Chen Danyan: The world of twenty kilometers of Pujiang River

2021 is another year of complete closure for me, it is very easy to get tired, it is easy to feel heavy. However, the epidemic subsided slightly, and those art museums along the Huangpu River cautiously opened their doors to welcome guests.

I was surprised to find that this section of the Huangpu River has slowly become a bit like the meaning of the river of art museums. When the epidemic stabilized, the article previewing the exhibition in the city had a playful title: running a broken leg to see the exhibition.

Chagall's exhibition was held in Shanghai. In Chagall's 60-centimeter by 40-centimeter gouache paintings and oil paintings, he and his loved ones always float flat in mid-air, like long white clouds over the New Zealand fjords. Then I thought, well, I've floated like that in those years, on the unfamiliar road to the art museum, in Munich in 1992. As Chagall said: If you have love in your heart and are loved, you understand this float. Chagall's intoxicated little people float on the walls of the Kushi Museum in the summer of 2021, and the Kushi Museum opens in a large house built of stone walls on the Bund. It used to be the Jardine Matheson Building. It is one of the earliest foreign buildings built in the big house on the Bund, and it is also the most important Bund building in the era of treaty ports.

When Chagall painted the villain again in 1981, his loving little people were already in the ground, but underground they still embraced each other and retained their floating posture. It turns out that even if you die, you can still give each other the warmth of love. This is exactly what I have in mind for love, and belief. Some beliefs may not be fulfillable, but they do not affect your continued retention of them in your heart. Sometimes, especially in museums, you will encounter some light, and with the help of the emotions expressed by a painting, you will find that the myths that you built at the beginning of your life are still quietly standing in the corners of your heart full of debris from the past, and they have not collapsed.

During those years of travel, I came across Chagall's paintings in many museums, and many years ago I went to st. Stephen's Church in Metz, France, to see his stained glass paintings. Even in my youth, one of my novels used his paintings as covers. I thought I was familiar with the world he depicted, but I wasn't. On this rainy afternoon, I was huddled among groups of teenagers watching paintings with their teachers, most of whose faces were covered by blue surgical masks, and so was I. Past them, past the librarians who explained to them, I saw that in those paintings, the shadows were a ivory tower that made Chagall invincible throughout his life. A person has to be in an ivory tower to feel that love matters most.

This ivory tower, I'm afraid not everyone can go in. This ivory tower actually comes with each person's heart.

About seven kilometers up the Huangpu River, I saw a towering chimney, which was the Nanshi Power Plant, which was in full swing in the 1970s. At the time of Expo 2010, it was transformed into the Urban Future Pavilion of the Urban Best Practices Zone, which is the most important pavilion in the urban best practice zone pioneered by the Shanghai World Expo. Ten years later, it is already a museum of contemporary art. The exhibition hall, which once exhibited the robots of the futuristic world, is now displaying the paintings of tintin, a famous Belgian comic strip figure, as well as the life of the author Hergé.

This is the world's largest Tintin exhibition so far, it was determined before the outbreak of the worldwide epidemic, although it was postponed, it also opened in the summer vacation as desired, and the power plant is crowded with children on summer vacation every day. They wore masks, but were still lively, making loud cheers from time to time.

Tintin is a comic book character, a legendary traveler who traveled the world in the 1940s, and the story describes his travels around the world. The first country was the Soviet Union. The farthest place he went was the moon in the author's imagination. He also arrived in Shanghai during the Pacific War, where he painted the cruise ship on the Nissin pier and the stacked shop signs in mid-air on Nanjing East Road. You can watch an era of curiosity about the world and the world of that era.

The exhibition specially arranged an exhibition hall of "Tintin and blue lotus", focusing on the book of Tintin's travels related to Shanghai. According to Mr. Fall, a researcher of Tintin's story who came to Shanghai from London with the exhibition, from the beginning of painting the Shanghai story, Hergé was influenced by oriental art and invented the special brushwork of Tintin comic strips - single-line white drawing. Since then, Tintin's stories have been drawn in this way of being born out of Chinese painting, which has become the creative feature of Tintin's series of books.

Mr. Fall from London faced the masks on our faces and tried to communicate with the eyes that our masks did not cover. Mr. Farr said that because the one-line white drawing technique was born in Shanghai, Shanghai is the city where Tintin exhibition should come.

Walk another ten kilometers along the river to see that the West Bund Art Museum has now been built on the site of the longhua airport on the former river. The rivers of the industrial age with floating oil, its old docks, its old power plants, its old airfields, have now become the drifting waterways of the spiritual world.

There are many art galleries in Xuhui Riverside, the West Bund Art Museum is exhibiting the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and in the Pudong Art Museum, the Tate Museum in London takes light as the clue of the modern art exhibition, and the Pompidou exhibits in the West Bund Art Museum take sound as the clue, and the modern art exhibited is also exhibited from all over the world. From Tate to Pompidou, modern art, oil paintings, watercolors, and installations that have traveled across the ocean are striving to get rid of the great shadow of the Renaissance, to break away from the strong shackles of classical worldview and values, and to establish an art world that is more individual, more reflective of the daily life of ordinary people, and more focused on expressing the world of the soul.

In the West Bund Gallery, there is also a modern dance project in remote collaboration with the Centre Pompidou. A French modern dance work, presented on the West Bank by the Chinese dancer Duan Ni in place of the French dancer. A French dancer, a Chinese dancer, rehearsing online with a translator. What I saw on the day of the performance was a French story with a strong Duanni imprint. Perhaps the origin of this project is not to be integrated in this way, originally because the world is isolated and out of helplessness, but its result reflects the reaction of the world and the mind not willing to be isolated by this--a more integrated physical expression. The joys and sorrows of the human heart are always the same, and the expression of it, because of the different contrasts between geography and historical formation, can only shake people's hearts more.

The night after watching Duan Ni's performance was also an ordinary typhoon day in Shanghai in summer. The riverfront was wet, somewhat low-lying, and the steel breakwater had been erected. Originally a busy river channel for transportation, with hundreds of various docks along the river, it is now like the world's famous transport channels, transporting goods from the spiritual world. In this isolated world, the river still flows to the sea, and the sea still flows in all directions, lapping at every coast. (Chen Danyan)