Category Archives: shenzhen fieldnotes

houhai land reclamation area, may 27, 2007

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western corridor houhai land reclamation district

houhai, again. another encounter with that which became obsolete in less than ten years. another walk through the determined construction of an alternative world. several views of the same stretch of new road.

there’s a chinese proverb 沧海桑田 (the oceans become mulberry fields) that is used to describe largescale transformation. perhaps, 沧海楼盘 could be used to describe shenzhen’s development, or at least the policy of 移山填海　(move mountains, fill in the ocean), but it wouldn’t mean only massive change. something about the necessary scale of transformation to compete economically. something in keeping with another updated proverb i’ve heard: 谈金论股 (discuss money and debate the market)–a puny take on “discuss today and debate the past (谈今论古). or the rewrite of the national anthem:
起来还没有进股市的人们
把你们的资金全部变成神奇的股票
中国人民族到了最疯狂的时刻
每个人都激情发出震颠的吼声
涨停涨停涨停
怀着暴富的梦想
钱进钱进钱进进。　what other new proverbs have you heard?

设计之都： graffiti art, shenzhen

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the new look of tianmian–city of design

it’s the third annual industrial arts fair in shenzhen. last year this time, fat bird did a series of improvised performances at the fair. this year, the fair came to tianmian! specifically, city of design, the ongoing project to upgrade old urban village shenzhen hosted the first three-city (guangzhou, hong kong, shenzhen) graffiti competition. a few pics, here.

now, i don’t know where or how these artists actually applied to compete; i haven’t seen any of the shenzhen artists’ work around the city. not that means anything in and of itself, much happens that i miss because i’m busy elsewhere. but. i’ve taken pictures of graffiti in the past. i’ve taken pictures of overpainting. but in over five years of walking and photographing the shenzhen, i haven’t seen any graffiti approaching the quality on display. interesting questions: where do these graffiti artists actually work? where are their other projects? will the city actually heed shenzhen t.v.’s call for more graffiti art throughout the city?

all this to call attention to the ways in which shenzhen continues its pursuit of culture in government approved forms. more specifically, its pursuit of culture as a viable economic investment. the industrial arts fair is the most obvious example. government regulation, promotion, and investment is also making dafencun into something of a brandname. this year, in tianmian graffiti art is being promoted as a happy alternative to industrial manufacturing as the livelihood of urban villages.

that said, fat bird’s most “successful” projects have been in collaboration with government entities. indeed, our next performance installation is also made possible by a government agency. we’re just paid less.

画须添龙: Fat Bird at the Guan Shanyue Museum of Fine Arts

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draw whiskers, add dragon

The organizing committee of the tenth anniversary celebration of the founding of the Guan Shanyue Museum of Fine Arts commissioned Fat Bird to create an original performance installation for the event, “Open Water Colors: An Exhibition of Contemporary Works”. Fat Bird has created “Draw Whiskers, Add Dragon”, which will be performed on June 22, and on display from June 22 through July 22, 2007. An intro to the piece is online, here.

the sweetness and the people

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royal jelly and fresh honey, straight ahead

yesterday walking in the lychee orchard section of shenzhen’s central park, yang qian and i stumbled upon bee farmers. they do the guangdong bee circuit–shenzhen, pingyuan, nanhai–following the pollen. they are from pingyuan and have been coming to the central park these past eight years. the honey is amazing. for those of you in shenzhen who happen on this entry they’ll be here for another week or so, before heading north. more bees, here.

at dinner, i was telling a friend about the 蜂民, i even tried 蜜民, before folks understood that i meant 蜂农，a phrase which (unlike 蜂民) shows up automatically in pinyin word-processing. yang qian laughed and said it sounded like i was talking about “crazy people (疯民)”.

then qingfeng joked, nobody wants to be 民　because that character has a negative connotation in chinese.

i said what about 人民?

no, not good. better to be an official.

who aren’t part of the people?

chuckle, chuckle.

i persisted, what about citizen (公民)?

that can’t be helped (无奈)!

everbody at the table laughed, reaffirming the unquestioned truth that as an american 公民 i couldn’t understand what it means to be a chinese citizen. we then started talking about the medicinal benefits of lychee honey, which helps develop anti-bodies to local strains of flu. it was a polite segue that suddenly seemed a portentious metaphor. now i’m wondering about social honey and culturally born strains of flu: what keeps the people healthy?

upgrading the shenzhen environment

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shenzhen’s recent decision to neonize the city prompts today’s entry.

from 2006 through 2008, the city plans mto upgrade the investment environment, which includes upgrading the living environment: cleaning up rivers, planting more trees, building recreational bike trails (in overseas chinese town), giving old buildings a fresh paint job, and generally making shenzhen look better. the city’s decision to redefine the investment environment in terms of quality of life points to a shift in values that relative wealth has brought. it may also reflect shenzhen residents’ concern for their children, who will not be moving back to their parents’ hometowns. over the past few years, there people in government and society who want to do more than just make money in shenzhen seem to have been increasingly influential. they want to make shenzhen into a nice place to live and many of their projects reflect this goal, rather than bottom line economic thinking for which the city has been famous. as part of larger historical trends, the new ascendance of socially conscious may indicate a larger shift from viewing shenzhen as a place of transit to making shenzhen into a “hometown”.

nevertheless, being shenzhen, there is always an over-the-top moment. one of the more iconic decisions of upgrading the environments has been to encase old (read: too expensive to raze) buildings in neon tubes, so that at night, five story neon walls project computer generated images. some of these neon walls extend 12 stories into the nighttime sky. during the day, the buildings just look caged. unfortunately, my camera isn’t high-tech enough to take pictures of the new designs. however, the government assures us that all the lighting is environmentally friendly, again, in keeping with shenzhen’s drive to upgrade the investment environment.

baoan district: new and improving

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rubble, baoan district

yang qian teaches acting to dance students at the baoan district art center; saturday i went with him. while he taught, i tracked new and improving baoan, which lives very differently from “shenzhen”, or the area that is still technically the sez, even though the second line no longer functions. basically, the district is razing the remnants of factory areas and old villages, to be replaced by upscale housing developments. pictures of the rubble, here.

tianmian under wraps

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factories under wraps, alley detail

as part of the push for an economy based on “culture”, the city has chosen tianmian’s factory area to be a center for industrial design. so factory buildings from the mid 80s are now being upgraded to office space. some “before” pictures. when the new look is revealed, i’ll post “after” pictures.

海田路: rough edges

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development

haitian road (海田路) is one of the short, but not narrow roads that run north-south (perpendicular to shennan road) within the expanding city center. with the completion of the new city hall, library, concert hall, as well as much of the environmental landscape around the city center, nearby construction has begun to smooth out the rough edges, those remnants of previous development. of course, many of the tall office buildings on nearby shennan road have been completed as have nearby residential areas. few rough edges remain.

sometimes i feel like i’m doing salvage anthropology of disappearing factory districts in shenzhen. sometimes, it seems like i’m simply trying to keep up with the change. sometimes, i just want to remember where i’ve been, when those places just keep vanishing. what happens to memory when nothing remains as it was? not that it was what i thought, but those buildings nevertheless anchored my thinking, placed limits on what might otherwise drift away. and then where would i be? while walking from the city center toward tianmian, i happened to walk down a bit of haitian road and took 4 pictures of razed buildings, which now form the protective wall around a new construction site. i have an idea of what used to be here, but can’t say for certain.

后海新村: more houhai, again

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houhai tianhou

saturday morning, houhai new village, where the houhai tianhou once gazed out on houhai harbor and now sits back from houhai road, among shade trees and handshake buildings, her view blocked by cars and housing developments. those pictures, here.

also, at some point when i wasn’t paying attention, nanyou and chuangye roads became nanshan road. on my 2004 map, the road has the old names, which mark the border between nanyou and shekou neighborhoods. my 2006 map has the new names. i’m looking for a 2005 map to see when the change happened. interesting because it points to the continuing subordination of shekou to nanshan district. once, long ago, shekou was directly under the central government, and was only brought under district control in the early 1990s. but then again, the district system only came into play in the mid-1990s, but that’s not the story i’m telling here. nevertheless, i did wander past the old nanyou building and take a picture of it. again, interesting for its mid-1980s state of the art, both architecturally and in terms of landscape. (nanshan road runs parrallel to houhai road, and before the completion of the binhai expressway was the main road connecting the nantou peninsula to shenzhen by way of shennan road.)


nanyou building, shenzhen state-of-the-art, mid 1980s

second random thought of the houhai village walk. shenzhen is full of buildings from the late 1980s and early 1990s that have never used air-conditioner casings. the casings, attached to the buildings and located next to windows, were designed for small air-conditioners. presumably, once shenzheners could afford air-conditioners, they went for the bigger, better, colder variety. so empty casings and air-conditioners variously attached to the sides of buildings. as part of the beautify nanshan campaign, these randomly placed air-conditioners are now being caged.


never-used air-conditioner casings

福华路：manifest history

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generations: alley connecting shennan and fuhua roads

walking along fuhua road toward the shenzhen traditional chinese medicine hospital, i suddently realized that in shenzhen history appears as absurd and often surreal juxtapositions of architectural styles. almost thirty years (actually 27, and yes, in shenzhen we count) into reform, it is possible to identify “eras”, which often came and went in less than five years. architectural examples from every era still stand, although some are being spruced up, and others have been razed, to be replaced by bigger, taller, and always more expensive structures. rarely do any of the buildings, let alone a street or neighborhood, seem to have been designed according to a common plan. the disorientation i feel when walking along roads like fuhua, which were built in the 1980s and early 90s and no longer fit into shenzhen du jour echoes the abrupt sensation of entering another city i have when turning from an upscale boulevard into a new village. fuhua was paved at a time when streets comformed to the lay of the land. shops and lowrise buildings therefore stand both above and below street level, the hills that once defined futian’s lychee orchards still beneath our feet. in visceral contrast, after 1995 it’s all flat lines. manifestations of shenzhen history, here.