HOTLOG

Xu Tan, an artist and a good friend of Rain comes to pick us up and take us to the Creek Art Center by the Suzhou Creek. The Creek is a private institution directed by Norwegian Lise Yuen, focusing on young Shanghai artists and contemporary international art. Xu Tan introduces me to the curator Karen Hung and I introduce my work before she shows me the 3 floor gallery with cafe and top floor restaurant. They rent one floor for commercial activities, and the restaurant helps finance the gallery that has beautiful spaces but no external funding. We have lunch with Xu Tan who is super nice and funny. He just came back from a one-year residency in Berlin, and works with politically engaged installations. One project is a public sauna in the gallery accompanied with a video featuring numerous interviews with people about their relationship to their bodies. He tells that the Chinese just discovered their bodies for their own pleasure while before the body belonged to the communist party. Saunas have become increasingly popular, and he provides one for contemplation and interaction. He shows me another project where he supplies one real and one fake dollar bill and a questionnaire asking people which one they prefer. He does not think many people in China understand conceptual art. We laugh at how fortune cookies do not exist in China, only in Chinatown. We are too late for the Shanghai Museum, and head for Fuxing Park where we find that theShanghart Gallery is closed for renovation. The park is pretty with dancing old people and fun stuff for kids. My cell rings and it is Lise Yuen calling from Oslo where she is just down from a trip in the mountains. She apologizes that she was not able to meet me in Shanghai and we agree to stay in touch. Cool! We find our way back to the train station to purchase return tickets so we don't get Shanghaied in Shanghai before heading for Pudong armed with cameras. I videotape and photograph the wild skyscrapers and the waterfront into the dark, while lights are blinking and reflections shining in the pond of a huge park named Lujiazui Greenland. My son and partner make Chinese friends - everybody is amazed at our looks and wants to have a picture taken with us. Give and take.

We find a huge mall, enter to find something to eat, and are happy to find New Age Veggie where we have an excellent meal before taking a taxi home.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 22, 2005 at 9:25 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.