Shi Hantao
Caoyang New Village is the first workers' village built in New China after liberation. In 1951, Mayor Chen Yi put forward the policy of "serving production, serving the working people, and serving the working class first" in municipal construction at the second session of the Second People's Congress of All Walks of Life in Shanghai. The Shanghai Municipal Government began to acquire land to build Shanghai's first workers' village, and the following year completed the first batch of 48 buildings with 167 units and 1,002 houses. At that time, Caoyang New Village was sparsely populated, and 70 years later, more than 100,000 people lived in the area. Solving the problem of living, the next thing is to eat the top priority——— vegetable market has become an important place for people to consume throughout each era. Guixiang Vegetable Market is located in the center of Cao Yang, full of fireworks, the Internet reported that in March 2013, there were photos of the second renovation and upgrading, whether it was design and decoration, or the dress of people at that time, in today's view, it is like a world away. In September 2021, it was upgraded again to meet people's growing material needs. It is in this context that "Su Shanghai" was commissioned by the Shanghai Urban Space Art Season to build a vegetable market art museum in Guixiangfang, so that people can provide high-quality cultural products after eating and wearing warm. This article is led by Mr. Shi Hantao, the curator of the project, into the guixiang vegetable market art museum series of activities.
2021 Shanghai Urban Space Art Season, Caoyang Community Public Art Gui Lane Vegetable Field Art Museum Project Poster
One
Located in the heart of Caoyang, Guixiangfang includes a wet market and a 200-meter-long motorized road in the northern section of Guixiang Road, as well as small shops along the street and a small waterfront platform facing Caoyang Huanbang. This small section of Guixiang Road is connected to Lanxi Road, which crosses the Caoyang area, and at the other end, it intersects with Xingshan Road, which runs through most of Caoyang. Lanxi Road is not wide, but people come and go, bustling, commercial buildings, theaters, cultural centers, youth parks, as well as schools, hospitals, banks, post offices on both sides, is Cao Yang's "Nanjing Road". Xingshan Road is a typical boulevard in the Caoyang area, passing through a series of old and new residential areas, quiet and clean, and the elderly walk leisurely on the side of the road and chat. In fact, this movement and stillness are inseparable from the pattern that was preset when Cao Yangyi Village was built 70 years ago, and it still seems to have its own interesting interest today; and Guixiangfang is in the middle of it.
Since the end of the last century, the three villages have gradually been updated into some new communities such as "Apricot Garden", "Golden Plum Garden", "Zaoyang Garden" and so on, and Guixiang Vegetable Farm has also come into being during this period. Since a renovation in 2013, guixiang vegetable market was remodeled again in April this year, this time retaining only the most basic beams and columns and floor structure of the building; more importantly, the entire vegetable farm will also be fully updated. According to the official introduction, it is about to be upgraded to a "comprehensive vegetable market, will be the old service, public social, one-stop convenience service into it", today on the Internet to inquire about the Guixiang vegetable market information, that year's "Shen Ji dim sum shop oil tofu vermicelli soup", "Shangweiguan Nanxiang small cage", as well as "Li Ji rabbit noodles", "Feng Ji soup dumpling shop" and so on are still talked about. Affordable food prices are another topic, as well as the convenience of Guixiangfang's distance from the residential area. In these vivid accounts, we can read the nostalgia of the surrounding residents for the vegetable farm. At the intersection of the two ends of Guixiangfang under construction, there are often middle-aged and elderly residents looking inside, and it is obvious that everyone is also looking forward to its transformed appearance.
Renderings of GuiXiangfang
Two
It is in this context that "Su Shanghai" was commissioned by the Shanghai Urban Space Art Season to build a vegetable market art museum in Guixiangfang. The organizers put forward the idea of the Vegetable Market Art Museum in the hope that through a series of cultural and artistic activities taking place in Guixiangfang, it will become a more cohesive space in the community. In other words, in this community space that once connected people with daily life consumption activities, the content of the cultural and artistic level was superimposed, and through the creation and application of various representations and symbols, to deepen and expand the connection between people, to deepen their identification with each other and this place. Through countless rounds of multi-party meetings, but also in the collision of various realities and ideas (this process of collision and compromise is also of great significance for such experimental art projects), the first series of activities of Guixiang Vegetable Market Art Museum slowly took shape. In this process, artists and cultural workers in various fields have also repeatedly visited the Guixiangfang construction site, which has always been in the process of transformation, and communicated with the residents and employees of Guixiang and Caoyang to study the history of Guixiang and Caoyang, and finally we brought the following three parts together.
The first is two exhibitions in the vegetable market space. One is "Shadow Painting Cao Yang: Lu Yuanmin Li Shude Works Exhibition". The two artists, who were old colleagues of the Putuo District Cultural Center, used photography and sketches to record the nameless moments on the streets, revealing the poetry of daily life, and connecting Cao Yang's past and present, individual and collective common life experiences through these memories engraved in the minds of generations of Cao Yang people. Another exhibition is "Urban Archaeology: Atypical Looking at Cao Yang". Xu Ming, an independent researcher of urban history, and his team spent a lot of time digging up the news in old newspapers, visiting the traces of life left by generations of Cao Yang people, and collecting and combing the architectural decoration textures rich in Cao Yang characteristics, and then using videos, animations, maps and other diversified graphic means to give the audience a deeper and closer to life perspective to understand the history and social life of this area.
Cao Yang Glimpse 1990s-2000s Lu Yuanmin Photography
Cao Yang Sketch 2010s-2020s Li Shude
History of atypical Cao Yang New Village Urban Archaeology Xu Ming
Cao Yang a village 2.5D animation urban archaeology
The second part is three sets of works involved in space. The sculpture of artist Su Chang at the entrance of Guixiangfang is based on the pillars and walls in the old Guixiang vegetable market. The artist develops sculptures with both abstract and figurative effects from the mundane objects of life, which are presented in the newly transformed space of Guixiangfang Pedestrian Street, reminding the area of its past history. Designer Li Zhiqian created a series of logos that combine Chinese characters and pattern elements for Guixiang Vegetable Market, and thus developed daily necessities such as aprons and baskets, which not only provide a unique visual system for the vegetable farm, but also let us see the possibility of seeking innovation in daily life. Artist Tango will create a series of space paintings for Guixiangfang Space during the art season. He will use his usual abstraction, symbolism, optical illusion and other expression techniques to evolve humorous, warm and even bizarre scenes from the ordinary world of Guixiangfang. These works will break the inherent internal and external boundaries of space, extend the imaginary space for reality, and also let the audience find some accidents and fun outside of the usual tense and dull life.
Vegetable farm diagram Character Li Zhiqian
Works by Tango
Su Chang works
The third part consists of four workshops. In his sound workshop, artist Yin Yi will lead the trainees to go deep into the Cao Yang area with anthropological and sociological methods, to discover sound, explore the information and meaning in it, and reconstruct it on this basis. Architect Wang Qing's "Caoyang New Village Home" directly targets the newly renovated Caoyang Village, leading the residents of a village to paint a personalized or conceptual decoration plan for their new living space. Artist Xiaolonghua will lead the trainees to conduct field investigations and research on the typical living space patterns of residents of a specific era in this area, deepen their understanding of local life at that time, and try to reproduce them in the form of paper cuts and paintings. Jiang Qinggong's daily logo and art character workshop will invite experienced artists to work together. Although the profession of traditional artists has declined, their creativity, and the value and meaning they once brought to people's lives, deserve to be more deeply understood and developed.
"Urban Rainforest" Workshop Yin Yi
"Cao Yang New Village Home" workshop Wang Qing
"Cao Yang New Village Composition Illustrated" Workshop Xiaolonghua
"Cao Yang Logo" Workshop Jiang Qinggong
"Walking and Painting Cao Yang" Workshop on Urban Archaeology
Three
These projects will take place in a vegetable farm that is being renovated, as well as in Cao Yang's community cultural center, streets, parks, residential buildings and various other public and even private spaces. Although the whole project is called the Guixiang Vegetable Market Art Museum, it is actually an invisible existence. This is not only because the renovation of the Guixiang Vegetable Market is still only halfway through, but more importantly, when art is no longer bound by the space of the art museum, why should we impose new traps on it. If space itself is not natural and free, then tying art to a fixed form of space is a trap. Therefore, the form of these projects is not only "works" as objects, but various inquiries, interventions and occurrences, creative actions and expressions that are stimulated in the reality and characteristics of the place itself. In this process, the audience is not passive visitors, but participants, and art is not a one-way education and indoctrination, but a joint exploration and creation.
Today art galleries around the world are increasing their focus on communities. At the same time, governments at all levels, non-profit organizations, individual artists, and even some commercial company groups are actively experimenting with art mechanisms within the framework of the community. This phenomenon stems both from the efforts made by the art field, especially art museums, to break down walls, and from the tension between the funding of Chinese and the construction of social identity in modern democratic societies. For artists and creators, this open practice provides an opportunity for artists to get rid of the problem-ridden and increasingly solidified mechanism of global contemporary art, allowing them to gain new observations and enter life, deepening the perspective and method of perception and grasp of the real world.
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Of course, since it is an open practice, it must also be amorphous in itself, and it is still in the stage of exploration and experimentation. Like all institutions or individuals that carry out similar practices, we are faced with a series of practical and conceptual dilemmas and contradictions throughout the process of preparation and implementation. Fundamentally, for art, society is a being that it cannot escape from, but always wants to be outside. In other words, how do artists and institutions deal with their relationship to the context of their work and the object? In art trends and movements, from modernism and revolutionary art to later social interventional art, there are endless stories about this topic, which will not be developed here.
Based on this, the Guixiang Vegetable Market Art Museum has made a careful attempt and hopes to inspire more questions in the process. But in any case, a basic premise is that a community is an organism with its own growth trajectory and metabolism, and the large and small, tangible and intangible beings it contains also have its own logic and relationship, and the culture of a community is only a product of natural breeding on this basis. Therefore, art projects and artists who carry out community involvement are not to be the spokesmen of community culture, let alone the so-called reformers. He can only observe and express his own personal observations and expressions to the object in a gesture of respect. The artist is always a narrator, the act of intervention is only a kind of narrative with action characteristics, and in the end, no matter what kind of narration, the ideal hopes to become a catalyst for the community's life to become better- to catalyze the community's self-knowledge, to catalyze more discussion and communication - and the public nature of art will be realized from it.
We expect that in the coming months, more and more merchants will gradually settle in guixiang market, and more and more residents will gather in guixiangfang as before. At that time, it did not matter whether guixiangfang still had room for exhibitions, but it was hoped that more cultural and artistic workers could join in and carry out more and richer creative storytelling, let residents hear, and stimulate their resonance and thinking.
Project Chief Planner: Ruan Jun
Curator: Shi Hantao
Project Execution: Zhao Shuping Liu Lu
Event Execution: Zhu Huiqin Yang Zhuoer
Activity time: 2021.9.25-11.30
Exhibition venue: Guixiang Vegetable Market, No. 54-70 Guixiang Road, Putuo District, Shanghai
Editor-in-charge: Xu Haifeng
Proofreader: Luan Meng