Author Archives: Mary Ann O'Donnell

what to see when visiting shenzhen…

Posted on by

The other day I had an interesting conversation about Baishizhou with a friend visiting from neighboring Hong Kong. In a nutshell? She asked me what there was to see in Shenzhen that would be intrinsically interesting to someone who knew nothing about Shenzhen. She remarked that it was easy to figure out what to see in Shanghai and Beijing because they had a history. I mentioned that I have blogged on this very topic, including touristy suggestions.

I then said something less gracious to the effect of “If you can’t be bothered to learn about Shenzhen before visiting, maybe you’re not here to visit the city. Maybe you’ve come over to go shopping at the Luohu Mall or Book City.”

The problem, of course, is that ignorent global trotting passes for global chic living. We expect to arrive in an unknown place and to be able to read the lay of the land immediately, as if our homegrown geographies might be easily transported thither and yon. In a sense, the frustration we feel comes from a misplaced sense of entitlement: the world is my oyster. I know oysters. I should be able to open this oyster, grab the pearl and move on to the next delicacy. And while I’m at it, I should have the help of friendly English-speaking underpaid minions, who are not only not going to take advantage of my ignorance, but also show me where to find bigger and better and cheaper oysters because they. like. me.

Arrr.

Of course, tourists don’t want to visit an actual mall; they want something “authentic”. But as my friend pointed out, they don’t want to visit Baishizhou either because it is not self-evidently legible. Tourists — whether homegrown or from elsewhere — want something in-between the global standardized mall and actual working class neighborhoods, something edgey without being dangerously sharp. Something like a cheap Xintiandi (新天地).

And there’s the rub. The expectation that Shenzhen should be immediately legible to tourists and other strangers is itself a species of mall-think. Mall-think refers to the idea that the world has already been standardized into chain-stores that sell, among other things, samples of local history and culture. By extension, mall-think tourism refers to the idea of one-stop tourism (I visit Dongmen, the Civic Center, and Huanggang Village) which will produces a pre-conceived and therefore “intrinsically interesting” experience the Shenzhen difference.

Xintiandi, is of course, the most obvious and obviously successfully of mall-think development. The fact that they are expanding from Shanghai to Chongqing, Foshan, and Guangzhou should really be a wake-up call; Euro-American mall-think is transforming the Chinese landscape into accessible and therefore interesting shopping experiences. The view from Baishizhou reminds us, however, that mall-think tourism confuses global recognition with authenticity, and in doing so fails to see the intrinsic value of working class lives.

there is no city here…

Posted on by

The translation of 城中村 as “urban village” misleads. In fact, it is more accurate to call them urbanized villages, with the understanding that a village is not simply a rural settlement, but also and more importantly a corporate entity. The village settlement became urban, and in the process created a class of corporate land owners, who own the buildings. Thus, for example Baishizhou, where several thousand households control the real estate where 140,000 people live. Dalang Precinct (大浪街道) has an idegenious population of 8,000+ with a migrant worker population of over 500,000. The villages and some villages are not poor, they are the “local rich”.

Dachong, Hubei, Baishizhou — the list of urban villages that have been or are in process of being rennovated (a euphamism for razed and rebuilt) is, of course, the list of the most important real estate developments in contemporary Shenzhen. The plans for these new neighborhoods resemble those of Southern California, with climate controlled buildings, exquisite landscaping, and carefully planned walking areas.All this to say, when not talking about the need for low income housing (for both the working poor and recent college graduates) or rejoicing in the messy, cheap convenience of urban villages, the general Shenzhen consensus about urban villages in general is that the buildings and environment sub-standard. The goal is to replace them with neighborhoods that have enormous shopping malls at their center.

Now, the ideological irritant is the extent to which young intellectuals and urbane Shenzheners have coded the suburban impulse as tasteful, while the guilded buildings of the village corporations are being called “dirt wealth” buildings (土豪楼). In other words, there is something worse than being “exploding” or nouveau riche (暴发户); one could be “vulgar” rich, or 土豪. Indeed, vulgar rich is the term used to describe the skyscrapers and office buildings that villages (or individual villagers) have commissioned. The problem, of course, is that the logic of building vulger rich buildings is the same as building nouveau riche buildings. Urban villages and suburban cities hire the same architectural firms, use the same materials, and aim for the same symbolic ends — to announce their social importance. The only difference is the exterior of these buildings; where’s the guilded tipping point from nouveau to vulgar riche?

More importantly, the cultural coding of suburban urbanization as “tasteful” and rural urbanization as “tacky” misses the point — neither urban typology completely nourishes the human soul because both forms rely upon exploitation and exclusion in order to generate the capital investment necessary to build and rebuild Shenzhen.

dachong update

Posted on by

Located west of Baishizhou and east of Shenzhen University and the Shenzhen Science and Technology Park, Dachong was once a large urban village with over 1,200 handshake buildings. It is being redeveloped into an upscale residential area, with office buildings and mall.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to re-visit Baishizhou and get a sense of how the construction is being organized. Of note? A section of handshake buildings have been renovated as temporary housing for Dachong villagers, construction workers and young project administrators. By removing buildings, the developer, China Resources has created an intimate neighborhood with a park, basketball courts, and winding roads as well as a temporary shrine and ancestral hall. Indeed, this repurposing of extant handshakes is not only smart, it also suggests the contours of possible upgrades to extant urban villages, where the selective removal of one or two buildings would open up necessary public space without massive displacements of working class families, migrant workers, and young white collar workers.

Impressions of the temporary handshake neighborhood, below.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

handshake 302 opening

Posted on by

Handshake 302 opened yesterday! We held our opening at the Baishizhou Cultural Plaza, where we distributed 1,000 balloons to neighborhood children. People chatted at our information table while waiting to be guided to the art space. For over 3 hours, Kaiqin dialogued with visitors about the installation, Special Forces, and the importance of public art. At 5, the second part of the day began, with a workshop led by Pete Moser. More Music Baishizhou brought together 20 members of CZC special forces to workshop a song about Baishizhou and plastic stool percussion. Then Pete shared his fabulous one-man show with residents. Impressions, below:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

handshake 302 sneak preview!

Posted on by

We’re installing Accounting at Handshake 302! The opening happens October 20 15:00 to 17:00 come and enjoy an afternoon of public art in the village. Later, at 19:00 Peter Moser brings his community music project to the Baishizhou Culture Square. Impressions and map to Handshake 302 as well as the Culture Square, below.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

foxconn research

Posted on by

Jenny Chan documents the Foxconn suicides from the point of view of a survivor. Worth reading, A Suicide Survivor: the Life of a Chinese Migrant Worker at Foxconn.

czc manifesto (of sorts)

Posted on by

CZC logosCZC特工队 (tègōngduì) organized in 2012 in order to discuss, plan and support creative engagement with Shenzhen’s urban villages. Three questions have inspired us.

1. What can be learned and gained from returning to the urban villages?

2. How can handshake efficiency apartments, densely crowded streets, and bustling small plazas be repurposed as cultural spaces?

3. How can creative interventions motivate Shenzhen residents to cross cultural and economic difference and discuss our common urban condition?

Our decision to locate our art space and the performance series, Handshake 302 in Baishizhou, one of Shenzhen’s most (in)famous villages, constitute concrete answers to these questions. We hope that each visitor to our art space and every audience of a performance will use these diverse works to discuss and formulate their own answers to these questions, stimulating a rediscovery and re-evaluation of Baishizhou – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

In order to integrate art exhibitions, performances and research with the residents of Baishizhou, we are collaborating with the Shenzhen Baishizhou Investment & Development Company. We also attempt to purchase supplies from Baishizhou shops and vendors.

We welcome collaboration with artists, performers, and scholars from Shenzhen and the rest of the world. Please contact us if you have a project to realize in Baishizhou or another urban village.

Handshake 302 has been selected as a collateral exhibition of the 2013 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture.

who else has insomnia?

Posted on by

I aspire to a life of early to bed and early to rise. When I do rise early, I find my cellphone blinking with weixin alerts — throughout the night, friends have been pinging bursts of characters at each other, usually concluding with some clear indication that they are going to sleep. Weixin goes quiet until someone asks, “Who else has insomnia?”

According to Wikipedia, there are there kinds of insomnia — transient, acute, and chronic, which are defined in temporal terms. Transient insomnia lasts less than a week, acute lasts longer than a week but less than a month; chronic insomnia stretches beyond the limits of monthly endurance — “maybe I’ll go to work in a bit,” another blurts, “who wants to sleep anyway?”

I have read literary insomniacs most of my life and enjoyed the hardboiled insomnia of noir films — will there ever be a morning? But I have understood Emily Dickinson’s lament as metaphor for a more general human condition, rather than an explicit 3:24 a.m. call for help. Even Sylvia Plath seems — on printed page — to have come to a tentative understanding with sleeplessness:

She married the prince
and all went well
except for the fear —
the fear of sleep.

Briar Rose
was an insomniac…
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the court chemist
mixing her some knock-out drops
and never in the prince’s presence.

Nevertheless, weixin insomnia haunts me because I am unsure of the etiquette surrounding these direct glimpses into someone else’s pain. Do I acknowledge the call when I wake up? Do I ask how they’ve been sleeping next time we meet? Or do I just ignore the messages, as if I never saw them, and let the sarcasm and loneliness linger?

performance art in shenzhen

Posted on by

Yesterday, Cai Qing hosted an afternoon of performance pieces in his OCAT studio. I’m sure others have commented on this, but performance art and weixin seem a match made in virtual heaven. Below, impressions of Fang Fang’s piece, “An Individual” in which she first proved her existence and then had others eulogize her. The response to her claims that she was a living human being was that no one doubted her existence, but they had no way of verifying the legality of her documents — hee! Meanwhile, the entire event was variously documented by over 1/2 the audience.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

opening at handshake 302!!

Posted on by

Handshake 302 is a 12 sq meter effeciency apartment, which is transformed through changing site-specific installations. We are open Wednsdays from 19:00 to 21:00, and Saturday and Sunday, 15:00 to 17:00. Our first show opens October 20 with two installations, “Accounting (算数)” and “Exchange Corner (交换角)”. “Accounting” is a room-size installation, collaboratively conceptualized, designed, and installed by Lei Sheng, Liu He, Mary Ann O’Donnell, Wu Dan and Zhang Kaiqin. “Exchange Corner” by performance artist Fang Fang is installed in the tiny kitchen space of the efficiency appartment. Here’s the poster:
IMG_3824

The poster for “more music” with Peter Moser is also ready for the October 20 19:00 performance at the Baishizhou Cultural Plaza. Here’s that poster:
IMG_3823

Very much a “yeah us!” moment chez CZC特工队.