Building a Discourse: Capturing a Moving Target of Shanghai's Art Boom
Jenny Lin's new book, Above Sea: Contemporary Art, Urban Culture, and the Fashioning of Global Shanghai, is one of an emerging batch of titles to contextualize Chinese contemporary art in its evolving urbanism.1 Shanghai, as Lin's urban site of deeper investigation, offers a richness to the intricate relationships between the urban transformations that have taken place since modernity and again under China's postsocialist economic transition and the cultural productions that are both indicators and instigators of these transformations. The nuances Lin teases out through her selection of probes make the book a timely and relevant contribution to the nascent discourse on the rapid rise of Chinese contemporary visual art in the last two decades. The international curator Hou Hanru wrote in 1994 that the existing frameworks for understanding Chinese contemporary visual art are clearly insufficient.2 Two decades later Lin opens with a selective genealogy of contemporary art exhibitions since the late 1990s that began to put Chinese contemporary art in global flows, and points out again the discursive lacuna that remains glaring. Against the developed world essentialism that has dominated intellectual discourse of the non West, Lin affirms the necessity of more such volumes that could explore the site specificities and complexities to unpack the rapidly emerging contemporary arts ecologies that are diversifying, constructing institutions, producing spaces, and in turn increasingly inflecting the very global flows that shaped the perceptions and understandings of the non West. While indebted to the discourses that began to flourish after what she refers to as watershed exhibitions, such as Jean Hubert Martin's 1989 Magiciens de la terre at Centre Pompidou, Lin nevertheless reacts to the reductivism of some of these shows and highlights the urgent need to investigate and interrogate the multiplicities of cultural, socioeconomic, and geopolitical frameworks that shape the existing discourse, which remains largely monolithic when it comes to the non West. Lin's choice of Shanghai, the urban manifestation of China's encounter with modernity and the contemporary emblem of postsocialist economic transition success, reinforces the specificities that are crucial to constructing a discourse on the vast continent size country's cultural industries. How could it be possible to simplify the cultural outputs of such an extensive territory as China, or even Shanghai? Just as Lin's analyses of Shanghai's modern era linkages to contemporary developments are important for examining the non West's grappling with modernity's legacies, so too does her scrutiny of contemporary artistic production against the backdrop of China's state directed neoliberalization offer insights into the country's reglobalization and the localized simulacra of global symbols. Through the evolving chapters, Lin intertwines Shanghai's spatial productions with the illuminations, speculations, and provocations of a selection of its contemporary visual artists. Arranged chronologically, following the economic transition's developments from the 1980s to the 2010s, the chapters reveal a growing resistance to the state's co option through deploying contemporary visual art as part of its global image project. The mid 1990s revitalization of Shanghai's modern era heyday, as manifested in the first chapter in the revival of Shanghai's hybrid architectural types, highlights the pre 1949 linkages that are unique to the cosmopolitan city. The first decades of China's marketization, set to displace planned economics, are manifested in chapters 2 and 3, "Shanghai's Art in Fashion" and "Biennalization asBanalization, Promotion and Resistance." A growing "resistance" against the maturing state capitalism's embrace of neoliberal economics while maintaining its political status quo, namely of single party autocracy, is further scrutinized in chapter 4, "Installing a World City." In the first chapter, "From the Ruins of Heaven on Earth," the urban seems to foreground cultural productions. The chapter begins with Xintiandi, a commercial development that has, since its opening in the early 2000s, risen to prominence as an exemplar for viably preserving lilong, an iconic historic residential architecture type and urban morphology vernacular to pre
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