Monthly Archives: September 2005

rainy day

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It’s raining, again. Our summer has consisted of weeklong downpours and toxic heat that leaves me dizzy after even short walks. Outside my window, yet another typhoon (third in the past two months), which hasn’t landed in Shenzhen, but nevertheless blown in and lingered. Stir-crazy after so much time indoors, I decide to go to the Mangrove Bay Park and check out the water. Mangrove Bay Park is technically a natural reserve, but since the land reclamation project and re-zoning of coastal land reshaped this part of the city, it’s at best a mini-reserve with a few herons and birds I don’t recognize.

To reach the Mangrove Park, I ride the 101 from Tianmian to Window of the World, along Shennan road. My plan is to jump of the bus and then walk through the new roads that have been laid in the reclaimed land—on my way to Mangrove, I’m interested in photographing views of the old coastline before it has been filled in with housing developments, shopping malls, and greenspace. However, the actual layout of the land thwarts my plan. I knew that the themeparks had been built along the old coastline, but what I hadn’t realized that therefore there was no way through them to the new coastline. Accordingly I have to walk another mile or so west along Shennan road toward Shahe road, where I can finally veer south toward the bay.

I walk under grey skies, trudge through sidewalks covered in pools of muddy water (construction site run-off), and then squish past a clump of people waiting out the rain under a plastic awning. My umbrella keeps my face and torso dry, but my pants are already soaked and now cling to my knees. Once on Shahe road, I make another discovery—the reclaimed land has been fenced off and I find myself maneuvering to get my body, umbrella, and camera safely through openings in order to snap a quick picture. Can anthropology be reduced to this technically illicit, but in fact simply drippy sneaking around?

But then the sunlight stuns me. The rays that do manage their way past the storm clouds illuminate the landscape with unexpected beauty, indeed with a delicacy that I had never associated with Shenzhen. Nanshan Mountain shimmers on the horizon. A rainbow touches earth in Hong Kong. Even Shennan Road and Binhai Highway glow. Shenzhen transformed, radiant even. Photos from that walk can be viewed at: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000dbeh.

dogwood journal

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photos i took in beijing over the may day vacation have been published in the fifth edition of the dogwood journal (http://www.dogwoodjournal.com/Archive/Issue5/MaryODonnell.cfm). you can visit the most recent edition of dogwood at http://www.dogwoodjournal.com/index.cfm.

fat bird salon, 17 September 2005

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Yesterday was mid-autumn festival. The day before, Fat Bird held its second salon, this time at Rao Xiaojun’s studio, Raw Designs. The first salon featured poetry readings by Steven Schroeder, Yi Jihui, and Yang Qian, as well as pictures by Kit Kelen and Mary Ann O’Donnell. Kelen also contributed a music composition.

The second Fat Bird salon functioned as an open workshop, with an audience of 15 people watching, listening, and commenting on the work-in-progress, which is tentatively called “Materializations”. Over the summer, Liu Hongming, Yang Jie, Ma Yuan, Yang Qian, and O’Donnell met together to discuss how one might create within and beyond disciplinary constraints. By training, Liu is a dancer, Yang Jie a violinist, Ma an architect, Yang Qian a journalist, and O’Donnell an anthropologist. Each is interested in reworking the materiality of their art. For Liu, this has meant retraining his body to move both arrhythmically and distanced from music. Yang Jie taped the sounds of moving water—urine, tap water, rain, a shower—and then digitally manipulated these sounds, adding vocals and piano. Ma has been using sculpture to redefine space. Yang Qian read from “Language Materializes,” a series of written pieces, which explore cultural grammars (rather than events) as generative of meaning. In an attempt to move away from ethnographic documentary conventions, O’Donnell presented 15 photographs of Shenzhen walls.

The work of John Cage and Merce Cunningham has inspired this ongoing collaboration, as the five work independently on specific projects and then present them together at different sites. Participants can then use the others’ works in the creations of new projects, expanding the definition of “site” to include video projects, installations, and new texts that grow out of the conversation and its realization as a particular “salon”. In addition to emphasizing the way that meaning materializes through chance operations, these projects, both separately and collaboratively, mobilize self-reflexivity in the service of creativity. Indeed, this has been one of Fat Bird’s core obsessions: what does it mean to be an artist in a city like Shenzhen, where there are few organizations dedicated to creating and presenting new art? Of course, the upside of the material constraints that artists working in Shenzhen face has been to force creative to cross-disciplinary lines, both within and beyond their circles, generating a wonderful eclecticism.

feedback (houhai discovery)

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The other day I asked a friend to critique my photos. He didn’t like the “Found Objects” series because he understands photography to be a process of discovering what is there, rather than imposing myself onto the landscape. My husband countered that he liked “Found Objects” precisely because they constituted a moral evaluation of the landscape; for him, the point of photography was to insert the artist’s perspective into the work (rather than perspective as reflected through “discovery”).

Another friend has asked why my photographs of Shenzhen are primarily in black and white, and cold. She wondered how adding color to the images would change the feeling of Shenzhen. Her questions echo those of another friend who wondered why my pictures of Shenzhen weren’t pretty, while my photos of Berlin were.

On Saturday, September 17, 2005 I will be showing some of my work as part of “Language Materializes,” a workshop organized by Fat Bird Theatre and hosted by Raw Studio, a collective of architects interested in new ways of conceptualizing and building urban space(s). “Language Materializes” is the name of a series of writings by Yang Qian. The project, however, brings together independent works by Yang Qian, dancer Liu Hongming, architect Ma Yuan, composer Yang Jie, and myself. None of these works have been developed together. The point, in bringing them together, is to see the connections that juxtaposition inevitably brings, and stimulate discussion on how meaning is made through art and everyday life.

So I’ve been listening to all this feedback with a different ear. Sometime this week, I have to go print some photos and get them ready to hang. And I’m not sure of the kind of presentation I want. Do I go with discovery? Or judgment? Or perhaps color? I’ve been thinking of doing something highly anthropological and presenting a photo essay on the Houhai land reclamation project, which is visible from the Raw Studio windows. We could all look at the pictures, look out the window, and talk about what we remember of the older coastline…

In the meantime, I am posting some colorful discoveries of Houhai, which I took yesterday morning: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000cd53

on over-painting

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I’m not quite sure what to call the Shenzhen habit of painting over the graffiti—but just the graffiti—that some other soul has surreptitiously painted on a wall, or street, or stand, or the ridges of a corrugated steel barrier… They do not re-paint, or re-tile, or re-lay the sidewalk. They paint over a private eye’s telephone number or hastily scribbled contact of an independent furniture mover, and then over-paint again, and again, sometimes so efficiently that the black paint of the graffiti mixes in with the white over-paint, grey.

Yet this over-painting is often unexpectedly painterly. The thick textures that develop under multiple brushes and various paints could hang beside a Pollack or Rothko and not seem out of place. A question of framing, and re-framing, of course. Or more accurately, a question of learning to see otherwise. To see other than the grit of desperate advertising or the sloppy ineffectiveness of anti-graffiti measures; to observe, instead, the organic composition of common spaces.

To see some examples of over-painting, please visit: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000bcxp

on greenspace

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Yesterday, I took my camera for a walk. Although I had a new object to photograph—a well-used pot for brewing Chinese medicine—I didn’t want to carry it. Instead, I walked around the Baihua area, which is bordered by Huaqiangbei in the south and the Shenzhen Stadium in the north. East and West, I meandered between Baihua Road numbers 4 and 2, respectively. This is primarily a residential area, with housing from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Shenzhen School of the Arts is located here, as is a Wallmart.

Greenspace constitutes one of the pleasures of older developments. Unlike newer developments, which have enclosed park-like areas for their exclusive residents, older areas sometimes have large strips of greenspace that stretch between the development wall and the sidewalk. Lovely banyan trees and lush bamboo clumps shade passage through these strips, which were planned when land was plentiful and funding for elaborate and imported topiary not easily had. Then, planners planted native species and left them to their own devices. Today, grass and palm trees, cultivated flowerbeds and exotic bushes define both public and privatized greenspaces.

One might measure the historical distance between new and old greenspaces in terms of an all-too-visceral ethics of efficiency. As factories, developments, and streets have colonized most of Shenzhen’s land, the older greenspaces, with their cool shade, unkempt paths, and rustling leaves seem vaguely decadent, indeed wasteful. In contrast, the newer greenspaces fit within the lines of an efficient urban planning. They boast denser vegetation and more varieties of plants per square meter, as well as park benches, concrete paths, and small pavillions.

The relative decadence of the older greenspaces is a strange phenomenon. It’s clearly not a question of ecological efficiency. The older greenspaces require no care, except for the occasional sweeping of leaves and picking up trash that accumulates in the network of banyan tree roots. The new greenspaces demand constant attention. Accordingly, teams of gardeners cultivate them from about 6 a.m. until 5 a.m. (with a lunch break and nap time). The decadence of the older greenspaces isn’t even a question of occupied space; the legislated proportion of greenspace to built space hasn’t changed over the past two decades. Instead, I think this relative decadence might arise from the plants themselves, or rather, the growing.

Plants thrive in semi-tropical Shenzhen. Grasses and vines quickly overtake any bit of untended land, climbing walls and bridges, weaving themselves into mesh wire fences. The vitality of Shenzhen’s weeds is particularly evident at abandoned-soon-to-be-razed sites, which support thick walls of shimmering vines and purple flowers. Hence, the city must hire so many gardeners in the newer greenspaces, which like botanical gardens have precise borders between different species; no room for creeping vines, even less for natives. In the older spaces, however, the banyan trees’ roots hold back the onslaught of vines, which cling to the development walls, their lush often translucent green setting off the mottled brown roots. Patterned, yes, but not clipped back, and therein, I think, is the difference that makes a difference.

The sharp lines of the newer greenspaces materialize an efficiency made possible by shearing back growth. I can imagine the gardeners’ irritation at their charges yearning to grow outside the plan. One comes, in the newer greenspaces, to know one’s place and how to occupy it. In contrast, the decadence of the older greenspaces feels like a deep, satisfying stretch, creating one’s place through the process of occupation. This might be one definition of freedom—having the space to grow according to one’s nature, even as we respect the conditions that allow others to flourish, co-evolving. That said, the efficiency with which vines overtake an abandoned factory or deserted village reminds us that others will thrive on our graves; we too are an environment.

A post-script. After I began writing this entry, I took a walk in the northern section of the city’s Central Park. This is older greenspace, older even then the so-called “older greenspaces” described above. Those spaces came into being with the city, 20-odd years ago. Instead, the land on which Central Park was zoned was formerly a leechee orchard. In the northern section, far off the main strip, the park remains a leechee orchard. Indeed, the city still harvests leechees here every June and July. Here, the clipping and weeding and cultivation feel like homecoming. Native, if you will. At any rate, I was reminded that there are gardens and there are gardens. Simply outgrowing the plan isn’t necessarily the point either, it’s just a tickle, a whisper: there are other ecologies possible.

To view some of Shenzhen’s greenspace—old and new, inadvertent and leftover from socialist agriculture—please visit: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000aw3w. I have also photographed the found objects in central park. Those pictures are at: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/000093f8.