Forgotten Places
Rebecca Catching
As a society and as individuals, we have a tendency to want to forget the past, holding tight to the knowledge that we have “progressed” to a new era, leaving the poverty and the backwardness behind us. Yet the past provides a rich territory for inspiration. In this group show, we have a number of artists, mostly based in Hong Kong and Shanghai, two cities with complex relationships to the past, exploring themes such as time, loss, memory, marginalization, urban renewal/historical effacement and the urban structures which lie beneath the orderly streets and gleaming facades. Forgotten Places refers not only to places that are unfrequented, unglamorous, desolate or poor, but also to the people inhabit these forgotten places.
Shanghai-based artist, Qian Rong was an obvious choice for this show as his work is often set in various time periods at once and his practice as an artist regularly involves perambulating the city’s lesser-known districts and neighborhoods. For this piece, Qian was inspired by Fuxing Island, an island in the Huangpu River which is dotted with traces of history.
It was used by the Japanese in the 30s as a weapons depot and Chiang Kai Shek lived there for a period of time during 1949 before he set sail for Taiwan. It was also home to a historically important shipbuilding facility, which still exists today, but the place now has a desolate feel, populated by old factories and retired workers.
Qian uses this island as a jumping off point for a variety of ink on paper works entitled “Lone Island Forum,” 2011 which take us to various periods in history (ancient China, the early 1930s and the Sino-Japanese war). In one work we see a pair of lovers from the 1930s with a dragon coiled around their necks as if entrapped by the circumstances of fate. In another work, we see a person in a Chinese opera outfit holding a torch as a symbol of freedom, striking a pose. In another work, we see a group of men seated together supposedly engaged in a discussion – all exuding stiff postures as they supposedly engage in free debate. The word “luntan” or discussion comes up frequently the artist’s discussions of his work, which is fitting because his oeuvre presents a constant dialogue between past and present. Another work features a character holding large brushes in each hand with blotches of ink all over the sky; Qian refers to this as the alteration of history by those of the present. In this way, history becomes forgotten only to be remembered in a new way, framed differently by new historians with new agendas.
While Qian Rong circles in and out of different historical periods, Chai Yiming meditates on the theme of forgetting, in his ink on paper series “World,” 2011. These works depict vehicles – planes cars and buses – whizzing along open highways with the backgrounds blurred into pastel streaks, using the metaphor of speed to speak to the topic of forgetting and also of a sense of intentional abandon.
China’s peri-urban zones are increasingly bisected with freeways allowing for ease of transport – arteries which bring the lifeblood of development – but at the roadside are the forgotten places and people (aging textile factories and recent migrants) who have been left out of the country’s dream.
Though they certainly speak to broader implications, these works were inspired by a more personal approach to forgetting. Talking of his inspiration, Chai speaks of the feeling of floating through the city in a car absentmindedly watching his surroundings go by. He talks of seeing and not seeing, being and not being – a condition which speaks very much to life in a fast-paced over-stimulated environment.
It’s not only that we move through the environment quickly but also that it frequently changes before our eyes. A long-time resident of the Moganshan Lu area, Christophe Demaitre has observed the constant metamorphosis of the neighborhood. In his mixed media works “Aomen Lu,” 2011 and “Observatory,” 2011 he uses photography as a medium imbued with loss —the implications being that something in a photograph does not exist anymore in the exact same conditions as when it was photographed – to convey the loss of a certain way of life – of the raucous local neighborhoods giving way to forests of alienating concrete towers.
This loss is also conveyed through the rendering of the photos, faint, often blurred and contrasty; they are applied with emulsion onto found objects, in this case, a rusted piece of scrap metal — its dented and pockmarked surface evokes the history of that particular object. By depicting these scenes as faded and washed out, he makes them look like as if they have disappeared already. They did exist at the time of writing but perhaps by the time you read this, these communities will be gone – their demolished houses giving way to armies of recyclers who then send those materials on to build more buildings in a constant cycle of tearing down and building up.
Demolition, marginalization, and change have also been key themes in the work of Robert Lee Davis. In his collage work “Interplay,” 2011 he employs elements of buildings and snippets of text to convey the changes which took place in his neighborhood in the recently-gentrified area of Taikang Lu but also those which have been happening around the city. Lee’s work, which involves a process of slowly combing through newspapers and magazines looking for the appropriate images, casts him in the role of an archivist paying homage to the act of remembering.
His work is like a scrapbook which takes the visual form of a variegated skyline with buildings extending upwards and text extending downwards, surrounded by brushstrokes of acrylic which lend a kind of quaint “old world” feeling to this modern megalopolis.
In the work, the buildings are lined up along a horizontal axis in order to create a panoramic view similar to viewing Hong Kong Island from Kowloon, Pudong from the Bund or Manhattan from Brooklyn. There is something about a city skyline surrounded by water that conveys a sense of man’s accomplishments and ambitions – the kind of ambitions which usually lay waste to small and insignificant places.
Wang Taocheng’s painted scrolls also examine the cycle of urban renewal and abandonment, how a once prominent place can soon become forgotten. “Untitled (Plank Bar and the abandoned Garden of Commerzbank)” depicts the bank building of the Commerzbank which was abandoned when the bank moved to a new building. He juxtaposes it with some lines of verse from the poem “A Sigh in the Court of Perpetual Faith,” which expresses the longings of a woman who cast herself from the inner circle of the emperor to a far-flung part of the palace, thus fusing the concept of forgotten place with a forgotten person.
Other panels in this scroll exhibit more scenes which, though they seem civilized, are rather empty and cold: a table set with carnations – those most prim and institutional of flowers – cast in a cold overhead light. These scenes no doubt bear relation to Wang’s new life in Germany where he has been living and studying for the past year and convey a sense of alienation in a strange land. Is it the places which are forgotten or the person himself who feels ignored within these places?
Li Xiaofei presents a similarly desolate and empty face of the city in a new video work, “New York in the Spring,” 2011 which explores concepts of inside and outside – the outer skin but also the organs and cell bodies that work underneath to make the whole organism function. While on residency in New York with the Asian Cultural Council, Li had the opportunity to ride atop a garbage barge and film the city as the ship sailed up and down the Hudson River. Li’s footage is strangely eerie. His camera trains in on the neatly-ordered apartment blocks gently bobbing up and down, observing what seems to be a ghost city devoid of almost any human activity.
This is overlaid with a soundtrack of a man from the New York City Wastewater Treatment System discussing the city’s sewer network, its pumping capacity and various kinds of filtration systems. The camera eventually cuts to reveal the man behind the voice and we see him making proud exhortations about its capacity for handling New York’s waste. He presents us with a contrast of façade versus underbelly, grittiness, and filth a forgotten realm which lies beneath the grandeur and spectacle of the city. In this film, we see a cross-section of the city ecology – a controlled chaos far below the streets which has been nicely packaged and processed so that we need not confront it on an everyday basis.
Su Chang presents us with similar scenes of chaos in his new photographic series “Scene” 2011. In this case, it’s his family’s home which has been transformed into a macabre scene of soot and ash. Recently an electrical fire lead to the destruction of the interior of his family house in Songjiang. The family was safe, but the house was devastated. The loss of these objects, these mnemonic devices is painful because we fear we’ve severed all links to the past, these memories and the people related to them now irretrievable.
In China, the history of a house can have a deep impact on its real estate value, especially in Hong Kong which maintains a strong tradition of “fengshui,” folk beliefs and superstition. Wading very deep into this territory of fear is Nadim Abbas in his work “Untitled (14th March).” The works uses an amalgamation of Rorschach patterns melded with the blueprints for houses. Abbas gathered data as to all the deaths which had occurred on specific dates – in this case, the 14th of March. He found information on online real-estate platforms which are geared towards prospective buyers – many of whom would be put off by the hidden history of these houses saturated with a lingering aura of death.
The Rorschach drawings – still used as an important means of psychological testing – reference the lack of mental stability of the inhabitants. Like a building being consumed from the inside by termites, many Hong Kongers maintain a stiff-upper-lip despite the heavy social and family pressures, many of which are, in fact, exacerbated by the extremely high real-estate prices. Perhaps some of the extreme superstition which surrounds the “history” or “past” of a house, its potential for housing ghosts is linked to an intense anxiety about the pressures of paying for said house.
The concept of chasing for ghosts appears again in the work of two Hong Kong artists, Sarah Wong and Leung Chi Wo. Their photographic series “He was lost yesterday and we found him,” explores the unknowable nature of the past. Gathering archival photographs such as images of 19th-century workers re-surfacing a road or of people in a busy train station, they search for appropriate clothing to re-create these scenes in studio. But unlike the historical photographs, these images lack any context whatsoever. There is no background except for the blank fields of color provided by a studio backdrop. The expressions and poses suggest that there is a story behind the characters but we are left to imagine the specifics on our own.
By removing the surrounding imagery, Wong and Leung strip this problem of “knowability” bare and force us to confront the impossible task of understanding that which we did not personally experience.
At the same time, there is something strange about these historical characters. Made up, under the artificial glow of studio lights – they look like extras who’ve walked off a film set.
In a sense the term “extra” is fitting as once something becomes history, the characters or actors of history fall under the direction of those of the present – at the disposal of whoever needs them, to support an argument or prove a point.
Then there are some characters, who like most of the anonymous people in Wong and Leung’s photographs, are just forgotten – nameless faces who were captured on film at a certain time and place.
These un-named souls speak to the very fickle nature of history its very minimal capacity to capture more than a fraction of human activity. One need look no further than the relentless pace of the news cycle to discover that the conflicts of a week ago are already old news. Ben Houge urges us to remember the plight of the nameless individual in his sound installation piece “The Winds of Kabul.” An American artist who was previously based in Shanghai, Houge chose to reflect on his country’s lingering presence in Afghanistan and other zones of military conflict despite the slowly diminishing visibility of the conflict from the headlines.
In this piece, Houge creates a generative sound installation which uses data from conflict zone weather reports – the wind speed in particular – to create a sound piece which involves the sound of wind chimes recorded in Shanghai. In conceiving this installation, Houge was inspired by the idea of number stations – underground radio stations which are often used to communicate during wartime to pass encoded messages across borders. “Winds of Kabul” speaks to a hidden underground world, of voices which exist but are not heard, somewhat similar to the voices of Abbas’ ghosts.
So what can we take from “Forgotten Places”? That history is unknowable, yet at the same time a powerful tool, that undesirable history gets covered up, just as do the undesirable mechanisms which power the functioning of a city, that cities are full of many forgotten places such as old neighborhoods which give way to urban dead zones or perhaps that forgetting is part of human nature but that we need to keep our notes on the past close at hand and review them often.
