We went to the K11 shopping mall in downtown Shanghai to see the exhibition they have done on the influence of Salvador Dali on modern Chinese art, a collaboration with the Dali Museum in Figueres, an appropriate use of the space, given the theatrical and crossover nature of Dali’s career and work:-
Then we had lunch:-
We went out to Zhang Huan’s studio in an old hydraulics factory in the far distant outskirts of Shanghai:-
He came out to greet us:-
I had been before to the Long Museum, just before it opened eighteen months or so ago. It’s an impressive, large scale, concrete structure based on surviving industrial remains. What I hadn’t expected was a scholarly exhibition in the basement devoted to The Imperial Art of the High Qing, art which survives in Chinese private collections from the reigns of three Emperors – Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong. What wasn’t clear was where the works had been during the cultural revolution. Were they hidden or have they been bought back from the west ?
Off to Shanghai. By the standards of Hong Kong, a huge, messy, amorphous megalopolis, with a population of 25 million spread across the delta of the River Yangtse and a long drive in from the airport. It’s hard to believe the ups and downs of its history: settled by the British after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, foreign men, according to the guidebook, ‘found sexual solace in service professionals’; they were joined by the French and Americans and the Sassoons and Kedouries from Baghdad; then the Japanese came after the Sino-Japanese war of 1895 and the White Russians after 1917. The Japanese took over in 1937, the Americans on 15 August 1945, and the Communists on 25 May 1949. Now, under the Communists, it is once again the ultimate capitalist city.
We had an unexpected, but exceptionally enjoyable pop-up dinner in an anonymous tower block in Central. A sliding door opened to reveal a sculpture in a small space by the lift:-
We had lunch with the Consul General in her residence which is in the Opus Building, up on the Peak, designed by Frank Gehry organically and with a fairly astonishing view of the whole of Hong Kong:-
We started the day in a Buddhist nunnery which was reconstructed in the 1980s in Kowloon City beyond the old airport and is surrounded by huge tower blocks, making for a slightly surreal combination of the traditional and the contemporary:-
I have been impressed by the scale and density of the great housing projects of the 1950s and 1960s, as seen from above from the Peak and from the street on our visit to Para-site, including the staircase down from the floor they occupy in an old industrial building in Quarry Bay:-
We started in Aberdeen, an old fishing village over the hill – actually under a tunnel – from Hong Kong. We were taken on a motorised Sanpan to see what remains of the old houseboats in amongst the great monuments of 1970s social housing.
This is the social housing:-
I’ve always in the past stayed in Central, normally at the Mandarin, but this time am at the Peninsula in Kowloon. They support art projects with the RA. I like the ceremony of arrival in Hong Kong, the old fashioned and hyper elaborate courtesy. This is my attempt to do an Alvin Langdon Coburn of the view from the hotel:-
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