Category Archives: Uncategorized

Beijing

Last stop Beijing.   We’ve arrived in the deep white, miasmic haze of the polluted capital city.   Our guide introduced the pleasures of Beijing by telling us about the poor state of the ladies’ lavatories and the likelihood of being scalped on Tiananmen Square.

We walked across Tiananmen Square:-

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Through to the Forbidden City.   Initially I was sceptical.   But when we were allowed through a private door to an area occupied by the concubines and young princes and went into rooms unoccupied for a century at least, there was more of a sense of its history pre-Mao, before the Cultural Revolution, when Reginald Johnston taught the young Emperor Puyi to play tennis.

Mao hangs over the entrance:-

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Yuz Museum

We went to the Yuz Museum which is a converted aviation factory built by the Russians in an area of the city where the authorities have invited entrepreneurs to open private museums.   The museum opened in 2014, designed by Sou Fujimoto:-

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We began with the Rain Room by Random International where we got gently soaked:-

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K11 (2)

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:-

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Then we had lunch:-

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Zhang Huan

We went out to Zhang Huan’s studio in an old hydraulics factory in the far distant outskirts of Shanghai:-

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He came out to greet us:-

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Long Museum

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 ?

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Shanghai

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.

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K11

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:-

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Opus Building

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:-

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Chi Lin Nunnery

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:-

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