Thinking about Shanghai Urban

Skyline

in the “Anticipation of Reappearance”

of Shanghai

Mia Yu （于于 ）

December 19, 2006

1

Splayed open from a suitcase, the Shanghai skyline

in Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable City series immediately pops up

like a shoddy sales display temporarily installed by a

traveling salesman. Displayed directly on the gallery

floor, the Oriental Pearl TV tower appears to be a

syringe needle wrapped in toilet paper; the Bund,

Shanghai’s iconic waterfront, is a pair of tattered

pantyhose stretching across the garish interior (fig.1).

With flashy lights embedded inside, the suitcase also

works like a light box. It not only brightens up the

whole display to entertain the viewer’s eye, but also

draws the viewer up close to examine its material

details. While “Shanghai in a suitcase” delivers a quick

pun on the city’s recent development fever, the kind of

banal materiality attributed to Shanghai’s skyline

prompts us to think about the very urban condition that

the work responds to and probably operates upon.

2

Fig 1. Yin Xiu Zhen, Portable City-Shanghai, 2002. Installation: suitcase, clothing, needle, cupboard. Courtesy of the artists.

Yin Xiuzhen’s installation was first exhibited

during the 2002 Shanghai Biennale. Inaugurated in 1996,

the Shanghai Biennale is a large-scale international art

exhibition sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and

Shanghai Government, as a permanent programme of the

Shanghai Art Festival and the Tourism Festival.1 The

Biennale has been seen as a strategic place-making

manoeuvre to develop the cultural software needed to

promote Shanghai as the Global City of Asia. The 2002

Biennale with the theme “Urban Creation” was the first

exhibition in China where art and architecture were shown1 Lisa Movius, “Urban Deconstruction: The 2002 Shanghai Biennale Moves Towards the Mainstream,” Asian Wall Street Journal, January 17-19, 2003.

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together. As Alice Ming Wai Jim astutely observed, “[the

biennale’s] political correct and relatively safe theme

sought to address the speed of construction in cities of

different scales over the past two decades and how this

ongoing historical and spatial transformation is shaping

China’s contemporary culture.”2 In this context, a number

of artworks dealing with Shanghai’s rapid urban

transformation were selected by a team of international

curators and exhibited together in the Biennale. It is

during this biennale that critics noticed that more and

more Shanghai-based artists started to treat Shanghai as a

new thematic in their works.3 Using diverse artistic

strategies, these works directly comment on Shanghai’s

drastic self redefinition and reinvention movement. In

these works, Shanghai refers more than a place, rather

signifies a series of new sensibilities, Utopian ideals

and emerging urban subjectivities.

The social backdrop of such artistic production is

the rapid urban transformation undertaking in Shanghai in

2 Alice Ming Wai Jim, “Tourism, Art and Shanghai’s Urban Skyline,” Parachute, no 114 (2004): 85. 3 The Biennale curators Alanna Heiss and Yuko Hasegawa discussed it in a private conversation.

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the last two decades. Until the 1990s, the tallest

building in Shanghai was the twenty-four-storey Park

Hostel, built by Ladislaus Hudec in 1934. But in the past

decade, in Shanghai’s headlong rush to reinvent its urban

fabric, partially in its own former image, partially as a

fractured conglomeration unconstrained by any unified

urban plan, the city has once again become the site of

growth on an unparalleled scale. The biggest

transformation of Shanghai has been the city’s horizontal

expansion into Pudong, a new special economic zone. The

most visually dramatic spectacle has to be the vertical

rise of the Pudong skyline along its farmland-turned-

into-business-district waterfront.

With the influx of capital investment and an economy

driven by commodity exchange, not only did social

relations and everyday life change, but so too did

cultural practices. Like Yin Xiuzhen, many Chinese

artists started to see artistic potentials in Pudong’s

transformation and started to appropriate its iconic

skyline for their artistic production. Often being

created in a quick fashion just like the city’s thousands

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of building projects, many of these works wrap themselves

in a fun, light-hearted spirit and even demonstrate

prankish impulses. They tend to poke fun at not only the

kitschy forms of the landmark buildings in Pudong, but

also the kind of cultural urbanism that bolsters

Shanghai’s image in a high-visibility platform.

Contemporary artists in China, especially in

Shanghai, no longer define themselves in relation to the

state and resistance to or dissent from an authoritarian

power. The challenge is to define themselves in relation

to the aesthetics of commodity culture and the “society

of spectacle.” Hence, Shanghai has again become a

laboratory for thinking through a range of issues

concerning the formation of the contemporary Chinese

subject. In this short essay, I would like to trace the

connections between the ways in which Pudong skyline is

presented, re-presented and enacted upon as a spectacle

and the very strategies that the artists employ in a few

selected works.

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Pudong’s new skyline in the culture of “reappearance” of

Shanghai

Although the concept of “skyline”, traditionally

meaning “the line where earth and sky meet,” only began

to refer to the buildings on the horizon in the late

nineteenth century, the visualization of the skyline-like

urban profile can be traced to the early modern Europe.4

One of the first graphic devices to conceptualize

“skyline” in the Renaissance is to emphasize buildings in

silhouette against a blank sky. Though this ideal

representation was not completely based on visual

reality, it nonetheless broadcast a formal statement of

the city’s self-conception and highlighted those features

of the cityscape important to the purposes of the

sovereign power.5 In the late 19th century, Europe

witnessed the first impulse to build monumental towers to

commemorate important cultural or political events. Best

exemplified by the Eiffel Tower, they served as

advertisement for, and monument to, the spectacular 4 Spiro Kostof, “The Urban Skyline” in The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1991).5 In this respect, Kostof gave the examples such as “Jorg Seld for his view of Augsburg (1521) and Lubeck (1552), Woensam for the 1531 view of Cologne, and Conrad Merian who depicted a number of Austraiancities as well as Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Ulm and Paris.” (287)

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advances in engineering technology. It is also around the

same era that the corporate skyscrapers started to shoot

up in Chicago and New York as a monument to the growing

prominence of the modern American corporation. In the 20th

century, the urban skylines composed by landmark

skyscrapers are probably the most visually impressive

ones and the most represented in the modern visual

culture. Creating landmark skyscrapers have been

frequently employed as a strategy to address various

agendas, which more or less has to do with attracting

investment and tourism, updating the city’s image in line

with historical changes and elevating the city’s profile

in the global order.6 The most recent example in the West

is probably the transformation of Berlin’s skyline with

mega projects like Potsdamer Platz’s SONY center in the

1990s.

The modern urban skyline, as Spiro Kostof concisely summarizes:

Skylines are urban signatures […] These landmarks focus city forms and highlight city portraits. The

6 For example, In 1979 the city of Melbourne held an international competition aimed at securing a distinctive landmarkt itself. “It became clear that Melbourne needed a big idea—something unique, something remarkable, something to give us more pride in ourselves and a far more significant place in the global iteneray…” Quoted in W. Attoe, Skyline (Chichester 1981), 2.

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presentation itself is contrived. It is chiefly meant for an external audience. The artist composes the urban skyline with the pilgrim, the official visitor, the common tourist in mind.7

The most intriguing aspect of Kostof’s definition is

contrived effort to orient a skyline toward an “external

audience.” His understanding suggests that not only the

skyscrapers significantly broaden the viewer’s field of

vision, but also they want to be viewed from a distance.

This kind of extraverted exhibitionism is connected to

the spectacularization of a skyscraper-strewn downtown in

visual culture, starting from the skyscraper photography

of the early 20th century. Since Alfred Stieglitz

glamorized the Manhattan skyline by abstracting it into

stylish silhouettes and planes, the Manhattan skyline has

built up its iconicity through proliferated

representations. Nowadays, tourists flock to take the

Staten Island Ferry in order to see the city as the

photographers see it. Going to a particular view point

and identifying the landmarks on the urban skyline have

indeed become part of the modern tourist ritual.

Conceived as an object of long-range vision, the

7 Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1991) Ch. 5: The Urban Skyline.

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modern urban skyline is intensively mediated by a pre-

meditated system of representation. Skyline seems live

its life more in magazine photographs, postcards, tourist

souvenirs and advertisings than its specific spatial

locale. In them, the skyline’s topography is often

flattened into two-dimensional images, planes, or even

abstract contours. The material specificity of the

architecture looses the relevance and is reduced to

smooth and shiny surfaces.

A contemporary urban skyline is neither a real place

that one can spatially experience from within, nor a

concrete object that one can physically interact with.

Its existence oscillates between an object of vision and

a simulacrum space. It has a concrete presence in image

and yet remains elusive in physical experience. However,

I posit that skyline still leads a life physically,

socially and culturally. A skyline grows, matures, ages,

rejuvenates and even gets injured at various moments of

its life as seen in the tragedy of 9/11. In the hands of

various cultural agents, a skyline also travels and

mutates through images and objects. Though a skyline is

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built to fulfil certain desires caught at particular

historical time, its accumulative growth over history may

make it loose its original social-cultural significance

and re-gain cultural currency of a whole other kind. The

system of signification that articulates a skyline’s

cultural relevance is never static, but in a constant

state of flux. An urban skyline is contextualized, de-

contextualized and re-contextualized as the socio-

political context evolves and reshapes. Hence, thinking

about a skyline’s cultural life is essentially to think

about how meanings are organized through architectural

and spatial displays and representations, and how skyline

and its representations, in turn, mediate social

relations among people. Shanghai’s new skyline in Pudong

New Area provides us a potent site to examine these

issues as well as the resonances in contemporary art.

In 1992, Deng Xiaoping, China’s neo-liberal leader,

toured Southern China and called for the region to become

the laboratory for the country’s drive towards

modernization. Deng’s slogans “To get rich is glorious”

and “A new look each year, a transformation in three

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years” became the catch-phrases of the Reform Era. Within

a few short years, Shanghai has seen the construction of

over one thousand skyscrapers, several around-the-city

subway lines, a high-speed magnetic train and the longest

steel-arch bridge linking Shanghai to Pudong.8 As the city

was revitalized, so were its aspirations of being a

cosmopolitan city. With an acute obsession for

superlatives and speed, the city is never shy about

desiring replacing Hong Kong to become Asia’s premier

metropolis. Located right across the river from the Bund,

Pudong used to be a vast suburban area occupied by

vegetable farms and low-income housing by the late 1980s.

After being designated as a special economic zone in

1993, the residents pf Pudong were quickly relocated

within a year and the shanty towns they used to live were

razed to make space for a Central Business District at

the waterfront, two tax-free factory zones, five high-

tech parks and numerous new residential compounds.9 Amidst

all the transformation, the most visually dramatic one is

the fantastic vertical reconfiguration of urban skyline

8 Shanghai Tourism: Expanding the Horizons. (Tourism Commission, 2000), 42. 9 Xu Wen, “Pudong: Untold Story,” The Asian Urban Review, 40 no. 2 (May, 2006), 23.

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in Pudong.

The skyscraper skyline of Pudong was conceived to

impress (fig.2). It consists of a line-up of landmark

buildings along Pudong’s waterfront, such as eighty-

eight-storey Jinmao Tower and the Oriental Pearl TV Tower

perched on a small river delta at the turning point of

Huangpu River. 10 Every night, Pudong puts on a fantastic

show with excessive neon lights and subliminal video

projections on the architectural surfaces (fig. 3). As

the new icon of Shanghai, the Pudong skyline is

conveniently used in Western TV documentaries and

magazine feature articles to illustrate a phenomenon

phrased by the Western media as “China rising.” Like many

foreign visitors who experienced a “Shanghai surprise” in

their first visits, cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas viewed

Shanghai today as “an everyday cinematic illusion,

capable of conjuring whole skylines as if through special

effects.”11 He called Pudong an artificial paradise

10 I think that the tallest building in Shanghai, Jinmao Tower possesses a “religious aura.” Its architectural shape is inspired by and loosely modeled upon a Chinese pagoda, the tallest structure in Chinese classical cities. 11 Ackbar Abbas, “Play it Again Shanghai: Urban Preservation in the Global Era,” in Shanghai Reflections: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Search for an Alternative Modernity, ed. Mario Gandelsonas (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 37.

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anticipating the “reappearance” of Shanghai as Asia’s

most important international city.

Fig.2 Postcard image of Shanghai.

Fig. 3 Postcard iamge of Shanghai night view.

As a spectacle planted on the façade of Pudong, the

Pudong skyline serves as a total justification of the

conditions and goals of this anticipation and represents

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the constant presence of this anticipation. With the spirit

of a commodity, the skyline “sells” to the world an

economically prosperous and culturally glamorous image of

Shanghai that helps to seduce international business and

tourism. This image projects a falsified reality but

simultaneously presents itself as part of the reality.

Shanghai is materially invaded by such projection, and

ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it.

The Pudong skyline simultaneously reveals and

conceals. What it reveals is the desirable “reappearing

face” of Shanghai; what it conceals is the presence of

the true producers of Pudong skyscrapers—the migrant

peasant workers who arrive in the city everyday to work

on the construction sites. Like all other spectacles put

up in Shanghai everyday, the Pudong skyline subjects its

own producers to itself by separating them from the end

product and eventually casting them into consumers and

spectators. The fetishism of the Pudong spectacle

attributes subjective characteristics to the skyline as

compensation for the loss of subjectivity felt in the

division of labour. As Guy Debord conceptualizes,

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“[Spectacle] is at once a faithful reflection of the

production of things and a distorting objectification of

the producers… [T]he fetishistic appearance of pure

objectivity in spectacular relations conceals their true

character as relations between people.”12 Hence, the

Pudong skyline is at the very heart of Shanghai’s

“unreality.”

At a quick glance, Yin Xiuzhen’s installation Portable

City-Shanghai satirizes such “unreality” that the Pudong

skyline projects. Yin has made several suitcases for the

world cities where she has exhibited her art—all using

locally found objects, the recorded sounds and the used

clothes of the city residences. Compared with the others,

the Shanghai suitcase particularly strikes me as the kind

of garish sales display that one can find in a summer

street market. The flashy lights embedded in the suitcase

brighten up the whole set-up and further accentuate the

cheap and mundane material that the “merchandise” is made

of. Yin deliberately objectified Pudong and attributed

materiality to Pudong’s media architecture, which have

been heavily de-materialized by its own media projections12 Guy Debord. Society of the Spectacle. (Detroit : Black & Red, 1977)

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and representations. Yin significantly shortened the

viewing distance between the city object and the viewer.

Instead of looking up at a mirage-like skyline on the

horizon like all spectators do, the viewer looks down at

a small suitcase right under the eye. The closeness to

the viewing object arouses an anthropological interest of

observation. The viewers often linger over the suitcase

for a long time and try to identify all the material

details that compose the suitcase interior.

The suitcase functions as both a humble platform and

a physical container. It simultaneously reveals the

context in which Shanghai exists and suggests the

potential space that it travels to. The suitcase, a

travel object, is destined to live its life in between

various fragmentary phases of travelling, waiting, in

transition, in diversion, in detour, in detention and in

storage. A suitcase draws a map with the traces that it

inscribes onto the world. The items inside the suitcase,

mixed with essential things for travel and the souvenirs

from a visited place, also reveal the purpose of the

journey and the status of the traveller. Having been

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asked many times the same question bout the identity of

the suitcase owner, Yin Xiuzhen remains ambiguous about

the answer. She even once said in an interview that it

did not really matter to her. Some critics see the

suitcase as a symbol of Yin’s personal journey as an

international artist; others view it as a simple

belonging to a migrant worker who may have come from the

countryside and participated in building Pudong.13

However, it seems to me that the specific identity of the

suitcase owner may not be so important. It is precisely

due to the ambiguity of the traveller that Yin’s work is

open to more interesting interpretations. Shanghai is at

the center of inter-crossings of itinerates with diverse

goals and desires. The Pudong skyline contained in that

suitcase, hence, could be a tourist’s souvenir, a migrant

worker’s dream, an architect’s project, a real estate

developer’s target or a salesman’s product. Pudong

provides a platform of exchange for goods, services,

ideas and people. The city is not only a stop in their

paths but also makes diversions in lives as commodities.

13 Pi Ji, “Review: Portable City series” Yishu: Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art, 36 no. 3 (Fall 2003), 45-46.

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Shanghai’s own journey of “reappearance” as a global

metropolis is precisely articulated by the conflicts,

contradictions and negotiations of these intertwined

travels.

Between Pudong and the Bund: the tale of two skylines

The Pudong skyline was born into a contrast with the

Bund. The most dramatic aspect of Pudong is probably not

the waterfront display of landmark skyscrapers, but the

dramatic juxtaposition and cultural echoing between the

two skylines of Pudong and the Bund. The architectural

confrontation of two skylines signifies a reciprocal

space in which they constantly compete with each other,

contextualize each other and also complement each other.14

The line-up of neo-Classical Concession-era buildings on

the Bund used to be Shanghai’s signature skyline from the

1930s until the early 1990s. Since the late 1990s, the

14 This shift manifests itself most evidently on the cover of the city’s tourist brochures and travel magazines as well as the investment portfolios targeting Western investors Interestingly, the tourist brochures targeting Chinese tourists have Pudong skyline. While travel materials targeting overseas tourists still use the Bund. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom observed that “Similarly, the sheer number of Shanghai publications dealing with the city has grown so much in the last decade that, even factoring in the tendency ofa rising percentage of these to show only one or more Pudong structures on the front, there has been no overall decrease in the number of times the Customs House shows up on the cover of a new book.”

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Pudong skyline started to replace the Bund on the covers

of investment portfolios and tourist magazines. The

emergence of Pudong did not damper the Bund’s cultural

relevance, but altered its meaning and diverted its path.

Just ten years ago, tourists came to the Bund to

snap photos at the neo-classical buildings that once

served as the headquarters of foreign banks and shipping

companies in the early 20th century. Today, the Bund is

the primary location to view the Pudong skyline, where

tourists are obsessed with taking pictures against the

theatrical backdrop across the river. As the Concession-

era buildings from the 1930s were refurbished into

nostalgia-themed restaurants, bars, boutiques and

luxurious hotels, numerous roof-top terraces were created

on the top of them. They aim at offering their well-

heeled clients a uniquely “Shanghai” experience: wining

and dinning in the fetishized Old-Shanghai glamour while

enjoying the dream image of Shanghai’s future. (fig.4) On

the Pudong side, tourists can also take the elevator up

to the Oriental Pearl Tower’s observatory deck to gaze

down at the aging skyline of a once semi-colonial city.

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(fig.5) The gazes from two sides of the river

reciprocate each other, forming a diptych of past and

future.

Fig. 4 View of Pudong from a roof-top terrace on the

Bund. Photo: Miao Yu. 2004.

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Fig. 5 View of the Bund. Photo: Miao Yu. 2004.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, in his essay “A Big Ben with

Chinese characteristics: the Customs House as urban icon

in old and new Shanghai”, examined the cultural biography

of an iconic object on the Bund, the big clock on the top

of the Customs House, from the moment it was shipped to

Shanghai in the 1930s until the recent rise of a

competing icon, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. Considering

icons having “careers”, Wasserstrom addressed the issue

that the old icon might “lose its job” to the upstart new

icon. However, he argued that the rise of Pudong “has not

stripped the buildings of the Bund of their symbolic

resonance, but altered their meanings.” He wrote,

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The appearance of this competing skyline… also has made [the Customs House] start to seem less a symbolof a place than a symbol of a time, an icon less of Shanghai than of ‘Old Shanghai’ (a common term now for the city’s incarnation as a treaty port). In general, which the Customs House was once treated inmany texts as a displaced piece of another part of the world (a British object in a Chinese setting), it is now as likely to be understood as a displaced piece of another era.15

In the presence of the Pudong skyline, the Bund

makes a diversion from “coming from a foreign place” to

“being left by an old era”, from Shanghai’s official

portrait to a repackaged symbol of “Old Shanghai.” The

echoing between the old and new skylines privileges a

linear, progressive timeline in which the temporal

categories of past, present and future are carved out

from the flux of time and materialized by an

architectural display of Pudong vs. the Bund. Shanghai’s

past, selectively fixated on the 1930s, is repackaged

into a consumption of nostalgia as seen on the Bund.

Colonialism in disguise of global consumer culture once

against merges into a convoluted dialectic with a desire

for cosmopolitan subjectivity. The history after the 1949

communist revolution is conveniently forgotten due to its

15 Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “A Big Ben with Chinese characteristics: the Customs House as urban icon in Old and New Shanghai.” Urban History, 33, 1 (2006), 68.

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relative irrelevance to such subjectivity. With other

strands of Shanghai history remarkably absent in the

Bund-Pudong space, Shanghai is caught within the “empty

homogeneous history” that Walter Benjamin characterized

as a defining principle of modernity. The future, or at

least the kind of future that Shanghai’s double skylines

tend to project, cast individuals into amnesic bodies.

Their personal and public spheres are released from the

boundaries of the nation and compressed into the single

figures of global consumers. Shanghai-based curator, Gu

Zhengqing, wrote in an essay that,

The images of this fictive future … are especially capable of stimulating feelings of idealism and romanticism. Nevertheless, the weight of reality presses people deeper and deeper into a fictive world that promises tomorrow will be a better day. To many people, this unattainable Utopia is a reality, in whose light the present is only a periodof crossing to that other shore.16

Such utopian vision seeps into the public belief

system by urban spectacles, spectacular viewing

experiences and popularization of certain languages that

affirms and privilege a glorious future. Shanghai-based

16 Gu Zhenqing, “An Explanation of the Themes of ‘Second-Hand Reality’” in Second-Hand Reality (Beijing: Today Art Gallery, 2003),n.p. The exhibition was in two parts: “Pre-reality” and “Post-reality.”

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artist Shi Yong’s photo collage series titled Made in China-

Welcome to Shanghai (1999) appropriated these Utopia-making

schemes (fig. 6). In one image, the artist poses as a

model Shanghai citizen in a Mao-suit, sunglasses and

coiffured blond wig. His hand is pointing toward a far

direction that supposedly Shanghai is heading toward. His

gesture alludes to Mao’s iconic gesture in his public

sculptures and portraits (fig. 7). The Oriental Pearl TV

Tower and the Customs House, Shanghai’s old and new

icons, are framed by the red curtain and visible on each

side of the backdrop. The words placed next to them read

like bland slogan phrases straight out the mouth of a

government leader—“Look, the global outlook of the new

century must be glorious” and “in the new century, we

should really grasp opportunities.” Shi Yong dismantles

the singular iconic figure associated with the Communist

leader and replaces with the figure of the modern-day

Chinese businessman driven by the allure of everything

global. If the desire is for persons to transform their

own life through agency of the marketplace, Shanghai of

tomorrow will be populated by such figures content to

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live out a fictive life characterized by illusive

perpetual prosperity.

Fig. 6 Shi Yong, Made in China-Welcome to Shanghai, 1999.

Photo.

Fig. 7 Mao statue. Photo. Associated Press.

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Fig. 8 Shi Yong, The flying vehicle over Shanghai. 2004. Installation: metal, air matt, video. Photo: Miao Yu. Gallery view of Shanghart gallery, Shanghai.

Shi Yong’s video installation The flying vehicle over

Shanghai (2004) is a more subtle commentary on the

relationships between Shanghai’s two skylines. Making it

sound like one of the simulated tours in Shanghai Urban

Planning Exhibition Museum, the title instantly arouses

the viewer’s appetite for another spectacular experience.

At the first glance, the so-called “flying vehicle” looks

like a flying saucer fixated on the ground. (fig. 8) To

experience the work, the viewer must lie on the ground

and insert his or her upper body into the flying saucer.

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However once inside, the viewer may be surprised or

disappointed to see that there are nothing more than a

few small monitors showing grainy video footages of the

stagnant water of Huangpu River. No sign of urbanism is

ever visible for the entire two-hour video. After lying

on the floor for a few seconds, most of the viewers feel

embarrassed and even mildly furious for getting down to

the floor for such a banal and meaningless video.

Shi Yong’s anti-spectacle video takes a prankish

look at how contemporary understanding of Shanghai is

automatically mediated through ready-made presentations

of spectacle. The notion of a “flying vehicle” alludes to

multiple existing technologies that enable tourist to

view Pudong and the Bund from multiple angles, such as

roof-top terraces, revolving restaurants, coin

binoculars, cruise ships, helicopters, simulated virtual

tours in museums, and so on. However, unable to fly, Shi

Yong’s flying vehicle provides the ultimate anti-

spectacle experience to the spectacle seekers, still

water. Consequently, the non-presence of these expected

images simply makes the spectacle consumers uncomfortable

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about themselves. Shi Yong intentionally let the viewer

confront their discomfort by seducing them to the ground

with a promise of a flying trip.

The focus on the unspectacular image of water evokes

a new viewer-object relationship that is not based on any

kind of consumption and exchange. Huangpu River’s water

is not only the material that fulfills the ground space

between the two skylines, but also the very medium that

enables the physical passing from one side to the other.

As the spectator’s vision is conveniently fixated onto

the grand mirage on the horizon, he or she ignores the

things that fill the space around. As the camera

horizontally moves across the water, the viewer’s body

(lying flat inside the installation and having the video

right under her or her eye) is as if aimlessly floating

in a neither-here-nor-there space. The floating body of

the viewer is potentially released from the “striated

space” of the city and initiated into a “smooth space”—a

space with no orientations, or landmarks and only a

series of fluid movements, segments and intensities.17 By

17 Striated space is defined by Deleuze and Guattari that “defined by the requirements of long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, invariance of distance through an interchange of inertial points of

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disrupting the correct body position of a spectator, the

artist removes the spectator from the linear temporal

scheme of the Bund-Pudong and locates him or her immersed

in the residue space between two skylines, an in-between

state of becoming.

As the lifeline of Shanghai residents, the water of

Huangpu River also has potent meaning. It is through the

symbolism of flowing water that Shanghai, a port city,

was first connected to the world in the mid 19th century

and reconnected to the global market in the last decade

or so. Huangpu River has been a symbolic site for the

appearance and the reappearance of Shanghai, two temporal

phases that Shanghai was and is being confined. However,

Shi Yong’s video presents the river as a space with

neither horizon nor skyline. The disappearance of the

Shanghai skyline(s) signifies the disappearance of Shanghai

as an object of local and global market forces and place-

making schemes. Ultimately, the space of disappearance is a

reflexive space relatively autonomous from the realm of

reference, interlingage by immersion in ambient milieu, constitution of a central perspective.” Quoted in Deleuze and Guattari, “Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines” In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 1987). 494-495.

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both the marketplace and the state. It is here where

people are finally free.

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Bibliography

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