Shanghai certainly looked like it was teeming with attention in November 2019, when I visited for a residency. It was the biggest city nearby when I lived in the region as a teenager. Now, Shanghai is likely the biggest city in China, not in terms of area size or metro population but in terms of centripetal interests.

 

Lately, the mercantile city has aimed to establish itself as a contemporary art center. The following writing describes the city’s aspirations, which have some historical roots, in relation to a video work by artist Ming Wong that observes the city. Wong’s artistic endeavor to link the former French Concession of Shanghai to French New Wave cinema (Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) sounds like a leap of faith, for they share little besides both being (once) French, a characteristic that doesn’t and shouldn’t be seen as indicating either’s full identity. Yet, at a time when Shanghai attempts to massively reassert its haipai ([Shang]hai-style) local culture that emphasizes on embracing the modernizing and the “Western,” Wong’s video work is revelatory, since it remarks on a Shanghai that’s always on the lookout for balance between cultures and between times.

 

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I.

 

The location of my residency was not very central. As a result, I spent ample time commuting for openings and other events, all of which were circumscribed into the month of November, the municipally designated art season. As opposed to the time I spent going on foot and subway, it didn’t take long for me to notice the French connections the city was bolstering. The West Bund Museum, designed by David Chipperfield, is a modernist public space that somehow has the simple, light-filled atrium of an efficient office building. The Centre Pompidou lent the Museum its collections and programming, beginning in November 2019 and lasting for at least five years. The same neighborhood that’s revamped from a disused airport also saw the opening of French artist Cyprien Gaillard’s solo show at the TANK, a museum whose name derives not from a full title but from the past life of its buildings as fuel tanks for aircrafts. In November, Emmanuel Macron visited both museums during his China visit, even inaugurating the former.

 

Moving northward along the Huangpu River while sticking to Puxi – the historically developed west end of Shanghai – one would encounter the Power Station of Art (PSA) and for several more miles, the Amber Building at the Bund. The PSA was China’s first state-run museum dedicated to contemporary art. At the top of the seven-floor power plant reincarnate, it opened an exhibition on French architect Jean Nouvel’s practice. The Amber Building was a warehouse of the Central Bank of China in the 1930s and 40s. Since 2018, it began to house galleries, and two of the three existing ones are from France – Perrotin and Almine Rech. Perrotin showed the work of two French artists, Jean-Michel Othoniel and Pierre Soulages, during November.

 

Located more inland in the trendy former French Concession, the Prada Foundation’s Shanghai branch since 2017 (Rong Zhai) lives in a historic revivalist residence (that Prada helped conserve), where a site-specific exhibition of Chinese artist Li Qing could be seen. The architectural and geographical European-ness is not lost to the Italian fashion house, as Prada states in the mission statement that the residence “[embodies Prada’s] ongoing commitment to Chinese culture and Sino-European dialogue.”[1] Many bilateral exchanges have supposedly happened. In an interview, the French curator of the exhibition, Jérôme Sans, compares Shanghai to Paris, drawing on their differences concerning the transformation of urban landscapes.

 

Perhaps a story familiar to many, Shanghai’s cash-laden international gateway status goes back to the period when it had semi-exclaves of countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and particularly France. Despite that its European cosmopolitanism, which has more than just a hint of post-coloniality, could date back to the mid-nineteenth century, the former French Concession has never been an area of foreign opulence secluded from the once mostly rural China. In the 1910s, the west side of the French Concession was developed into a premier residential area, attracting well-to-do people of all nationalities, including Chinese nationals. During World War II and before the total Japanese occupation of Shanghai in 1941, the French Concession was Shanghai’s last bastion to receive refugees of Chinese and other nationalities.

 

The cultural mélange of Shanghai that mixes the Chinese and the “Western” has fascinated generations of Chinese novelists. Eileen Chang is one of the first and most known. She gained prominence with her 1943–1945 novellas portraying contemporary Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Her literary styles and themes, which are based on her impressionistic and occasionally cruel view of Shanghai and its fashionable/old-fashioned residents, have influenced future writers. Wang Anyi is one of the influenced and another writer preoccupied with the city. Her 1995 novel The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, which follows the life of a Wang Qiyao from 1945 to 1986, is often seen to have revisited Chang’s Shanghai. Having lived through the modern vicissitudes of China and Shanghai, Wang Qiyao becomes an emblem of “old Shanghai” near the end of the novel. Her decadent pre-liberation past as a “Miss Shanghai” is the source of admiration and animosity toward her, the latter of which results in her “tragedy that echoes the pulpy Hollywood noirs of her youth.”[2]

 

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II.

 

By the 1990s in Chinese society, “Shanghai” could serve as a metonym for a commodified nostalgia for China’s former capitalist times. This remembrance has been revitalized by the socialist market economy, and it has made Shanghai an object of interest in not just the art scene and literature but contemporary artworks as well.

 

Shot mostly in the former French Concession, Next Year / L’Année Prochaine / 明年 (2016) by Ming Wong looks at Shanghai as well as the French New Wave. The title refers to Last Year at Marienbad by Alain Resnais, a film that traces a perplexing love story in the Czech spa town Marienbad. The film is known for its ambiguity, which is achieved by unprecedented cinematic language that helps create among its viewers a chimerical feeling. As if paying homage to Resnais’s deliberately confusing narrative, Wong cross-cuts scenes from the film with his own performance of the very scenes. Meanwhile, Wong sets his own performance not in Marienbad, but in a “Western-style” Marienbad Café, the Fuxing Park, and other places in the former French Concession.

 

Split screens, green-screen scenes, flicker effects, reversals, glitches… Wong uses an array of techniques to generate the video, many of them referencing structural films. Every appearance of the man/woman from Last Year at Marienbad is accompanied by Wong’s acting of him/her, often with the latter appearing in a parallelogram frame and moving back and forth atop the former. These techniques obstruct a straightforward view, recalling the baffling film of Resnais. But more importantly, they create visual collages that cut contemporary French-Concession establishments into the Baroque palace and garden that represent Marienbad. Resnais’s film loses its enchanting power in this adaptation, while Shanghai gains a comparison to the Baroque, which is eponymous with an interior-decorating style so popular in the early days of China’s economic reform that nowadays, the word is synonymous with kitsch.

 

Wong’s collaging is not restricted to editing. In terms of casting for a scene at the Café, Wong has chosen actors of both East Asian and White European descents. The casting doesn’t collage, but the fact that the actors are as stiff as wax figures without conversations does achieve the effect. By moving the camera across the biracial tableaux vivant, Wong creates a sense of staged internationalism that’s unnatural and Eurocentric, much like how Shanghai’s art scene could be described. In a scene at the Fuxing Park, one sees Wong and his co-actor performing a filmic moment next to a group of Chinese men playing cards. First laid out by French in 1909, the Park has retained some French characteristics along with its later Chinese-style additions. The viewer could sense an uneasiness between the romance originally set at an ornate hotel and the card-playing setting at a public park. The French-Chinese feature of the Park presumably should have eased the tension, but the surrealism of the scene exaggerates the cultural blending belonging to the Park, making it appear contrived.

 

Looking at the video, one could say that to pair the eclectic former French Concession with the super bourgeois Marienbad seems maladroit. After all, Wong has little intention to make visual transitions between the two locations smooth. But adjacent to the visual “awkwardness,” there is a verbal transcendence; it doesn’t necessarily better link the two locations, but it certainly allows something more unifying to exist alongside the chasm. In an attempt to remind the woman of their previous acquaintance, of which she claims to be unaware, the man from the film narrates: “We met in the park – as in past times. You stood before me, waiting, unable to take a step nor turn back. It is not possible to turn back.” In the video, this narration is overlaid with Wong’s, which follows the initial lines but brings the narration from the past and present tense to the future tense. The same is done to the woman’s lines. With this grammatical modification, the questionable love affair is suddenly delayed to the future. Instead of disputing an uncertain previous event, the couple gets to look forward to a future meeting.

 

Near the end of the video, Wong inserts a scene from another Resnais’s classic – Hiroshima, My Love – and overlays the film clip, again, with his own acting. Yet, the line uttered by Lui to Elle in the scene that foreshadows their separation is resolutely Marienbadian: “Stay with me in Marienbad.” (Dis)connections between Marienbad and the former French Concession are left behind, but the forward-looking sensibility continues.

 

In Last Year at Marienbad, one character alleges to not know the past, and the other’s nostalgia lacks confirmation – the couple face a dilemma regarding their history. However, in the video, the mismatched encounter is altered into the two’s collective anticipation of the future. This foresight is geographically enclosed by the former French Concession, where a sophisticated and cosmopolitan past might seem palpable. At the same time, that heavily embellished memory, when recalled, doesn’t get to dictate what the area should become hereafter. With the passing of “old Shanghai” symbolized by Wang Qiyao’s tragic ending, one could sense the artificiality of the nostalgia and then move on from it. This change of mind is perhaps also what Wong has suggested with his work. The video ends with contemporary Shanghai cityscapes that combine somewhat rundown French-Concession homes with nearby unfinished high-rises; these temporally in-between buildings are collaged with post-war street views of Nevers, France from Hiroshima, My Love. What the city will look like in the future remains unknown to most, but a look at the city’s not so urbane and flashy sides would guarantee more encompassing variations in the future.

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[1] “Special Projects: Prada Rong Zhai,” Prada Group, accessed February 15, 2020, https://www.pradagroup.com/en/perspectives/stories/sezione-progetti-speciali/prada-rong-zhai.html.

[2] “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai,” Columbia University Press, accessed February 15, 2020, http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-song-of-everlasting-sorrow/9780231143424.