Old Shanghai
In the summer of 2010, I returned to Shanghai to see my mother who has Alzheimer. From the airport to my parents’ home, Shanghai at a glimpse failed to stir up sufficient aesthetic reaction as expected. The city looked glitzy, dizzy, and inexplicably numbing to this less curious and more critical soul. It’s hard to find the kind of beauty like an aged wall, a quiet alley, a cobble stone paved street, a vegetable stand abandoned for the night, a stray dog wondering around, ship siren echoing afar, poignant smells permeating night sky......In a a city yearning for modernity, new means value, hassling and bustling is accepted as entertaining.
Shanghai as it stands now, is a lost place in the guise of rebirth, with a glamorous facade and a rotten soul. Its best moment is either gone or has not arrived yet. My heart wants to believe the latter, but my mind chooses the former. The place I grew up with already fast forwarded into a mecca of materialistic pursuits and philistine tastes. Soulless mansions are abundant and cultured visages scarce. Residents and visitors alike are transformed into an alienating community full of vile surprises and banal pleasures. With this unstoppable tide, a sense of being either hopelessly drowned or joyfully immersed sweeps through this city who unabashedly craves for spotlight. Shanghai today is without identifiable identity, perking on the edges of tolerance, human and environmental. Still, I will defend it, as my hometown, but not with love I used to have. It’s a duty, and duty is not optional.
I haven’t done much art cruising either. I’ve lost zeal for art, especially contemporary art. What is art? Without cognitive clarity, at least for me, appreciating art is in nature window shopping in malls or voyeurism in striptease bars. Certain things in life require fixed, non-evolving, and eternal definition and qualification, such as painting, sculpture, ballet, opera, etc. Any attempt to change, fuse or modernize runs the risk of deviating in the process and ruining it in the end.
One afternoon of a light drizzle, I felt an urge to see the places my family and relatives used to live. I grabbed a camera, and so began a spontaneous sojourn, guided by a faint memory and fueled with arousing sentiment. What I photographed afterwards is a personal memoir of a bygone era, narrated as randomly as this nostalgic odyssey combing through the familiar alleys, streets, buildings and parks. Old Shanghai, as framed in my memory, is eternal.
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