On November 6th, Sun Ke Villa's latest theme group exhibition "Urban View" was officially opened to the public, and a number of modern and contemporary artists brought immersive exhibition content on photography, installation, multimedia images and other immersive exhibitions of Chinese cities, showing the new urban group portraits brought by urban renewal to modern China in this 90-year-old building.
During the exhibition, coinciding with the main exhibition of the 2021 Shanghai Urban Space Art Season held in Shangsheng Xinshuo, a number of architect sharing meetings, workshops, urban walks, academic forums, etc. on the theme of "Urban Wonders" will also be held in and around Sun Ke Villa, bringing citizens and tourists to think about contemporary Chinese urban life and development.
This exhibition is also the third public exhibition held by this excellent historical building in Shangsheng Xinsho since its renovation and opening last year, and the initiators include Shanghai Vanke, Shanghai Minsheng Art Foundation and Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, which will last until December 12 this year.
Showcasing the different terroirs of China's urban agglomerations
Wang Yiquan, curator of "Urban Wonders", currently lives in Shanghai, and in the eyes of this native Beijinger, SunKe Villa, which has experienced different historical identities such as private residences and offices of the Shanghai Institute of Biological Products, has now become an ideal space for building situational exhibition expressions. He invited a group of artists, architectural groups and researchers who practiced diversely in the context of urbanization to create contemporary art works that use the city as a background and can provide speculation.
As a result, a series of seemingly "spectacle" buildings, scenes, and sounds in the city were included in the exhibition hall on the first floor of Sun Ke Villa. The ancient fireplace is decorated with photographic works reflecting the architecture of the city, the iconic octagonal balcony is arranged as a "meditation room", and the fireplace of the villa and the fountain in the outdoor garden can be seen in the tennis balls emitting faint fluorescence. And these exhibition designs, which at first glance are slightly confusing, have the thoughts that the artist wants to express behind them.
Inspired by the surrounding areas such as Sun Ke Villa and Columbia Country Club, Zhang Liaoyuan, an artist from Hangzhou, interleaved the tennis courts built by expatriates in Shanghai's West End in the 1930s and 1940s with the tennis courts that are imaged in today's consumer society, forming an outdoor installation "Autumn Wind". A former vaulted room on the first floor of the villa has been converted by Beijing-based musician Qu Qiufan as a playing place for sound scenes, screening artist interviews and musical works from Beijing's well-known art space "Arrow Factory Space".
Discussions on Chinese cities, including the Yangtze River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, are inevitably inseparable from the figures of cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Guangzhou artist Huang Cheng made a field recording of a village in Shenzhen's urban village into a sound work, "Baishizhou Records", which was looped in the exhibition hall of Shanghai Sunke Villa, more than 1,400 kilometers away from Shenzhen. Li Qing, an artist living in Shanghai and Hangzhou, photographed the site left over from the demolition of old houses in Hangzhou's urban transformation, "translating" the picture into a pattern on the indoor carpet.
In a historical building in Shanghai, listening to the field recordings in the old town of Shenzhen and watching the imagery expression of the transformation of the old city of Hangzhou, these works about the urban environment and people's individual lives are all the reflections that "urban wonders" want to convey to the audience.
At the beginning of 2020, artist Xu Tan and two young researchers, Liao Baoxin and Huang Rui, launched a group called "Shunde Studies", and this exhibition is the first time they have published their research process on the customs and customs of the Shunde region of Guangdong Province and the urbanization of the Greater Bay Area in the past two years. On the TV screen in the exhibition hall, a documentary of the group members interviewing the local people in Shunde was scrolling. On the side of the larger display, "uno Weaving City Network" brings a live broadcast of the Wukang Building, a landmark building in Shanghai, showing its reflections on the cultural window of Shanghai through three arched floor-to-ceiling windows.
Shanghai's urban renewal process is inseparable from the participation of many social organizations. In the Xinhua Road Historical and Cultural Landscape Area, where Shangsheng Xin is located, a young innovative social organization called "Big Fish Construction" has long been rooted in Xinhua Road, focusing on architectural transformation, curation, and neighborhood reconstruction, local practice, architecture and urban research. In this exhibition, Big Fish Construction brought a newly curated "One Square Meter Micro Public Art Action", showing that under the leadership of professional designers and architects, every resident can make the community better by changing the square meter around them.
Conservation operations activate the historical landscape
Just next to Sun Ke Villa, a 20-square-meter transparent glass house has recently attracted the attention of many citizens and netizens. The project, called the 24-Hour Solitude Project, has been mixed, with others calling the performance art program an "urban wonder." In fact, discussions on urban performance art, the practicality of public space, the sustainability of urban renewal, and the current social value of historic buildings have been hot topics in recent years.
Li Xiangning, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning of Tongji University, believes that the behavior of "spectacle" or "wonder" is an important representation of contemporary cities and one of the driving forces for the evolution of public space. Contemporary artists, architects and cultural researchers all have their own observations and reflections on the "wonders" of the city, and they are also exploring the possible path of the city to the future.
Returning to the present, some spatial ideas that were previously difficult to achieve are now gradually becoming the commonplace and favorite life scenes in urban life.
During this year's Shanghai Tourism Festival, the Shanghai "Architecture Readable" Alliance and the Shanghai Architectural Society launched the selection of "Shanghai's Top 20 Most Concerned Excellent Buildings", and Shangsheng Xinshuo was among them. The reason for its selection is not only the "blessing" of landmark historical buildings such as Sunke Villa, Columbia Country Club, and Navy Club, but also because since the park opened in 2018, it has held concerts, theater festivals, art and cultural exhibitions, creative markets and new debuts of domestic and foreign brands from time to time, which has made it an open cultural vitality community of "7x24 hours".
The revitalization and utilization of the excellent historical building Sunke Villa also deserves continuous attention. According to Shanghai Vanke, on the one hand, the repair of Sunke Villa is strictly in accordance with the regulations on the protection of cultural relics and the regulations on the protection of excellent historical buildings in Shanghai, and while restoring the historical style, based on the principle of "minimum intervention" and "recognizability", it strives to truly and completely protect the historical architectural style, and achieve the goal of "keeping the old as it is, so as to preserve its truth" as much as possible.
On the other hand, the choice to change the restored villa from the previous closed state to a protective open operation is also to stimulate the vitality of the space through people's close dialogue with the old building. In the future, Sun Ke Villa will periodically introduce cultural content such as art exhibitions every year, and adopt the real-name system reservation form at the moment of normalization of the epidemic to guide the audience to visit in batches, so as to achieve the maximum protection of the building and a more full display of the city's history and culture.
Column Editor-in-Chief: Tang Ye Text Editor: Shu Shu
Source: Author: Shu Shu