Field Trip: Shanghai Project Chapter 2

Puxi is underwater. The Oriental Pearl Tower has gone dark. Mutant sea creatures, glutted with microplastics dumped in the ocean 120 years ago, have made homes out of swanky quarters in the French Concession and within algae-smothered carriages of the Shanghai Metro, which at one time transported over 11 million passengers daily, of a human race at the brink of extinction—at least on Earth.

This was the disturbing vision of 2116, presented at the opening weekend conference of Shanghai Project Chapter 2: Seeds of Time. As Zhang Lei (CEO and founder of Envision Energy, a clean energy technology company and co-sponsor for the event) pontificated repeatedly, in 100 years’ time, 70 percent of downtown Shanghai will be submerged in water due to the effects of global warming and climate change. Conferences, roundtable discussions, marathon Q&As and presentations unfolded over two full days, marinating curators, journalists, artists and Shanghainese citizens in research-heavy diatribes against the sustainability of our Anthropocene within the Shanghai Himalayas Museum complex, which included the Fujimoto-designed outdoor Envision Pavilion.

When Shanghai Project Phase 1, which at times was also referred to as Chapter 1—it is important to note the inconsistency in its very title—was officially activated in the city in September 2016 with a focus on public projects and community programs, skeptics from the science, art and citizen-engaged world rabble-roused. This was inevitable; co-artistic directors Yongwoo Lee and Hans-Ulrich Obrist had even pre-empted the Shanghai Project’s cause by stating a need for discourse between disciplines that have in our contemporary age been split or sequestered from each other. Chapter 2, Lee stated, was about exhibitions, talks, screenings, actions and works, and about planting metaphorical seeds for reuniting in a future world.

Day one began with an early morning meeting at the Envision Pavilion of scientists, academics and the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), with the designs of a discursive structure. “The roundtable presents ways in which we can or cannot utilize contemporary technologies to construct new models for sustainable practice,” stated the description for the first event of the opening weekend conference, “An Environmental State of Affairs.” Three of the four speakers gave their own presentation, which set the tone for the scattered forum to follow. Neal Benezra of SFMOMA spoke emphatically about the posterity and archaic importance of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, comparing it to the relatively newer and constantly shifting Centre Pompidou in Paris, whose very architecture invites dialogue with the political and social environment it inhabits. Studying artists in the SFMOMA collection including Emily Jacir, Danh Vō and Walid Raad, Benezra highlighted specific contemporary engagements within the museum. For example, Raad’s 96-inkjet-print work Cotton Under My Feet (2007) was created as a moving search for the exact shade of immaculate blue seen in the skies before the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City, based on legal transcripts from the trials years later.

By sharp contrast, Wang Min’an, professor of literary theory at Capital Normal University in Beijing, warned a jetlagged and caffeine-deprived audience about the impending cyborg takeover, relating the race for robotic advancement to that of apes and monkeys evolving into Homo Sapiens thousands of years ago. “The monkeys were scared too, that some of them were turning into humans,” he declared suggestively, perhaps nodding to an irrational fear when it comes to embracing a Ghost in the Shell future. When the third speaker, Stuart Kim, professor of developmental biology and genetics at Stanford University, began to ruminate on aging and entropy, he also suggested something radical: that scientists don’t quite know why humans are mortal. Thus, the discussion inadvertently turned to the issue of immortality and whether or not it was a sustainable or desirable goal. The moderator, curator Wang Kaimei, struggled to find a common thread between Cai Qinghua, professor at the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, whose studies were firmly rooted in fact; Wang, who spooled philosophical hypothesis after philosophical hypothesis around robotic enhancement; Kim, spouting firm beliefs against the existence of a regulated body clock (this editor then noticed the lack of female speakers on the panel to point out the well-researched and factually known biological clock pertaining to the fertility cycle); and Benezra, who had to answer an awkward question from one of the scientists about “why all artists want to be immortal.”

Other talks on the opening day weekend were just as randomly generated. There was a roundtable on contemporary usage of traditional Chinese medicine, which was later understood to be a particular passion of Dai Zhikang, founder and chairman of the Zendai Group and also founder of the Shanghai Himalayas Museum. In the Shanghai Project Chapter 2 catalog, Dai states: “Contemporary Chinese medicine and the Shanghai Project are—from two distinctive vantage points—helping us seek out ‘human and universal wisdom,’ to find the direction and the principle of the Great Unity.” (Later on, Dai also asked, seriously, if we were all waiting to send our sperm up to other planets in order to repopulate the human race there.) A marathon Q&A between Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Yongwoo Lee, several “root researchers”—Sophia al-Maria, Bruno Latour, Otobong Nkanga, Qiu Anxiong, Zhang Haimeng—and other guest speakers, lasted from 9:00 a.m. till midday on the second day. Later that day, artworks by these root researchers were seen at the opening of the “Seeds of Time” exhibition within the Shanghai Himalayas Museum, which Obrist mentioned was held in honor of the late Gustav Metzger (1926–2017), a pioneer artist-activist whose installation series in the show, “Extremes Touch: Dancing Tubes, Mica Cube, Drop on Hotplate, Untitled” (1968/2017), initiated discussions about the intangible relationships between air, water, heat and light.

A few more talks and discussions took place. Journalists were able to question and challenge the nature of the project in a press conference, which was possibly the most structured and insightful part of the entire opening weekend. One writer posited a question about the third chapter and why information hadn’t been announced yet. Obrist countered by noting a propensity of tabula rasa toward most exhibition structures, in that they are planned for, raised, and then wiped away from the spaces they once inhabited, quite mechanically. “Seeds of Time,” he said, was going to be different. It was both a long-durational project, for which germination had only just begun, and also a sign of what chapter three will be about. “We make a decision of the next show based on what we are doing now. There is actually a feedback route we can learn from the experience and then incorporate what we learn in the next chapter.” Another writer asked an even more pertinent question about promoting social inequality and improving quality of life for everyone on Earth. The answers, like the Shanghai Project itself, were inconsistent. Dai spoke of the contemporary Chinese Dream in relation to the more traditional American Dream, which had created a free world. The Chinese Dream will take us further, to the next step, he argued, as we create more models of sustainable and fair living for everyone, not just a small portion of the rich. Obrist—in a rather weak answer to the question—mentioned that in activating the Shanghai Project in remote Pudong, the event was open to thousands of citizens who would not otherwise be able to access art and culture. Zhang disagreed that the world was unequal, mentioning, “Even Mr. Dai has to sit through traffic and smog in Shanghai.” Lee spoke briefly, and succinctly, at the close of the discussion, perhaps not just in answer to the question, but to the overall project itself: “The spirit of sharing is important.”

Shanghai Project Chapter 2: Seeds of Time is on view at the Shanghai Himalayas Museum and Envision Pavilion until July 30, 2017. 

Ysabelle Cheung is managing editor at ArtAsiaPacific. 

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