Today I walked the OCT Eastern Group buildings between meetings.
Tag Archives: oct
OCT Bay: Give Happiness a Coast?!
Visited OCT Bay (欢乐海岸) this afternoon. OCT Bay is the third Shenzhen development of “The New OCT‘” to expand and develop their brand throughout China. The first effort was OCT (now OCT Loft) and the second was OCT East. OCT Bay’s advertising slogans suggest the state-owned enterprise’s ambitions to provide fantasy shopping experiences, for example: Elegant Christmas, Fashionable New Year’s (风雅圣诞，时尚新年). However, their motto, Give Happiness a Coast (给欢乐一个海岸) is beyond ironic. Water light shows, an artificial lake, and boat rides on the winding river, notwithstanding, the entire complex is built on reclaimed land from Shenzhen Bay. In fact, the former coastline (at least a km inland) used to be edged with mangrove trees and, further into the bay (in the middle of the complex), oyster cultivation. Impressions, below:
constructing the semi-public sphere – ocat renovations
i have noticed that many of the shenzhen spaces that i enjoy might be defined as semi-public. small scale spaces designed with particular publics in mind, these spaces repurpose the clunky mass architecture of most of shenzhen into interesting nooks for conversation and debate, without falling into the normative excesses of so many private homes. indeed, recently, ocat loft has extended its conversion of industrial manufacturing zones into creative cultural spaces. the newer area will be the site of the 2011 shenzhen-hong kong biannale.
importantly, cultural consumption and the gentrification of working class spaces have predicated the creation of this semi-public sphere, where individualized desires blunt the the progressive edge of public debate. and yet, if no one shops in these stores, hangs in the coffee houses, and attends gallery openings, the area will collapse and conversations displaced. such are the paradoxes of contemporary urbanization, images below.
tangtou, baishizhou
- tangtou old housing, new village
Baishizhou has the distinction of being Shenzhen’s “city that isn’t a city, village that isn’t a village (城不城，村不村).”
The first stop (bus or subway) after Windows of the World themepark, Baishizhou has come to refer to a 7.5 sq km sprawl of handshake buildings that was originally part of the “Shahe Overseas Farm (沙河华侨农场)”. This highly congested and irregularly built area is also the first stop for many new migrants to Shenzhen because of its central location, convenience, and lowest of the low priced housing.
Inquiring minds ask, “How did (one of) Shenzhen’s most beautifully landscaped high end residential, tourist and arts area (OCT) end up next to what is acknowledged to be one of the city’s largest slums?” Continue reading
bienniale graffiti
graffiti in shenzhen: high-end, high-concept, art
today walking around the biennale grounds, i noticed a graffiti exhibition. so again, as at tianmian (and it seems that some of the same graffiti artists have been commissioned here as a there), high quality graffiti gets shown in shenzhen as art, but does not exist throughout the city, which favors overpainting everything. this version of high-concept high-art urbanism is increasingly reshaping older industrial areas in the sez (关内). it is a version of shenzhen that grows out of and confirms the priority of architecture to the city’s self-representation. it also reiterates the importance of commercial art to the kind of culture that the city sponsors at the annual china (shenzhen) international cultural industry fair . it also fits that many of the folks at the bienniale are young and hip and artistic. i’m not sure if they represent a new kind of global elite, or it’s simply the case that the young hip and artistic global elite has finally landed in shenshen. graffiti pics here
urban form and memory
joshua kauffman and gwendolyn floyd
the bienniale opens tonight. well, bienniale the third. but it’s my first. i missed the previous two. i’ve been hanging out at oct loft with fat bird and silo, and these past few weeks, with gwendolyn floyd and joshua kauffman, co-founders of regional, which they define as “an interdisciplinary design and research network that performs and applies original analysis of global society, culture and commerce, uncovering and developing opportunities for profitable innovation and meaningful cultural intervention.”
their installation is called “foreground”, which was built out of bamboo. the design is derived from GIS data of a recently removed shenzhen mountain ridge. over the past twenty years, shenzhen has aggressively reclaimed land from both its eastern and western coasts. in everyday conversation this process is called “moving mountains in order to fill the ocean (移山填海).” with foreground, floyd and kauffman have respond to this transformation by using bamboo to re-construct a mountain that no longer exists. the contrast between the structure and the ground actualizes the difference between shenzhen’s pre- and post-urban topographies, creating a visible and material history for the area. more importantly, the installation enables bienniale visitors to imagine the lay of shenzhen’s land before urbanization and, in doing so, re-imagine how the city might reproduce itself in the future.
at least i hope so. one of the illusions of land reclamation and disappeared mountains is how quickly they vanish from consciousness. when i go to houhai and look out at the new landscape i have to think, and think hard, to recall something about what was once there. most of the time, however, i end up taking another round of photos and then doing a little side by side comparison. that was then, this is now.
its hard work to keep the city’s past and present simultaneously in mind. usually, i depend on the material world to do that for me. the old buildings, certain parks, particular roads–these hold my memories, which i enter by way of an evening walk. to the extent that it remains in place, shenzhen keeps my memory intact. but the city keeps getting razed. or rebuilt. or refashioned. and as the buildings collapse and new edifices rise, or factories get a facelift and industrial areas are upgraded, i forget. or rather, i loose access to memory. all that stuff are also doors to memory, and when a building gets razed, i am locked out of my past.
click for images of gwen and joshua’s work in progress.
浮生自语/ Floating Lives
Silo Theater has returned to shenzhen!!!! this time to create floating lives with fat bird. we have been waiting and working to create this project since song jie and yang qian first met silo at the macau fringe 2002. we will be setting up a project blog at: http://floatinglives.blogvis.com. we invite all friends to come to the site and participate in the creation. here’s a first picture of the group:
mandatory group photo
front row (left to right): mary ann o’donnell, milou veling, bart sabel, jochem hartz, song jie, zhang yang
back row (left to right): jia huiwen, kang kang, yang qian
front row (left to right): mary ann o’donnell, milou veling, bart sabel, jochem hartz, song jie, zhang yang
back row (left to right): jia huiwen, kang kang, yang qian
thoughts on rainy days
for those not in shenzhen, you are probably blissfully unaware that 4 typhoons have landed nearby over the past several weeks. this means it has rained almost everyday this month. and not little tiny avoidable raindrops, but heavy raindrops that blow horizontally and thus bypass even the largest umbrella. so i haven’t been able to get out and take pictures.
i have, however, been wandering around some of shenzhen’s new hotspots and am struck, once again, by the difference a decade makes. it really is a different era here from ten years ago. yesterday, i saw the latest harry potter in a small, intimate theatre with 40 fat reclining sofas (and mediocre popcorn. the children next to me had the sense to bring kfc.) today, i went to yoga class in wonderful studio with truly wonderful teachers, some who have practiced in india. i then had dinner with a friend and her son at a japonese restaurant. if memory serves, ten years ago i avoided movie theatres because they were often haunted by men who watched with a date chosen from the ladies lined up outside the door. there was no yoga anywhere. and we ate mostly cantonese food; sometimes food from other parts of china, but ten years ago, the cuisine had a definate regional bent.
it’s as if suddenly all the talk about building a global city has come true. the socialist dreamers who came in the 1980s and early 90s have successfully built a city for a middle class that has only recently emerged.
indeed, all the recent cultural activity is no doubt part of this massive yuppification of shenzhen.
or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that those socialist dreamers have built a city for their children, who really do belong to a different world. it is however an open question as to why they belong to a different world. friends who look to japan and korea say it’s possible to be both traditional and modern; china has failed because of socialism. at lunch two days ago, a friend (now in his early 50s) said that people born after 1970 don’t have any tradional characteristics. he blamed the cultural revolution for cutting off contemporary china from its roots. that’s why, he said, china is modernizing like this.
like what? i asked.
without history. shenzhen is the perfect example of new china because it doesn’t have any culture or history. but it’s not even the best copy of the west. china is a fractured (分裂) society. we have no standards to guide us. japan and korea, he continued, have managed to preserve tradition and modernize.
his comments made me re-think the question of master narratives. not the fact that master narratives are imaginary and therefore not real in a material sense. after all, rarely does reality conform to what we think. but rather the fact that without a master narrative it’s hard to make value judgements; why is x better than y? tradition seems to me a legitimate answer to that question. socialism once provided another answer. today, my friend is trying to figure out what happens when all the master narratives have been shown untrue; what can the people believe? how will they recognize the good life? and in what kind of world is shenzhen a desired way of life?
oct loft: enculturing shenzhen
remaking industrial shenzhen: pedestrian street, oct loft
space by space, shenzhen is transforming its industrial self. at the same time that tianmian is remaking its factories into design studios, overseas chinese town (oct) is transforming its factories into a more explicitly bohemian art space. those factories that aren’t being transformed, are being razed to make way for upscale residential areas. gentrification in a generation, before anyone had time to grow up in an industrial city and miss anything about it.
this weekend, i visited oct loft (one year anniversary web release here) this weekend. the area is still under construction, but tea houses, restaurants, studios, and the contemporary art center have opened. along with he xiangning museum of art, the art center is holdoing a month-long exhibit called “abstraction is an expression of freedom (抽象是一种关于自由的表达).” the exhibit will tour hong kong, beijing, and then new york. art center’s director huang zhuan provides an explanation of their inspiration, here. as at the open ink painting, there’s an urge to make china’s past contemporary.
two details struck me about the space. first, like tianmian, oct loft’s industrial facelift entails replacing cement walls with glass. so the structure of the buildings remain, but now its all shiny and exposed. lots of black as well. second, the quality of the exhibition suggests an anti-dafen village moment. indeed, when i met several of the young men involved in getting this project up and going, one was vehement about separating what he was doing from dafen. such are the debates over “professional” versus “commercial” art in shenzhen, itself a telling distinction.
take a walk through OCT loft and compare with transformations in tianmian.
Shenzhen Noted 