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Alternative to Museums: Public and Independent Art Spaces in Shanghai

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Alternative to Museums: Public and Independent Art Spaces in Shanghai Julie Chun Alternative to Museums: Public and Independent Art Spaces in Shanghai n recent years, the desire on the part of curators and artists to situate art in public spaces, providing unrestricted access for audiences Iand devoid of entry fees, arose in response and as a critique to the eruption of private museums in Shanghai, some of which were fostering an exclusive cultural status through private VIP openings and costly entry tickets. Thus, in Shanghai, it is not difficult to locate the multiplicity of temporary and permanent art venues sited in personal apartments, private centres, shopping malls, cafes, local basements, public parks, and even neighbourhoods marked for demolition. Yet the discourse about public art for determining who, or which institution or entity, should decide on what kind of art that should be presented and for whom it should be presented continues to be a vexing issue and remains mired in power relations involving favourable guanxi (relationship of reciprocity) as well as financial leveraging.1 China’s government-sponsored public art programs are managed by provincial or city officials with very little, if any, input from the general public for whom the art is supposed to serve. Moreover, self- serving and corporate sponsored promotional displays disguised as public art rarely offer critical insight. It has been two years since the publication of “Being Out There: The Challenges and Possibilities of Public Art in Shanghai” (2014), which presented the initial considerations that arose from my research.2 The text presented here picks up where I left off to investigate the recently established (or re-established) autonomous and independent sites that are striving to expand the cultural literacy of the local community. These sites warrant examination for acknowledging the disparate identities of the viewing public and for creating a common ground in negotiating the needs of artists, curators, and the public in the contemporary environment of Shanghai’s fast-changing society. A brief recap of the public projects from my 2014 article demonstrates that peripheral and non-mainstream art are not immune to shifts. They also evolve over time within the urban discourse of transformations and disruptions. Due to abated funding, the Zhujiajiao Contemporary Public Art Exhibition was suspended after two iterations. Yet the notion of situating public art in a traditional Chinese water town must have had its poetic appeal, for it was strikingly recaptured at Wuzhen in the exhibition Utopias-Heterotopias (March 27 to June 26, 2016) on a grand scale by one of China’s veteran curators, Feng Boyi, who commands international respect and reach. 67 Due to the ever-present escalation of rent in Shanghai, Basement 6 Collective has had to move out of its former subterranean complex on Huashan Road to another basement that is more affordable a few blocks away on Pingwu Road. The current space is smaller in size, but the fervor and independent spirit of its founders, Anneliese Charek and Katy Roseland, remains undiminished. As for art in malls, Adrian Cheng’s well-funded K11 Art Foundation has increased its prominence by rebranding its initial free-entry K11 basement art museum as the slick and polished “chi K11 art museum” (chi is taken from Cheng’s Chinese name Cheng Chi Kong), collaborating with international foundations to mount exhibitions by European masters such as Claude Monet and Salvador Dali for which a single entry ticket price might reach as high as 120 yuan (about $18.00 USD). Fortunately, not all free and accessible sites for art have succumbed to non- existent status. The Jing’an Sculpture Park has received a greater torrent of foot traffic thanks to the opening on April 19, 2015, of the newly constructed Shanghai Natural History Museum on its premises. The Shanghai Sculpture Space at Red Town has recently undergone a much-needed cleaning and restoration. The grassy knolls have been mowed for families to picnic, and many of the deteriorating sculptures, with the exception of Dai Yun’s brick Saloon Car (2010), have been removed and replaced with large-scale works that are in better condition. Stall #26, in the self-contained local alley market on Anshun Road, persists in its public engagement as Bazaar Compatible Program and is embarking on its sixth year of operation. In the great urbanscape of Shanghai, the demise of sites for public art is countered in a positive way by the surge of independent and alternate art spaces. Funded predominantly through private sponsorship, some of these spaces are making significant contributions to the art scene and the local community, oftentimes rivaling or surpassing the spectrum of what the newer, bigger, and better-funded private museums may have to offer when it comes to content quality and public programming. What and where are these sites in Shanghai? Who are the forces behind these smaller-scale albeit critical spaces for presenting art to the public? How exactly do these independent sites differ from Shanghai’s museums proper? Most importantly, in what ways are these independent art spaces surpassing the boundaries of conventional museums to add value in benefitting the local community? To locate the answers to these pressing questions, I will examine four such sites: MoCA Pavilion, Ray Art Center, Chronus Art Center, and am Art Space. Each of these independent sites in Shanghai is contributing, with high levels of success, in re-thinking the paradigm of the exhibition by pioneering unique modes of presentation and fostering vital inquiry into the discourse of contemporary art within Shanghai’s cultural realm. Similar to the conditions established in my 2014 article, the definition of “public” in the context of art will be confined here to the simple criterion of open and unencumbered access that is devoid of any entrance fees and thereby truly made available to anyone. The term does not necessarily equate “public” art with government sponsorship because when China’s one-party state dictates the terms for public art, the results are often displays of quintessential nationalistic monuments and strategic placements of contemporary sculpture that advocate the political persuasion for collective harmony. 68 In this study, I have discovered that private funding of public art spaces did not necessarily lead to restrictive controls. Rather, the ideals for achieving alternate exhibition potentialities embraced by the supporting patron(s) have often resulted in greater degrees of creative liberty for curators and artists than when funded by the local or municipal government or corporations who would insist on a stronger voice and presence throughout each step of the exhibition-making process. I have also found that autonomy (that is, decision-making in the selection of artists and artworks, as well as curatorial strategies and public programs) at all four of these independent art sites is possible precisely because they tend to be smaller operations without complicated organizational hierarchies for reporting and approval, leading to greater degrees of efficiency. In the case of independent art spaces in Shanghai, small can be translated as big, perhaps not in terms of scale or namesake, but in the ability to open up possibilities for how contemporary art can be accessed by and communicated to the general public. MoCA Pavilion: Pushing the Glass Ceiling “When the building finally becomes a part of the city, how the art affects one’s life is no longer limited to the physical ‘exhibition’ space. Rather, it’s how the museum as an institution lays the ground for a new culture of the city.”3 –Atelier Liu Yuyang The forty-square-meter, two-sided glass cube located on the congested West Nanjing Road was the former gift shop of MoCA Shanghai. This space for commerce could not have been better selected, for it straddles the heavily frequented Starbucks and the entrance to Shanghai’s most iconic, and thereby touristic, landmark—the park at People’s Square. The MoCA Shanghai museum itself lies a short, five-minute walk through the meandering footpath of the park under a lush canopy of trees, directly across from an expansive lotus lily pond, near where many elderly retired men and women gather to play cards, smoke, chat, and linger. The gift shop was conceived as a marketing platform for announcing with posters and exhibition catalogues the current exhibition held at the museum, while artistic key chains, mugs, and other odds and ends proliferated on its shelves. Needless to say, the museum shop did not fare well; the overpriced commodities were too similar to the knick-knacks sold at half the cost in the nearby underground arcades of the People’s Square subway station, and the exhibition catalogues were overpriced for the occasional student or the retired elderly person who might wander in. The fledgling museum shop reimagined as a white (or in this case, glass) cube for art was the brainchild of Wang Weiwei, who has been a curator at MoCA Shanghai since 2010. In addition to her curatorial duties at the main space of the museum, Wang Weiwei assumed the responsibility of overseeing the direction and operation of MoCA Pavilion with one other full-time staff member, Shirley Zhu. Wang Weiwei is well respected in the domestic and international art industry despite the scrutiny that is constantly upon her. She is one of the rare in-house curators in Shanghai, where such a crucial position remains mystifyingly non-existent in many museums. Another point that sets Wang Weiwei apart is that she 69 has remained in her position for over six years in a city where most art professionals switch titles and hop from one art institution to another in a matter of mere months. Wang Weiwei specialized in Buddhist art at Fudan University and went onto receive her master’s degree in Art History and Archeology from Korea’s top-ranked Seoul National University.
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