Point of view haunts me. A frightening thought, that. Yet the specter of junior high English class has followed me to Shenzhen, and my feet stumble, wondering: where to stand? From what point of view do 30-story pink buildings make sense?
First person, street corner.
Second person, homecoming.
Third person, omnipotent?
I have published one postcard at: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000hqe3
Generally, walls of some kind not only separate construction sites from the street, but also provide a space for particular kinds of public discourse on and about Shenzhen. On these walls, development firms announce the future building, private eyes advertise their services, and the rare graffiti artist paints a picture. Construction teams tend the walls around important projects more carefully than they would the walls around lesser projects. Workers regularly touch up these walls, projecting an image of neat, orderly, and respectful construction. Guangdong plants, however, have little regard for edges and flourish even at concrete foundations. Please view these inadvertent blooms at: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000gy09
I’ve been thinking about the possibility of creating “experimental art” on Shenzhen’s streets. About a year ago, two Dutch artists led a two-day workshop here. They asked us to think about art as something that highlights the nature of everyday life. They suggested that by contrasting “unnatural” or “not normal” activities with quotidian routines, we could explore naturalized (but not natural) social forms and spaces. For example, a group of us sat on the steps of a building, playing with our cell phones. Normal activity for this space. However, every two minutes, we all looked up from our phones, stared straight ahead, and then turned our heads to the right. After a minute, we returned to playing with our cell phones. This kind of collective, planned activity constituted abnormal behavior for this space, highlighting the nature of “hanging out on steps” (among other things.)
At the time, I found this way of thinking quite useful, and have even used a version of it for my Found Objects series. However, the more I think about it, the more I wonder how much this strategy depends on the collective maintenance of social norms in order to be effective. What happens, for example, when the artist’s experiments can’t exceed extant uses of space? For example, walking from my apartment to a friend’s office in downtown Shenzhen the other day, I passed a woman eating out of a garbage can. She scooped handfuls of rice from a styrofoam container into her mouth. A child slept on her lap, his legs dangling near her left hip. Today, as I walked through the park, I noticed a man sitting on a park bench, legs spread, a limp penis in his right hand. Clearly, he intended to be seen because he was sitting next to sidewalk, rather than behind a bush. I’m not sure if he had just finished masturbating or urinating, but hand and organ both glistened in the afternoon sun. What kind of street art could say more about Shenzhen than these two performances? Or perhaps the question is, how might street art respond to these two performances?
Now, I’ve thought about photographing these and similar scenes, but part of me (and thus far the dominant part of me) resists. I don’t want to invade their privacy. This is the sentiment that prevents me from looking more closely and keeps me from snapping that picture. Clearly, they’re not worried about privacy in the way I’m used to thinking of it (behaviors that remain unseen, taking place behind closed doors). But I can’t convince myself that they would therefore welcome a photo shoot opportunity. At this moment, is turning one’s head away correct? Or would a more interesting form of art-response be to sit down and eat with the woman? Offer her food. Is the point to acknowledge the very specific reality at hand (so to speak), making street art a more explicit form of interactive improvisation? I’m as repelled by the idea of sitting down to eat from the garbage can as I am by taking pictures. Certainly, I had no desire to approach that man. What is it in me that turns away? Doesn’t want to look and yet wants to document this world?
It’s not even that these two performances are isolated events. I regularly see “abnormal” use of public spaces in Shenzhen. At construction sites and under park trees, workers take afternoon naps on woven bamboo mats. Beggars arrange themselves on most of the pedestrian overpasses throughout the city, while barbers set up shop underneath, placing a fold-up chair in front of a mirror that they have hung on the cement wall. At mealtime, many bring their rice bowls outside, squatting next to the road and people-watching. And I gaze, but out of the corner of my eyes, unable to bring myself to look directly at all this. It occurs to me that the reason they may have brought their lives to the street is that they can’t afford closed doors. So perhaps I am ashamed to look at poverty? But there may be other reasons they have brought their lives outdoors, just as there are other reasons I keep mine inside. If so, what then pre-empts a conversation? Or the possibility understanding? Is it that by looking away I am offering an exchange—don’t look too closely at me, and I won’t look too closely at you?
In Mandarin one of the words for “shameful” is “not fit to be seen by people (见不得人)”. What does that expression actually refer to? Is it the woman and her child? Is it the conditions that have forced her to eat out of a garbage can? Is it an American woman turning away? Is it how during public events police officers push her and others like her out of sight? Or is the question not what we look at, but how we go about looking? At that moment, is some kind of connection possible?
Two days ago, I jumped on a 234 and made my way to Lake Fengze, which sits between a small chain of mountains and the Northern Loop. Along with developing real estate on land reclaimed along Shenzhen’s southwestern coast, developing real estate along the Northern Loop represents a sizable chunk of construction within the SEZ.
Before I wax poetic about the size of the construction sites and the magnitude of the city’s vision, a bit of geography is perhaps in order. Imagine a giant bird, stretching its wings for flight. The mythologically inclined have identified this bird to be a roc, and nicknamed Shenzhen, “Roc City”. At any rate, the city lies just north of the Hong Kong, joining the New Territories on a strip of land between Huanggang (in the west) and Wenjingdu (in the east). This area might be thought of our bird’s breast. The roc’s western wing extends into the Pearl River Delta, its tip at the Nantou Peninsula. From Nantou, one soars north to Guangzhou. The roc’s eastern wing juts into the Pacific Ocean, its tip at Nan’ao. From there, one heads north to Chaozhou.
Given the importance of river trade to China’s pre-modern economy, and that of the Pearl River to South China’s economy, folks living on the western wing have traditionally been better off than those living on the eastern wing. Indeed, this inequality seems to have constituted the area’s political-economy and cultural geography for at least a millennia. On the one hand, for roughly 1,000 years, the county seat was situated at Nantou, while Nan’ao was home to relatively poor fishing villages. On the other hand, Cantonese speakers, who remain culturally hegemonic in Guangdong Province, have occupied the western lands, while Hakka speakers have inhabited the eastern tip.
The construction of the Canton-Hong Kong railway in 1913 began to unmake this cultural geography, shifting wealth and influence from the western wing to the breast. The railway enabled the British to bypass Guangzhou and transport goods from the Mainland to Hong Kong, where they controlled the harbor and shipping. The first railway station on the Mainland side was Shenzhen Market. It bears mentioning that these two different forms of spatial integration produced two kinds of cities, riparian cities and colonial ports, which depended on the railways (there by shifting control from folks along the rivers to whoever owned the railroad). That is two say, the Canton-Hong Kong railroad was a means of redirecting wealth from Guangzhou (a riparian city) to Hong Kong (colonial port). Shenzhen emerged as part of this spatial reordering of China’s traditional political-economy. Nevertheless, until the early 1980s, when Reform and Opening completely altered the area’s demographics, this demographic distribution held more or less true: relatively wealthy Cantonese in the west, relatively impoverished Hakka in the east. These groups seem to have mingled on the Roc’s breast, where Cantonese and Hakka villages abutted one another. (For the classic analysis of urbanization in imperial China, check out G. William Skinner, “Marketing and social structure in rural China, Parts I, II, and III”. Journal of Asian Studies 24, 1 (Nov. 1964): 3-44; 24, 2 (Feb. 1965): 195-228; 24, 3 (May 1965): 363-99.)
So, historically two forms of transportation have connected what is now called Shenzhen to Guangzhou, the most important urban center in the Pearl River Delta region for 2,000 years (give or take). The older form of transportation was by water, connecting Nantou to Guangzhou. Significantly, villages with rights to the banks of the Pearl River also had small docks from which they could set sail. The younger of the two forms of transportation is the railway, which Hong Kong to Guangzhou by way of Shenzhen. In 1953, when the newly established government transferred the county seat from Nantou to Shenzhen, they acknowledged the growing importance of the railway for integrating the political-economy that would come to define socialism in the PRC.
The construction of superhighways at Lake Fengze represents an intensification of the political and economic integration enabled by both riparian and rail transport. Since the establishment of Shenzhen, the development of infrastructure has been central to the construction of the city. Indeed, on both the western and eastern wings of the roc, the city has built ports that are capable of handling large amounts of containers and combined, their capacity exceeds that of Hong Kong. Moreover, better rail lines have been put in place, although they are now used primarily for transporting human beings. However, the main thrust of development has been constructing roads that link previously isolated villages and market towns both within Shenzhen and to Guangzhou and Hong Kong. (For example, Nantou used to be an hour’s bus trip from downtown Shenzhen, in the belly of the roc. With the opening of Binhai, it’s now a twenty-minute express ride.)
From western to eastern wingtip, three main arteries integrate Shenzhen. The first developed was Shennan Road, which runs between Delta waters (in the south) and the Meilin Mountains (in the north). Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Shenzhen semis, trucks, and private automobiles rumbled along this one road, hauling products and persons to the Hong Kong border crossings at Wenjingdu, Luohu, and Huanggang. Small, often single lane tributary roads funneled these same products from Market and village enterprises. In the early 1990s, however, construction on Binhai road and the Northern Loop began. Binhai road was carved out of Delta waters; it is the mainstay of the city’s land reclamation project (for a partial intro to the land reclamation project, see: ).
The Northern Loop has been carved out of the mountains; it is part of an attempt to make useful land that had previously been given over to orchards. The expression “moving mountains to fill the sea”, which usually refers to the land reclamation project also points to the razing of the Meiling Mountains. From an airplane, one can see huge tracts of flattened land. Up close, when driving along the northern loop, one can see dump trucks lined up to haul the rocks and dirt to places in need of landfill. (Although this scene was much more common ten years ago, the level of construction is still quite remarkable.)
Designed to increase the volume and velocity of road traffic, these new and improved roads radiate out of Shenzhen in every direction—not only to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, but also toward Huizhou, Meizhou, and Chaozhou. Within the city itself, the single lane tributary roads have been widened and it is not uncommon to see semis lumbering between the remains of palm tree orchards and upscale housing developments (that take advantage of the natural beauty of former agricultural lands). Shenzhen and Hong Kong are cooperating to build the Western Corridor, which bridge the Pearl River and link the cities in the West.
Yet the historic geographic political-economy dies hard. At the national level, a colonial product of railways and ocean port shipping, Shanghai has emerged as the country’s dominant port city. Indeed, port cities have fared better than inland cities, most of which were established when riparian transportation integrated China’s regional economies. In Shenzhen, specifically, the eastern wingtip continues to be relatively poorer than the western wingtip.
In the late 1990s, the City designated a new urban district, Yantian to actively promote tourism and manufacturing to develop the eastern part of the city. One of the first projects completed was a four-lane tunnel through Wutong Mountains, which provided a natural barrier between the roc’s eastern wing and its belly. However, even with state of the art roadways, tourism and manufacturing have not been as compatible as planners might have thought. On the one hand, Shenzhen residents enjoy spending their weekends on the beaches in Yantian, the most beautiful in the city. In the evenings, they go to Yantian to dine on fresh and cheap seafood. On the other hand, the new district has not only encouraged the construction of factories, it has built a large, international port. And it is not unusual to see cars full of beach towels and umbrellas caught in a traffic jam with semis. More obviously, however, is simply the difficulty of dividing a finite strip of coastline between shipping, manufacturing, and leisure activities.
Why does all of this roadwork matter? Or perhaps the question might be phrased: what makes these contradictions so poignant?
Shenzhen was built with an eye to integrating China into world capitalist exchanges. Yet in order to achieve the kind of integration sought, China has also had to reconstruct the urban order of things. In places like Shanghai and Guangzhou, this has entailed an intensification of historic geographic inequality. In contrast, in Shenzhen, globalization has predicated a transvaluation of that same inequality—it is the first new city to challenge the hierarchy of Chinese cities. In this sense, Shenzhen is a new kind of Chinese city, admittedly built out of old landmarks and geographic habits, but nevertheless quite different than its predecessors. Unlike in Shanghai and Guangzhou, where the urban elite are very often the decendents of that city’s historic elite (whether traditional or communist), in Shenzhen the nouveau riche are exactly that: a new group of elites, who thirty years ago didn’t expect to be where they are because they knew their place in the older order. More importantly, Shenzhen’s elites have risen out of the construction of this environment. In building the city, they have constructed themselves as a new kind of Chinese subject.
For a look at Lake Fengze roadwork, please visit: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000f086
Over the national day holiday, I went to Yan’an and Xian. Yan’an, of course, resonates throughout Party history, while Xian “makes you proud to be Chinese”, as a friend said before I left. Both are located in Shaanxi Province, center of the central plains heartland, which for millennia has defined belonging to various Chinese polities (or so it seems in retrospect.) It was my first visit; after ten years in Shenzhen, I finally complied with my friends’ exhortations to make a pilgrimage to “authentic” China.
Now, I have been to Beijing, even lived for a while in the capitol, but that brief stint was not enough to convince my friends that I have understood the cultural verities that define their homeland. All this to say that Shenzhen isn’t considered part of China, not ancient China, certainly not mythic China, not really even modern China, which is typified by Shanghai’s cosmopolitan facades. Instead, Shenzhen exists as a strange aberration—a necessary concession to global forces, but not really Chinese. Or at least this is what I have gathered from conversations about the limits to my research project. According to friends, it is possible to study the political-economy of reform and opening in Shenzhen, but not to learn anything meaningful about China’s culture.
On our way to Yan’an, we stopped at the Yellow Emperor’s grave and lit incense. The grave is located in a lovely area, with old, old pine trees and birdsong. Chinese Emperors have always understood the importance of burial fengshui, I was told, and this theme would repeat itself in Xi’an and its outskirts, where terracotta soldiers and bronze horses protect the first Qin Emperor’s grave. But first to Yan’an, where we stayed in a three-star hotel.
In the mythic landscape of Mao Zedong’s rise to power, Yan’an symbolizes many things—how the peasants gave refuge to communists fleeing Nationalist persecution; how the communists persevered for years before liberating China; the establishment of Mao Zedong Thought as a Chinese supplement to Marxist-Leninism. We visited a Song dynasty pagoda, which throughout the Cultural Revolution represented the Yan’an years and thus remained undamaged by Red Guard fury. We also went to Yan’an years museum and followed the progress of WWII from the point of view ill-equipped peasant soldiers holed up in caves.
Beyond these myths, however, Yan’an has represented rural poverty and the collective will to build a socialist utopia. Stereotypically, Yan’an peasants lived in caves with few amenities. They were malnourished, uneducated, and determined to give their children a better life. Yet, red tourism has brought wealth to some in the area, while others continue to live in relative poverty. Busloads of tourists come for a day, rarely longer, to look at where Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Zhude lived and planned the revolution, but we walk past crumbling courtyards and dingy residences. Today, those peasants in search of a better life, I am told, are better off working in Shenzhen factories, where at least they can earn a wage, rather than place their hope in agriculture. When I ask why no one wants to be a peasant, my friend gestures to the decrepit and unsanitary housing, asking rhetorically, “Would you want to live here?” And of course the answer is no.
From Yan’an back to Xi’an by way of the Hukou waterfall, an important national symbol. I’m sure on a warmer, less windy, certainly drier day, I would have appreciated watching the Yellow River surge from the central plains toward the eastern coast. However, on that particular day, I cowered in the lobby of the large hotel that has been built right next to the waterfall and even so, I left with a head cold. My friends, however, were undeterred and photographed themselves standing right at river’s edge, smiling through the spray of icy water. It was, as they reminded me, the first and possibly last time they would come. I agreed it was a rare opportunity, but except for a perfunctory walk past the falls, remained inside.
In Xian, the college classmate of a Shenzhen friend had agreed to show me the city, and over the next three days, humbled me with her generosity. He Lei picked me up at the hotel every morning at 9 a.m. and then brought me to the most famous sites, purchasing all tickets and picking up the tab at every meal. When I tried, rather lamely to pay, she scowled and promptly ripped the bill out of my hand. Xian born and raised, she wanted me to love the city as much as she does. Indeed, the grandeur of the terracotta soldiers and refined beauty of Huaqing hot springs provided a backdrop for her enthusiasm. When I reported back to my friend, she nodded knowingly.
“People back home still care about people. They’re not selfish like in Shenzhen.”
“So why did you come?”
“I don’t know anymore, either. At the time, I wanted to try something new. To see more of the world.”
“And now?”
“Now? Now I live in Shenzhen and dream about retiring back in Xian.”
He Lei pointed to another aspect of that hard truth, which is less extreme than that governing daily life in Yan’an.
“Most Xian people live in substandard housing. They don’t earn very much money. So they have to leave. But nobody wants to. Xian makes you proud to be Chinese.”
That then, perhaps, constitutes the fragile but all-too-vexed thread that sutures Shenzhen to the central plains. People not only want to improve their material standard of living, but also to preserve where they came from because they define themselves through the love they feel for their hometown. So they come to Shenzhen, this place that is “not authentic China” in order to get back.
Even on those days it didn’t rain, the sky remained overcast, and that grey infuses all the pictures I took while in Shaanxi. For a sense of a place considered by many to be one of Shenzhen’s most radical antitheses, please visit: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000e49d.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Shenzhen Noted 