining thing is that the article this photo accompanies quotes none other than the fatman, tagged here as “leading architectural designer and curator who has a copy of Content on his bookshelf.” The last part of the sentence I know is not true, but it explains why he called me frantically at lunchtime on Friday asking if I was in Beijing and if I had a copy of Content on my bookshelf. He couldn’t resist taking a little jab, calling the controversy “a ridiculous joke, created by people who do not understand architecture and a section of the media that has not bothered to find out the truth.” The last part of that sentence is pure earthquake-investigation rhetoric, here channeled to sillier purposes. But the huge question this raises is if, as he claimed last week in seminar, the only words that turn up no results in a firewalled search are “freedom,” “democracy,” “Ai Weiwei,” and “f**k,” then why the f**k is Ai Weiwei quoted essentially speaking for freedom and democracy on the front page of the China Daily? (In the only slightly amusing category is that the byline, Liu Wei, admittedly a very common name, seems here to mark a reporter as cheeky as his two artist namesakes.) The full article, just for fun:

Apparently the China Daily hearts the fatman, which is what Mathieu Borysevicz told me w/r/t the Sichuan madness, that they had run a quote in which he criticized the local police. What kind of media blacklist is it that sees his existence completely deleted from the Chinese web, yet quoted, just below the fold, in the national English-language daily? This goes in the same “mysteries of one-party rule” category as, Why can’t China put together a decent pavilion for the Venice Biennale? Also, did anyone ever realize that the guy who edited Content, Brendan McGetrick, lives in Beijing? Liu Wei, you’ve got a lot to learn.

Finally, on the topic of dirty thoughts and the CCTV, I leave you with one tiny iPhone photo snapped last April on the great cantilever during a guided tour from Captain Kool himself. I won’t translate it, because my mom reads this now, but suffice it to say this is worker graffiti is nastier and more graphic than anything that theoretically sophisticated junior architects could dream up.

Wang Xingwei, Untitled (Hostess and Luggage), 2001. Oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm.

After a week of slow connections in Shanghai, I finally saw the first of the new season last night, 5 1/2 days late if you include the time difference. Though I haven’t read the chatter, it all seemed a bit clichéd–the boiling milk that segues to maternal flashback, the British boy secretary with an accent the girl secretaries love, the fire bell that reveals Sal’s darkest secret, and of course Don Draper with a flight attendant. Even astutely researching who flew 707s from LGA to BWI (if those are even historically accurate airport codes) in 1963 can’t do away with the basic triteness of the stewardess fantasy motif.

In Matthew Weiner’s defense, it transcends. Wong Kar-wai famously adapted it for ’90s Hong Kong. The day after the episode aired, I stumbled across the following, on the morning hop from PEK to SHA. (In a Shanghai Airlines 757–perhaps the very last of the 1050 that Boeing built between 1982 and 2005). It’s an article from The Beijing News about a national flight attendant search that sounds more meat market than Super Girl. Much has been made of the way in which Mad Men evokes the anxieties of a world on the brink of cataclysmic change that resonates with the American mindset in 2009. China, I guess, does cataclysmic change without the anxiety, at least when it comes to flight attendants. Just ask Mr. Liu, quoted in the story below.

584 GIRLS JUMP THE FIRST HURDLE; ENTER PROFESSIONAL EVALUATION

Yesterday the “2009 China Southern Stewardess Competition” concluded its Passenger Committee Evaluation phase for the Beijing selection area, as 584 girls were chosen from 6000 registrants, moving on to the expert evaluation phase.

Those With “O-Shaped Legs” or who “Can’t Laugh” Cannot Become Stewardesses

Sources say that the application process comprises the six phases of Gaze Evaluation, Written Test, Trials, Callbacks, Selection-Area-Specific Television Exposure, and Final Competition. Yesterday, at the site of the competition, all registrants were divided into groups of ten, then called one-by-one to the stage to introduce themselves. Next, according to the requests of the committee members, they were asked to turn around, put their feet together, then walk a loop across the stage and return to where they had begun.

Do not think these are such simple motions; indeed they encompass every sort of serious requirement used to select stewardesses. Passenger selection committee member Mr. Liu noted that competitors are asked to turn around so that the committee can see whether they have obvious O-Shaped or X-Shaped legs; putting their feet together allows for evaluation of whether their legs are symmetrical; and asking them to walk across stage is mainly to see whether their bearing is sufficiently elegant and magnanimous. Aside from this, judges also give marks on the important criteria of whether the competitor has a naturally radiant smile and a full set of glowing white teeth.

Mr Liu said, laughing, “I initially thought choosing stewardesses would be an enjoyable, relaxed affair. Who knew I would have to worry about the high standards of China Southern? It seems that being a judge is also a form of manual labor!”

Their Height Not Reaching 1.63 Meters, Nearly Half of Competitors Eliminated

As of 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, the China Southern Stewardess Competition official website had announced that 584 competitors from the Beijing Selection Region had passed the Passenger Committee Evaluation.

China Southern added that many contestants did not measure 1.63 meters, and that nearly half of all contestants were eliminated on this account. “If they are enrolled students, they must ensure that they will finish their studies before Sept. 1, 2010; those who do not meet this requirement will also be eliminated,” a China Southern spokesperson said.

The fatman came to our seminar. Since the two things he professes to hate the most (besides the thing he hates the most) are Shanghai and the academy, I didn’t think he’d make it, and that was even before what happened last week in Chengdu. I didn’t believe he’d come until I got the call to come to his suite late one night, where he sat in his bathrobe on a couch next to an old writer-friend, the poolside Mao incarnate. The next morning after a state-owned-hotel breakfast of gruel, broccoli, and a soy-sauce friend egg, he sat before the assembled audience of academics in a pink t-shirt, his blue linen worker pantlegs tucked into his socks. “Designing China could mean anything,” he opened. “Like Fucking China.”

Shanghai is a city of servants, began the diatribe, who traded the foreign occupiers for the fiction of the people’s democracy. From there he moved through the litany of cases that to him mark the increasing inhumanity of an irredeemably flawed system. The sterilized cop-killer executed. The earnest lawyer detained. The earthquake investigator on treason trial. No slides of dropping vases, dipping vases, grinding vases into powder. No gray brick buildings, no riffs on Ming chairs or Qing temples. No ceramic flower panels. No hundred-hour-long videos.

Someone asked: “Whither Chimerica?” He replied that the die were cast the day Pat Nixon got taken to see the pandas in the Beijing Zoo while the two boys struck a “deal among mobsters.” Two illicit lovers, unable to hop out of bed and into the shower. NBC was the only news outlet not to interview him last August, although they sent an invitation for him to come into the studio to demonstrate calligraphy. “Don’t think Western valuations of human life are absolute,” he chided, “particularly across cultures,” one eye to Abu Ghraib.

Someone asked: “Can’t we separate China as nation-state and China as civilization?” He replied that you can’t tell by looking at a girl whether she’s deep-down good; you can only say her skirt fits well or her shade of lipstick flatters.

Someone, a misguided old Shanghainese friend from the New York days, asked: “How do you keep up the opposition even as you design buildings for the government?” That he had so little idea about how things get built–that the fatman was on retainer to the Swiss boys, who were in turn at the hire of the state–is interesting, even if the answer, the old line about how the government would never pick him in a million years, was not.

Someone asked: “What can we do here as foreigners?” all stuck on the problems of presence as complicity to the bigbad state. “Foreigners in China are only ever here out of interest,” using in Chinese the two words that mark the two main valences of “interest,” “So you’re best off walking around, finding a nice restaurant, taking some pictures, and going home to tell your friends what a great time you had.”

After the talk, that’s just what he did. While the scholars kept behind closed doors–the Californians wondering if he was all for show, the Shanghainese taking offense on behalf of their city and country–the fatman was out taking pictures for his copkiller documentary, chauffered by an abstractionist-cum-art deco dealer in a five-series and a Patek Phillipe.

I met them for lunch in a little Huaiyang place around the corner from Xintiandi. We had a good, tight room on the second floor, just four of us. The walls were hung with line drawings of bygone local scenes–a barber drying a head with a coal-heated blower, picky ladies inspecting meat. Having eaten his lunchtime pills, he carefully filled the tiny Ziploc into which someone had sorted them with spoon after spoon of tea. He sealed the bag and set it at the center of the table, which at this point only held a few cold appetizers. He let three seconds go by, just long enough for the three of us to start wondering exactly what the teabag was doing on the table. And then suddenly, a fist fell from above, bursting the bag and soaking the abstractionist in tea. “You sure move quick!” came the gleeful punchline, as the abstractionist produced a napkin and began to wipe down his face. “Funny, no?” he asked. “I learned that one from Uli Sigg.”

Yang Fudong, The First Intellectual, 2000.

I spent last week in Shanghai for the first half of a theory workshop convened by a humanities center from the University of California system. The theme is “Designing China,” and the speakers are a lot of the people whose names circulate enough that I feel like I have longstanding intellectual relationships with them even though we’ve never really talked, or in some cases even met–Yung Ho Chang, Hung Huang, Liu Suola, Leo Ou-fan Lee. For those of us who exist in intellectual professions outside the academy proper, it’s a strange but joyous thing to be thrust back into the seminar room. You quickly catch up on the new words that weren’t yet in vogue while you were an undergrad: “haptic,” “conviviality,” “elsewheres.” You remember that every point made, every question raised (every speech-act, I should say), is to be called an “intervention,” a word that to me at least skews a bit fierce for what are ultimately civil interchanges among mutually respectful colleagues. (Then again, I used to find it annoying that people in the art world called every room a “space,” and I got used to that.) Ultimately you have to cherish the quaintness of a professional community whose comfort and status derives so transparently from its function of preparing the ninety-nine percent of undergraduates who don’t go on to further disciplinary study for “regular” careers staking so much self-worth on the possibility of envisioning itself as deeply critical.

That said, their conversations are to mass opinion as the haute couture shows are to Zara, and I know which I like better. People trade in smart, generally extemporaneous coinages that, while not suited for mass consumption, seem to explain everything for a second or two: “recombinant urbanism,” “every city needs its big idea,” “not deconstruction, reconstruction.” You sit there and listen to folks, your age or a bit older or younger, who have spent the last few years “avoiding the pitfalls of both localism and exceptionalism,” wondering “how to take the surface seriously as an analytical space.” As in any field, the best maxims are those that seem completely trite to the speaker but completely novel to the listener, as in, “Every anthropologist who’s sat in on or led brainstorming sessions knows that they’re closely related to ritual and magic.” I also still relish good post-structuralist wordplay, and am glad to note that the belabored multi-parenthetical zingers of the fin-de-siècle (”medi(t)ation,” “dissemi-nation,” “(gyn)ecology”) seem to have given way to a more brazen form of punning–searching for the “Dasein of design” and locating “the ‘decade’ in ‘decadence.’” Sometimes, people say things that are downright insightful, like Benjamin Lee’s extended analysis yesterday of the reflexivity of financial instruments like derivatives as rehashing the ethnographic conundrum of how to account for the observer’s always-already disturbing presence. (He somehow got from there to Frank Knight’s 1921 distinction between uncertainty and risk, and from there to Knight as Weber’s first translator, and from there to the Protestant Ethic as a response to the fundamental salvation uncertainty of Calvinism. Wow. PDF here.)

For all that smartness, though, people still make the same sorts of pedestrian observations (lane-house-next-to-the-Starbucks stuff) and traffic in the same vulgar pomo/poco contentions you get at most art world panels. The big question–Whither, China?–is still the big question. “Context” as concept looms large, but people don’t find the specific dynamics of how this or that text gets made very interesting, and they still fail to pick up the earnest treatises on Harmony placed at the seminar room entrance by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences hosts. If the art world is, as Jonathan Napack once said, a parody of the real world, then the humanities are a really long conversation about it. Investments differ and affects fluctuate, but at the end of the day, the two are cousins, and we’re all clear on the fact that both beat actually having to “intervene” in anything so specific as, say, an assembly line, a construction site, or even a state-secrets trial in Chengdu.

1.) Start with the part about the fishing village and the Chinese walled city. Traders in the mud and such.

2.) Move straight on to the Opium Wars, making sure to conflate the two. Offer a cursory sketch of how settlements were granted, first to the Brits, then to everyone else. (Advanced practitioners only: insert line about how the Zhoushan archipelago, not Hong Kong, was the initial object of British desire.) If the audience is predominantly American, knowingly make the point that “the French like to do everything differently,” leading them not to join the International Settlement.

3.) Veering toward Fuxing Park, field intermittent questions about the trees and those who planted them. Explain that Huaihai Lu used to be called Avenue Joffre.

4.) You must, absolutely must, include the fact that only 2000 actual French people lived in the French concession at its height, and that most of the residents were, even then, wealthy Chinese.

5.) Make at least twice the point about the inexorably wartorn nature of China in the early twentieth century. Pepper with unsubstantiated references to internal demographics of the same period, saying things like, “The north was full of warlords and corrupt officials. Shanghai was for businessmen.”

6.) Walking into a typical neighborhood, (extra points for having your group stand in such a way that they completely obstruct the flow of residents in and out of their compound, and for each dirty look thus drawn) get to the part where refugees flood the villas and their gardens driving opportunistic developers to improvise a form of block housing that draws on Western forms and Chinese fengshui. All hail the lilong!

7.) Moving on to the present, tell at least one moving story about a family reclaiming its real-estate inheritance in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. From there, segue into a discussion of the well-intentioned but ultimately flawed nature of preservation efforts today. Point to, say, a Russian Orthodox church that became a winebar in the nineties before becoming a retirement center in the world-expo run-up, noting that the crosses on the architraves remain, while the icon of St. Nicolas has been removed.

8.) Drop everyone in Tianzifang to shop for “Chinese design,” contrasting the organic nature of this renovation with the situation in Xintiandi. Sniffing the cesspool, explain how one young designer inherited a cramped apartment here from her grandmother, turned it into a shop, and that within a year the whole thing had exploded, a testament to the new vitality of the creative industries. As the remaining locals shuffle by holding chamberpots, tripping over the workers installing sewer mains that will soon make these daily journeys obsolete, marvel at how far Shanghai has come, and how far it has to go.

By this point, everyone should be ready for lunch.

Zhang Enli, Trees IV, 2004. Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm.

Coastal City Mall, 2008, Shenzhen.

Yesterday was one of those magical Pearl River Delta days where the exigencies Koolhaas started proselytizing about a decade ago seemed to resonate even truer than I always imagine they must have at, say, the GSAPP or Documenta X. That old maxim about Shenzhen skyscrapers designed in three days? Sure seemed unchanged as I walked with a designer friend from his studio to a diner down a kilometer-long elevated walkway lined with every sort of retail operation and offering views on myriad foundation-pouring works in progress. This was Nanshan, the new CBD. The walkway and surrounding mixed-use had opened back in December. “They’re imitating Hong Kong,” he told me, which would have seemed less funny if we hadn’t been just a few kilometers over the “border.” We spent a long afternoon proofreading and then ate at the standby Hakka beef hotpot place in Xiasha, a VIC that emerged to service the truckies coming over through the Huanggang crossing, before they amped it up and opened it 24/7 to individual travelers in preparation for a coming subway and rail link.

If you’ve never crossed at Huanggang, you should, but only once. Where Lo Wu propagates this PRD urban fiction of a pleasantly connected stream of city centers, with the KCR light-rail running alongside the through-train to Guangzhou, Huanggang is all fuck-you elbow throws and spitting and plastic burlap sacks. You scale this baroque pedestrian overpass, negotiating poorly designed signage (all in Chinese of course) into the exit hall. After getting your stamp, you are dumped into a giant port-authority-style bus terminal where you must buy a ticket for one or another destination in Hong Kong. Wanchai is as close as it gets to Central, but fortunately I was staying on the Kowloon side, so Mongkok sufficed. Here’s the catch: If you have a suitcase, they’ll make you put it in the lower compartment, but absolutely do not slip into the Airport Express mentality of In-town check-in. After the bus has driven the five minutes through the no-man’s land between border terminals and deposits you in Hong Kong entry land, DO NOT NEGLECT (as I did) to take your suitcase from below and carry it with you through the second crossing. The irony was that the last time I crossed at Huanggang, which should have been the last time I crossed at Huanggang, the hassle of having to reclaim one’s bags multiple times was enough to drive a certain megacurator to cancel a talk and hitch a cab directly from the in side of the border to HKG, just in time to hop AF185 back to CDG.

So there I was, waiting behind ten other “visitors” (i.e. mainland Chinese, to whom Hong Kong belongs, but who are still extremely restricted in terms of entering it) as a very deliberate inspector actually read every line on every entry form (strangest question: place of passport issue), wondering why the e-channel barcodes that work so flawlessly for enrolled foreign-passport holders at the airport had not yet been installed here at Lok Ma Chau. It was at this point that I realized that there was no way I would be boarding the same bus I had been on before; all the Hong Kongers, who made up 80% of the bus population, had swiped their ID cards and cleared customs in seconds flat. Finally through, I could only attempt extreme politeness and precipitate a brief walkie-talkie exchange among the bus operators searching for my bag (I was fortunate to have remembered the exact departure time of the original bus) and then rode the 30 minutes into Kowloon trying not to think about exactly how one would go about trying to reclaim an item that had last been seen in the space between two borders. Miraculously, the bag was there on the curb in Mongkok. Some days, you just get lucky.