At the Shanghai Metro Museum, there is an old photograph of a square meter on the Shanghai No. 55 bus at rush hour that can squeeze down 11 people. According to Liang Weijie, deputy director of the Shanghai Metro Museum, when the car arrived at the station, some people had a hard time squeezing on the car, and it was difficult to get off the train. Some citizens crowded the car doors and pushed the car doors to this day.
At that time, Beijing and Tianjin already had subways, and Shanghai subways were once considered by experts to "punch holes in tofu", and the difficulty can be imagined. On May 28, 1993, the southern section of Shanghai Line 1 was put into trial operation for sightseeing, when it was difficult for people to ride, cross the river, and it was difficult to walk, and vigorously developing rail transit was an inevitable choice to fundamentally solve the travel difficulties of citizens.
In the early days of the development of the subway, the traffic attribute was obviously the main attribute of the subway, and the passengers took the subway for only one purpose: convenient travel. However, as the process of urbanization has accelerated, the subways in China's large cities have also begun to shift from functional subways to humanistic subways, and many cities have begun to try to let public art intervene in subway spaces.
In Shanghai, more than 10 million people pass through the Shanghai subway every day. In this space, people gather, stay, and flock to the buildings and alleys.
Lujiazui's "Treading waves in this dynasty" screen, the dome arch design of Wuzhong Road Station, and the "underground butterfly magic forest" of Hanzhong Road all cover the subway station with a layer of texture and romance of science and technology, attracting countless citizens to punch in and stay. And when you look at subway lines around the world, when it comes to art, they always hide easter eggs of surprise.
Artist Xue Feng said in an interview with the "Xinmin Weekly" reporter that when a subway has more relationships between the environment and humans, and its texture extends the visual design and layout of the exhibition, the new urban landscape produced will be a new development in the public space.
Contemporary art "promenade"
In the seemingly inconspicuous underground space, history, modernity, and magic are constantly interspersed with collisions, like a documentary, and like a variation. Three months after the opening of Shanghai Metro Line 14, the "one station, one scene" hall is not as noisy as when it first opened, but there is still an endless stream of people who come to punch the clock.
Travel expert Kimi on social platforms, clip 1 minute video recommended Yu garden station. In the picture, the meandering light strip changes color, and its curved shape, like the water of the Huangpu River, flows rhythmically. The geometric shape of the tip of the wave also borrows the silhouette reflection of the cornice of the City God Temple to create an innovative site with a high sense of technological futurism.
This out-of-the-loop design "Shanghai Pulse", from the toMASTER Tomorrow Master Team, as the deepest station of Shanghai Metro (36 meters), equivalent to 10 stories high, based on the deep thinking of local culture, the designer hopes to use pure form to interpret the richness of multiple levels, integrate the architectural style of the East and the West, and connect history, contemporary and future.
Prominently in the middle of the exhibition hall, there is also an art installation called "Magic Rhythm", which is a layered flaky structure of an orange sphere, combined with beautiful rhythm, reflecting the balanced relationship between rapid urban development and slow life. Xue Feng told Xinmin Weekly that the subway belongs to a semi-enclosed space, easy to do some theme visual design, and its public art form is different from shopping malls and ground space, there is no extension of east, west, south and north, but each station will have personalized thinking in it, which is the epitome of contemporary art.
The column-free arch structure of Wuzhong Road Station on Line 15 has also been frequently exposed in travel blockbusters. But few people know that this station is a breakthrough architectural scale innovation in the design of Shanghai metro stations. In order to take full advantage of the purity of the columnless vault structure, the station hall hides details that are difficult to distinguish with the naked eye, such as escape lines, cameras, etc., and the advertising space is eliminated.
It is undeniable that the combination of 3D giant screens, light strips, large screens, geometric structures, and contemporary art has become a new landscape of underground space. Zheng Ming, chief designer of Shanghai No. 14 Subway Line, said: "We not only have the aesthetic characteristics of the building itself, but also have some metaphorical meanings in it, which truly achieves the effect of using space art to create an art space." ”
However, in the 1990s, the Shanghai subway was built without considering artistic style, and the combination of art and stations was not close. Kong Fanqiang, deputy director of the Department of Design at the School of Design of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said that under the cost-saving standardized design, the station building space is usually a single "square box", and passengers cannot distinguish the station without looking at the station name.
For example, Shanghai's first subway line 1, which is opened to traffic, is often presented in light box paintings and landscape murals on both sides of the corridor. Later, Metro Line 2 and Line 3 were completed and opened to traffic, and the artistic atmosphere in the station gradually became stronger. At the beginning of 2013, Shanghai Metro launched a three-year action plan for public cultural construction, introducing decorative arts such as relief murals, ceramics and glass to subway stations.
Taking Shanghai Metro Line 13 as an example, the design of Huaihai Middle Road Station is different from the past dotted public art method, using red brick walls, cobblestone walls, copper station signs and other artistic languages to spatially intersperse; the Natural Museum Station uses a large number of clay panels and stone materials as interior decoration to create a "cave" in the station hall.
For the last fifteen years, London has also been working to make art part of public space and introduce contemporary art, and the 154-year-old subway system even has its own subway art project team. They often subtly embed elements of the museum into the underground space, trying to develop the connection between this space and everything.
Xue Feng talked about 2019, he had a special visit to the London Tottenham Palace Street subway station, which was newly renovated by French artist Daniel Buren with pop art. The simple black and white striped geometric wall is more jumpy and lively due to the addition of orange, red, green and blue geometric figures.
"Before the renovation, it was filled with mosaic murals by Eduardo Bologge. When news broke in 2015 that about 5 percent of the murals would be demolished as part of the station's renovation, there was also a lot of controversy. Xue Feng said that the remodeled site proved to be more fascinating, with 150,000 people every day, admiring daniel Buren's work up close.
You know, until now, these works can only be seen in places such as the Centre Pompidou, the LV Foundation, the Guggenheim Museum, and so on.
The "Museum" in the underground space
If it is said that the contemporary art museums and museums in the underground space attract the public's love through visual impact, then the exhibition or window design with cultural atmosphere is to retain people's attention through the content of the story.
"Some stations have traditional colors, but also new technological interventions, various genres around a portrait, a landmark, with a unique expression of reorganization, resulting in new styles." Tourists no longer come to take the subway to reach a certain destination, which reflects the cultural significance of the underground space. Xue Feng told Xinmin Weekly.
Passengers passing through Jiaotong University Station on Shanghai Metro Line 10/11 usually stop for an art wall in the subway corridor. The center of the art wall is a relatively weekly three-dimensional space, symbolizing the words in Qian Xuesen's manuscript through a three-dimensional design, and then using these symbols to reconstruct Qian Lao's head in the middle area.
As passengers pass in front of the art wall, with the pace of distance and line of sight change, different levels of Qian Xuesen's visual portrait, slowly transformed to appear. As an outstanding alumnus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the collection that was properly framed and exhibited in the window, including Qian Xuesen's grade table, undergraduate diploma, and papers published in the "Air Force" magazine, let people have a deeper understanding of Qian Xuesen.
Tongji University Station has always been known as the most cultural subway station in Shanghai.
Standing in the station hall, looking up, the designer cleverly introduced sunlight directly from the Tongji campus to the station through the skylight design, and the upward corner hid the work "Huizhou in the Dream" by the Master of Chinese Painting Wang Guanqing. The industrial-style platforms, ink painting columns, and a large number of civil engineering structures seem to echo Tongji's signature civil engineering major.
According to Jin Jiangbo, deputy dean of the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts at Shanghai University and executive director of the Shanghai Collaborative Innovation Center for Public Art, different sites are distributed in different areas of the city, and each area has unique human and geographical characteristics. If the intervention of art is linked to the history and culture, the ecological environment, and the way of life of citizens, its "locality" can not only enlighten the soul, but also reflect the character and spirit of the city.
For example, although the Hailun Road subway station of Shanghai Line 4 was opened earlier, the walls of the station are full of portraits, famous sentences and works of Mr. Lu Xun, which tell the origin of Mr. Lu Xun and Hongkou; The Danyang Road Station of Line 18, the design of black and white cinema, the black wall introduces the century-old industrial history of Yangpu, and the white wall has electronic screens to show the development of new Yangpu.
In addition to the connection between subway stations and spaces, the echoes of urban characteristics and spatial design are becoming more and more close.
As a city with more than 40 relics of "Dream of the Red Chamber", the theme of the art wall of Confucius Temple Station is "Chinese New Year's Eve Night Feast", which shows the scene of Shou Yihong and Chinese New Year's Eve Night Feast guessing lantern riddles on the wall, with Jia Mu as the center, Jia Baoyu and others standing on the left and right, the maids carrying food boxes behind them, and Qin Huai's famous snacks jumping on the wall.
The thousand-year-old city of Athens is famous for its rich and precious archaeological artifacts, and at the beginning of the construction of the subway, it was designed to create a "museum in the subway". In the station hall, passengers can observe the ancient daily necessities excavated locally, such as amphora, clay vases, gold jewelry, etc., and read about the economic, political, religious and daily life of ancient Greece.
Of course, the reality is that at the beginning of the construction of the subway, it is difficult to consider the humanistic values thoroughly. One of the purposes of Zhang Lili, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Shanghai University, is to leave blank spaces for public art in subway stations with better underground space conditions, and the design of Hanzhong Road Station came into being. In terms of adding the cultural charm of the subway, many cities do not start from large-scale space design, but start from optimizing the details of station decoration.
Recently, in Hangzhou East Railway Station, the four characters of "East Railway Station" on the escalator triangle on the platform level have been replaced with a new "Su Dongpo" font. In the lower left corner of the new font there is also a seal engraved with the name of the station, a Tang poem. This combination of "word + print" with Jiangnan charm is the visual optimization design carried out by Hangzhou Metro Group and Xiling Printing Agency.
As an indication sign of the Hangzhou Metro, people can recognize the station with words and empathize with words, becoming the "first stop" for citizens and tourists to know Hangzhou. The name seal of the subway station also adopts a thick and simple Hanguan seal, and the seals of some key stations will be engraved by the well-known seal engravers of the Xiling Seal Society, and a set of replicas of the station name seal will be made in the future, which will be placed at various stations for citizens and passengers to "punch in" the stamp. In Shanghai, the station wall of Line 14 is made of purple sand, and the design concept is also taken from the traditional art of calligraphy and painting. In Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Island Line MRT, the most distinctive feature of the whole line is that except for Al kwang Wah Estate Station and Chai Wan Station, the station signs are all in calligraphy font. They are all from the pen of former councillor Au Kit Tong, whose first station name was "Admiralty", "looks like a painting, as if you can still hear the bells." "It is said that because most of the platforms on the Hong Kong Island Line are relatively narrow, they are specially designed to ease the tension of the passengers on the platform.
Artistic creation derived from the subway
With the development of subway space, subway derivatives and cultural creation have gradually become a form of subway art.
Li Long is an expert in collecting subway cards. From 1996, he began to pay attention to and collect subway cards to create his own Chinese subway card network in 1999, and has always had an indissoluble relationship with subway cards. The subway cards collected before were relatively single, such as zodiac cards and Byzantine cards. In recent years, Shanghai Metro has begun to innovate across borders, co-branding with various IP such as big-eared dogs, fat tigers, planetariums, etc., and launching commemorative cards on major festivals such as the centenary of the founding of the Party and the Winter Olympics.
In Liang Weijie's view, in addition to subway ticket cards, "readable" subway stations and carriages are also important subway cultural and creative carriers.
In particular, the core cultural circle of "Shanghai Metro Music Corner", "Metro Culture Corridor" and "Central Booth" has been built at People's Square Station, forming a subway public cultural system with People's Square Station as the core, Line 4 Ring Line as the cultural ring line, and cultural trains, station architecture, subway ticket cards, and virtual spaces as the exhibition form.
In the praise of the Internet, there are also voices of doubt. "The subway station is for transporting people, is it worth it to engage in subway art like this?" In the subway, there is a large flow of people, the pace is hurried, and there are very few people who can stop and carefully observe the artwork, can "subway public art" have an effective effect on the public's aesthetics? ”
In this regard, some experts responded: the impact of color and design on society in public places is subconscious, and what you inadvertently see will slowly affect the aesthetic taste and humanistic feelings of the public.
Liu Lizi, deputy director of the Cultural Industry Research Center of the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences, believes that after a city reaches 500 kilometers of subway network lines, the function and significance of the subway for the city will begin to change, and it will carry many functions in the industry.
In today's China, while the subway undertakes the travel of citizens and the image of urban culture, it also creates industrial value and can even change the urban pattern. This, in turn, requires city managers, in the process of subway construction, not only to consider the accessibility, safety and economy, but also to consider the overall situation, standing at the height of the integrated economy of the entire region, and comprehensively consider and enhance its value.
Xue Feng believes that subway art, as a public art in a stable field, should be conceived and planned according to different places and environments. After the media comes out, it is necessary to intervene in clusters of public art. For example, Yuyuan Road Station is composed of architects, interior designers, artists who do new media, etc., and people with different professions work together to create such a space, and cross-border cooperation also makes subway art more exciting.
At present, the development of public art in China's subway needs a stable capital investment and guarantee mechanism, and also needs to operate the main unit responsible for subway public art exhibitions and activities, as well as the development of cultural and creative products, in order to achieve long-term sustainable development and prosperity. The subway is "ten years of construction and a hundred years of operation", and the public art of the subway is an important part of the "hundred years of operation". (Reporter Wu Xue)