Dive into the archives.
- DON’T SLEEP: The Urban China book is coming
Urban China: Work in Progress, a book I worked on last year, is finally coming out. It’s based on 5 issues of 城市中国, an incredible archi-socio-historico-cultural magazine made by my friend Jiang Jun, among many others. I made several posts previewing the material when I was working on it. Check them out here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
I probably shouldn’t be ‘publishing’ it before its official release, but for the past half year the book has been caught up in an excruciating limbo as various parties argued about money. But it’s finally printed now, and I cannot contain my relief, happiness, pride. Matter of fact, let’s have a song…
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In all honesty, this book is very good and you should buy it. It’ll be in stores in about a month. There are photos and my intro after the break.
Popularity: 9% [?]
- The Helmsman Sound
Well, I’m finally in the home stretch of this Urban China book. It’s been months, but the edit and design are done and I’m mostly working on details now. This week I’m just doing research to fill in some gaps and explain some references that us foreigners might not get. One of the things I worked on today was a reference to a song called “Sailing the seas depends on the helmsman.” It’s one of those feel good orchestra jams that were so popular during Mao’s time. There’s been a lot of attention paid to Chinese revolutionary posters in the past few years, but not much on music. So here’s the song…
Yu Wen (lyrics) & Wang Shuangyin (music) – Sailing the seas depends on the helmsman
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right-click + ‘save link as’ (mac) / ‘save target as’ (windows)Here’s the lyrics…
大海航行靠舵手，
Sailing the seas depends on the helmsman,万物生长靠太阳。
The growth of all living beings depends on the sun.雨露滋润禾苗壮，
Rain and dew nourish young seedlings,干革命靠的是毛泽东思想。
Conducting revolution depends on Mao Zedong Thought.鱼儿离不开水呀，
Fish cannot leave the water,瓜儿离不开秧。
Melons cannot leave the vine.革命群众离不开共产党。
The revolutionary masses cannot do without the Communist Party.毛泽东思想是不落的太阳。
Mao Zedong Thought is a sun that never sets.Both the mp3 and translation are from the recently emboldened proletarians at marxists.org
Popularity: 5% [?]
- Urban China Source Material 05: Blind School
I had my morning rocked by these images today. They were taken by Nan Li in 1989 during a trip to a school for the blind, deaf, and mute. Unfortunately that’s all I know. Click to enlarge.
Popularity: 3% [?]
- Urban China Material 04: Peasant Mansions
Well, I am still working on a book with my friends at Urban China magazine. And after a month spent in fearsome battle, I’ve finally managed to slay the Chinglish Dragon and have officially moved on from editing to design. So I’m gonna put up a few more things as the process goes along.
Here’s a page I laid out today dissecting changes to housing in the Chinese countryside. The introduction of free market money has done wild things to village life, particularly from an architectural standpoint. The houses of the most affluent farmers are often similar to the one above, Frankenstein hybrids that mix materials and styles in a way that would even give a cartoonish post-modernist like Michael Graves pause.
I wrote about this phenomenon in an article for Architecture Digest last year. (The original piece was about the new campus for China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou. That’s a pretty interesting architectural spectacle in itself. Click here to see some beautiful photos of the campus by very friend Iwan Baan.)
To fully appreciate Wang Shu’s new campus for the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, it’s useful to travel to the city by bus. For much of the trip, your view is dominated by the unindustrialized agriculture that occupies so much of the Chinese countryside. You will see very little nature, and a great deal of mud, divided into tiny, meticulously parceled plots, some of which extend to within centimeters of the expressway. Small clusters of buildings appear every few hundred meters. They are mostly constructed of locally-produced brick and mirror the ruddy brownness of the earth from which they came, giving the scene a tranquilizing color consistency.
As you get nearer to the city, things begin to change. The foreground of farm life is compressed by a backdrop of cooling towers and smoke stacks. The air perceptibly grays. The images of rustic toil – elderly women bent over rice fields, teens transporting pigs by motorcycle, middle aged men hauling hay bales… – assume an ominous aura. There are glints of promise in the gloom, though. As if to compensate for the worsening atmosphere, the living conditions noticeably improve. The houses look sturdier, many are covered in a protective layer of plaster, some have multiple floors. An exceptional few are covered in rectangular tiles of white, pink, or lime green. Against the dreary surroundings, these unexpected bursts of color appear almost fluorescent.
As you approach the city limits, the proximity of money and opportunity grows more apparent and the decorative flourishes more dramatic. Colored tiles become commonplace. All houses now have glass windows and some are tinted blue. A few megastructures – a convention center, a long distance bus depot, one or two under-construction, already-populated housing complexes – mark the transition from rural to urban. They raise the bar for ornamentation and initiate an open competition of architectural showmanship which quickly drowns out the landscape.
The homes of the most affluent farmers – many of whom now work in the city as builders or businessmen – shoot up to three or four stories. Though the basic plan remains the same, the houses suddenly sprout absurd additions – Greek columns, Dutch gables, emerald curtain wall from an office building, granite stairs from a hotel. On nearly every corner sit mounds of broken bricks covered in a thin layer of white dust like loaves of ciabatta bread. Now that everyone can afford tiles, their size, color, and arrangement becomes the focus. Some use tiny, multi-colored squares to create a kind of pixelated static; others create simple, bold gestures like candy cane swirls; others eschew tiles altogether and create elaborate patterns of alternating vertical and horizontal brick. The result is the architectural equivalent of a car show. Riding past feels like being lost in gingerbread land.
Popularity: 4% [?]
- Urban China Source Material 03: Bare Life
Man alive, it’s colder than the 9th Circle of Hell in Beijing these days. It’s enough to make this winter-coat-less dummie long for the sweat-soaked smog-choked days of summer. Luckily I’ve spent most of this morning laying out images like the one above. It’s from a series called ‘Bare Life’ that was created by an artist named Wang Zi (王子). He took them in the summers of 04 and 05 in an area called Qianmen, a hutong not far from Tian An Men Square. Wang Zi grew up in a hutong nearby that has since been demolished. Here’s a selection from a text he wrote about the neighborhood (translated by Wang Ruocheng):
Before 1949, Qianmen was the busiest commercial area in the city, with the best courtyards and the most flourishing shops. Nowadays, however, this area has declined to a slum. The dilapidated single-story houses and the embarrassing lives within contrast sharply with the modern skyscrapers that surround them.
Qianmen is located close to Tian An Men Square. In every corner there are symbols and characters from different historical periods. They have been changing along with the developing city and include political slogans from the Mao Zedong period and the advocacy of economic development from the late 1980s, as well as small pieces of paper that advertise, declare of building soon-to-be demolished, celebrate the Olympics, etc. These symbols and Chinese characters have no value themselves; their original meanings may have been forgotten by their writers. Their meanings are confused, the accumulated results of mistakes.
For the poor residents, several families live together in one courtyard, sharing the same water tap. Under that tap there is a cesspool made of bricks, into which all the liquid waste and urine are poured. Insects will settle down here in summer, making it unclean. However, it is the squalor that brings people together, making the area around the tap in the courtyard an important public space. Residents used to clean vegetables and wash clothes here. Passersby even drank the water. All the above are not so common nowadays.
Without fine waste pipes, residents could not have toilets in the courtyard. Instead, they need to walk several minutes to the public toilets in the hutong, where queues can be seen at “rush hour” in the morning. In order to take a shower, people have to walk several kilometers away to a public bathroom. This happened in nearly all of the hutongs and courtyards downtown. Although some families can have simple shower facilities, most people can not afford facilities in their courtyard because they have less than five square meters of housing area. So wiping the body with a wet cloth becomes the most convenient way of taking a bath.
The plight of Beijing’s hutongs triggers strong feelings of nostalgia and righteous indignation on the part of locals and foreigners. These images and text I think capture a slice of that radically diminished aspect of the city without the usual melodrama. They also provide an interesting overview of Chinese male body typologies, but that’s a bonus. More images after the jump. Click to enlarge…
Popularity: 4% [?]
- Urban China Source Material 02: Red Scarf
As I mentioned last time, for the next few weeks I’m going to be posting material from a book I’m putting together based on the work of Urban China magazine. These photos are taken from Issue 22 which dealt with the topic of Chinese Education. They were taken by Du Yingnan (杜英男), a photographer from Manchuria who’s currently based in Shanghai. Du took these photos during a visit to an elementary school in a small village in Fujian Province, and they pretty much speak for themselves. The red scarfs that kids wear are generally associated with the Young Pioneers, a kind of Socialist Boy Scouts, but also serve as a overall symbol of primary education.
Popularity: 5% [?]
- Urban China Source Material 01
These days I’m working on a book with Urban China (城市中国), an often amazing magazine about China’s ever-changing/never-changing urban culture. Up until now it’s only been available in Chinese, but the book will be in English. I’m psyched about it, but at this point I’m just praying that too much won’t be lost in translation. I’m also pulling double duty editing and designing it, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for this blog in the next month or so.
But I think one of the best ways to keep VERY FEEL alive and maybe generate a little advance interest in the project is to put up some of the material. Urban China has an absolutely incredible archive of images from past and present China and going through it has been my arduous pleasure for the past few days. Anyway, I’ll put up some examples every few days. In honor of Thanksgiving, here’s a couple of images from Urban China #19: The Chinese Family. [click to enlarge]
Spinners breast feeding at a cotton mill in Beijing, 1978
New fathers feeding their children, 1993Popularity: 4% [?]
- Beijing Rising
Through a miracle of Facebook, I just became aware of this beautiful/bleak video made by Neville Mars of Dynamic City Foundation. Neville strapped a camera to a helium baloon and flew it over Wang Jing, a neighborhood in northern Beijing. During the Olympic viewing frenzy, some people asked me to explain what Beijing was like before the Games. I wish I’d had this clip then, it would have saved me a lot of unnecessary waffle.
Check out more DCF projects at the bURB site.
Also, buy their book The Chinese Dream.Popularity: 4% [?]
- A handshake from Lok
My friend Lok Jansen is an architect, illustrator, and all around awesome person. He lives in Tokyo with his equally awesome wife Naoko and I don’t see them enough. Fortunately, Lok occasionally hits me off with some of his latest work, and somehow the space between here and there feels smaller. Yesterday was such a day – in my inbox, amongst the boring work shit and junk mail, I found a glowing orb of flavor in a the form of email from Lok with 4 sketches attached. The sketches are inspired by the urban villages around southern China. (I wrote a little bit about a visit I made to one in this post from a while ago.)
Anyway, these sketches are great. Here’s what Lok said about them:
I’m doing these for a new cityscape or two about the Urban Villages. Went and spent time in a couple of them in Shenzhen and in Guangzhou. Places like the Handshake Apartments (Wo Shou Lau) in Shenzhen, and Ba Deng Cun (巴登村). After the mostly Japanese cityscapes I was looking for something new and was of course struck by the very high density, the amount of life, activity, struggle and joy. Which is why I added people to these for the first time – to have them contrast with the wild machine-like surroundings, and have the environment stand for the overwhelming situation the people are trying to overcome. I was impressed by peoples ‘let’s make some money’ attitude, but also struck by the vulnerability of each individual. And of course I wanted to do tribute to the pajama stylo.
Here they are (click to enlarge highly recommended):
And as an extra bonus, here’s a short film Lok made while walking through the “handshake apartments” (握手楼, so named because the buildings are packed in so tight that neighbors can shake hands out of their windows) in Shenzhen. I think a lot of what Lok mentioned is evident here and it makes the sketches that much more beautiful.
Popularity: 5% [?]
- Mo’lympics
I realize that I’m in danger of turning this into some sort of Olympic blog, but fuck it, you can’t fight the zeitgeist. Anyway, I just wrote a little account of my trip to the Bird’s Nest for Art Review’s site. It’s a lot like something I would put on here, but this time I got paid. ((Michael Phelps fist pump))
Intro:
What can be said at this point about the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games? They are awesome. They are big and pretty and well organized. Zhang Yimou’s shock-and-awe opening and the physical domination that followed slammed the door on 100 years of humiliation for the Chinese and signalled to the rest of us the passing of the torch (!) from the old superpower to a much older one.For years now, the Chinese media have presented the Olympics as a kind of referendum on the nation’s status in the world. Now, based on the montages of awe-struck visitors and the gold medal count that scrolls triumphantly along the bottom of nearly every TV channel here, it is clear that the results are in: China in a landslide.
The Beijing Olympics’ televised image (provided by American network NBC) has been as slick and selective as Zhang’s intro. The viewer, here and everywhere, is exposed to majestic shots of the National Stadium (aka the Bird’s Nest) and National Aquatics Center (AKA Water Cube) detached from their surroundings, their neighours cropped out, either by camera angle or cloak of darkness. A jump cut brings you suddenly inside the stadium, where the world’s greatest athletes are busy straining themselves within some sort of rectangular shape, surrounded by thousands of flag-waving fans. Knowing the great lengths to which Beijing has gone to disguise its blemishes – a cluster of dilapidated buildings next to my apartment was walled off from public view a few weeks before the opening – and knowing that the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube are anomalies in Chinese architecture, I was curious to see what else is going on at the Olympic venues. What is there beyond the edge of our TV screens? I travelled to the Olympic Green a couple days ago. Here’s what I found:
Read the rest here.Popularity: 3% [?]
- Take me out to the ballgame
Popularity: 4% [?]
- Shameless Plug 2
[image courtesy of divine-interventions.com]I just arrived back in Beijing after months away, and a few of the things that I worked on before I left are coming out now, so I thought why not put together another one of those awkward self-promo posts to spread the word…
Plug 1 (Posdnuos):
I haven’t been doing much freelance writing these days, but the last two articles I wrote come out this month in the new issues of Domus and AD magazine. The Domus one is about the new museum at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, designed by Arata Isozaki. The AD article is about the new residence of the Dutch Ambassador to China, designed by Dirk Jan Postel. Cop that!
Plug 2 (Trugoy):
The book MAD Dinner that I wrote about a while back is finally out. It took ages, and actually I’m not even sure if it’s in western stores yet, but they’ve got it in Beijing an on the publisher Actar’s website so….
Here’s a description form the press release:
MAD Dinner is the first book by the Beijing-based architectural office MAD. Organized around the metaphor of dinner table conversation, the book is a collection of ideas and opinions about topics ranging from politics to ecology to fame to the future. The dinner’s “guests” include people from all levels of Chinese society: a government official, hairdresser, migrant laborers, a doctor, a taxi driver, and a developer are all brought together to offer their views in an atmosphere of openness and exchange. MAD’s work is embedded in a series of extended conversations with international advisors, including the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, British writer Ian Buruma, filmmakers Zhang Yimou and Jia Zhangke, and the artist Ai Weiwei. The conversations work in tandem with MAD’s proposals to create an essential account of the architect’s experience inside the fastest urbanization in world history. (2008, edited by Brendan McGetrick)
So as they say, the book emphasizes conversations. I learned a lot working on it, and got to meet a lot of cool people. Here’s a list of the MAD Dinner guests:
Hans Ulrich Obrist_curator/ 小汉斯_策展人
Yang HongJun_delivery man/杨红军_快递员
Zhu XiaoDi _ architect/ 朱小地_建筑师
Lao Dong_taxi driver/ 老董_出租车司机
Ai WeiWei_artist/艾未未_艺术家
Qu HongYuan_construction site foreman/ 渠洪源_现场工程师
Wang MingXian_art historian/ 王明贤_艺术史学家
Hu LiZhong_ doctor/ 胡力中_ 医生
Jia ZhangKe_film director/ 贾樟珂_导演
Ian Buruma_critic/ 亦安·布鲁马_评论家
Wang BaoJu_curator/ 王宝菊_策展人
Jiang QiHong _state-owned businessman/ 蒋启虹_国企领导
Shi Jian_critic/ 史建_ 评论家
Huang Yan _city governor/ 黄艳_首规委领导
Tony_hair dresser/ 托尼_发型师
Zhang YiMou_filmmaker/ 张艺谋_导演
Mies Van der Rohe_architect / 密斯·凡·德罗_建筑师
Cao Fei _artist / 曹斐_艺术家
Kuku_3D renderer/ 酷酷_渲染图师
Peter Cook_ architect/ 彼得·库克_建筑师
Lei Jin _model maker/ 雷进_模型师
Ma QinYun _architect/ 马清运_建筑师
Li MengXia_fashion editor/ 李孟夏 _时尚主编
Jiang Jun_editor/姜珺_主编And since it’s topical, here’s a selection from the conversation we had with Zhang Yimou, the director of the Beijing Olympic Opening that everybody’s raving about. I personally found the opening’s heavy emphasis on Chinese history a little clunky and against the internationalist spirit of the Olympics, but I think from what he says here, you can get a sense of why it ended up that way…
MAD: As director of the Olympic opening ceremony you seem to have the obligation to juggle many different representations – first a kind of traditional Chinese culture taken from imperial times, then the mass spectacle associated with the communist era, and then a future vision that gives the event a feeling of hopefulness and modernity. How will you balance these different qualities?
ZYM: It is not personal work but team work, and it’s relevant for so many people and their expectations. Just look at all the buzz about it on the Internet or as text messages – there are as many sarcastic remarks as [hopeful] anticipations. It’s indeed impossible to appeal to everybody.
Here’s how I look at it: this is doubtless a very, very important presentation, but you still have to stay calm and treat it as it is – it’s still just an entertainment show, and you need to follow the rules and remain sane. Yes, we Chinese think it’s a centuries-old dream come true, so we have to grab the chance and comb through our 5000-year history, but in the end it’s nothing but a one-hour show.
No matter how great you are, it’s not possible to tell a 5000-year story in one hour. What you want to do is to present the story in visual, aesthetic, and emotional terms. It would be ridiculous to expect anything more than a show from it simply because of the unprecedented anticipation. I mean, why don’t you just write an editorial piece instead of producing a show then?
So I think I have a proper attitude towards it, and I won’t be bothered with all of that. I know it won’t be perfect, but the most important thing is to be entertaining and innovative – we also want to have general appeal. We need to have a universal, humane perspective, which is able to strike a chord in, say, an 18-year-old African youth’s mind. He who knows nothing about China should be able to say, “I seem to know a little bit of the Chinese elements now.” These are all important. When facing such a complicated creative project, I think it helps to start by simplifying things.
Plug 3 (Maseo):
Last, Becoming, a book I made earlier this year together with Ai Weiwei, had its launch event this week. It’s basically a collection of photos taken by Weiwei during the construction of Beijing’s new Air Terminal 3. For the book, I asked Weiwei and the airport’s designer Norman Foster to answer the same set of questions. I didn’t go exactly as planned, but there were a few points where I think the vast differences between the two men are spotlighted.
Here’s Norman Foster:
BM: What insight do you try to offer the students who work for you?
NF: Architects have a duty to design well and to design responsibly – whether that is at the scale of an airport or a door handle. The design process can question our assumptions about buildings and can reconcile needs which are often in conflict. That may mean breaking down social and physical barriers between user groups, or finding ways to bring different functions together under one roof. In that sense, design is a process of integration. The holistic thinking we apply to buildings applies equally to infrastructure – transport systems, streets and public spaces – the “urban glue” that holds a city together.
BM:What have students taught you?
NF: An amazing amount. Every year in the studio we have an evening when recent graduates show their work. The quality and intelligence of the work on display is extraordinary. Every person gets to present his or her work, and that generates a discussion. For me, it is one of the most challenging events of the year. Nobody stands on ceremony and the discussion can be very fast moving. If you begin by thinking you’ve seen it all and know everything, then you’re in for a very big surprise.
And here’s Ai Weiwei:
BM: What insight do you try to offer the students who work for you?
AW: To share the knowledge and to examine it.
BM: What have students taught you?
AW: The students told me it is very difficult to be a student.
LOL. Anyway, Becoming is also my first foray into graphic design, so I’m mostly excited about that. Here’s a couple of images…
And here’s a few of my favorite photos from the book. Click to enlarge…
Popularity: 3% [?]
- Awesome Book: The Chinese Dream
Very Friend Neville Mars and his colleagues at the Dynamic City Foundation have just released an amazing new book called The Chinese Dream. Neville is an architect from Holland. We met in New York in ’99 when he was working with a couple friends on a film called NYNTEEN NYNTY NYNE, and over the years I’ve come to deeply admire his commitment to quality and overall flip mode ethic.
He moved to China four or five years ago, lured by an announcement that China planned to build 400 new cities of 1 million inhabitants each by 2020, or 20 new cities a year for 20 years. He co-founded DCF, a kind of amorphous collective of sociologists, planners, researchers and designers, and got to work. In 2003 they launched the Urban China 2020 project, an in-depth study of the effects of China’s flash-urbanization and what designers could do in response. To expand the pool of participants, observers, critics, etc. a couple of years ago DCF established an online collaboration platform called BURB for open-source research and design.
The Chinese Dream (010, 2008) is the culmination of these efforts, a 784-page opus that I can honestly say is the most beautiful book on China I’ve ever seen. Besides that I can’t say much more, though, because I haven’t actually read it yet. Neville showed it to me last month between drinks and in poor lighting conditions, but I was honestly blow away by it. So I’m riding with that emotion. (Nev holla)
Here are some sample spreads, in case you think I’m exaggerating. Click to enlarge…
To view many more and read the book’s introduction, check out the Chinese Dream fact sheet here.
I don’t think it’s arrived in western stores yet, but you can order the book from the publisher’s site here.
For all the Beijing heads, here are a few places where you can pick it up…
FakeSpace www.fakedesign.co.uk
Bookworm www.beijingbookworm.com
Timezone8 timezone8.com
Onewaystreet Library, Yuanmingyuan www.onewaystreet.cnPopularity: 4% [?]
- Chinese Gvt: Don’t be a spastic – get drastic about plastic
I’m back in Beijing and the big piece of non-earthquake/non-Olympic news here is the new ban on free plastic bags. According to China Daily
From June 1 on, all Chinese retailers, including supermarkets, department stores and grocery stores, would no longer provide free plastic shopping bags.
The number of plastic bags consumed in China is literally unbelievable. It’s estimated that Beijing alone consumes nearly 10 billion plastic bags annually, which is equivalent to around 27 million bags per day. Really.
So this is great news for everybody I guess, but especially for China’s overworked, underappreciated environmental activists. Last year I got to know a bunch of them while I was doing research for the 桌志 | Eat Up project and I thought, to celebrate the new policy, I’d post up a conversation I had with Takeshi Ikeda, an organizer for Global Village Beijing, one of China’s earliest environmental NGOs. At the time he was spearheading an information campaign aimed at reducing the use of plastic bags. He talked a lot about the challenges of doing environmental activism in China, and he actually ended up saying the public advocacy doesn’t really work here. Anyway, I found it really interesting, check it out….
(more…)Popularity: 4% [?]
