Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai and Its Contemporary Material Culture

For the subject of my final paper I decided to visit Columbia College downtown for an exhibition called “Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai and Its Contemporary Material Culture”.  The exhibition was located in Columbia’s Museum of Contemporary Photography on Michigan Avenue.  The museum has three levels and at present all three floors are devoted to these current works.  The Chinese city of Shanghai and those that live there are the focus of the show.   The works on display all deal with the transformation in Shanghai over the past few decades into an enormous economic power and it’s shift from traditional ideologies to more modern independent society.
In Shanghai, a growing economy has ushered in the emergence of a new middle class living in a society torn between political ideologies.  They are young individuals living comfortably in a society that allows them to work toward a goal.  The formerly communist Chinese nation now approaches a sort of proto capitalism and as such their means of living have improved.  Similarly, young Chinese artists now have the freedom to express themselves and present their unique commentaries on the radical transformations of their city.  Though not a communist nation the Chinese does put limits on the expression of his people, this it seems presents the perfect critical environment for these young artists.   On every wall of the MOCP are images of young professionals in Shanghai, often in high-rise apartments, more recent luxuries of the Chinese people.  Likewise, images of the elderly inhabitants of the city present a harsh reality of a people whose context has been lost, the Shanghai that they remember is rapidly disappearing along with it’s customs and ideologies.  Also on display are images of a developing Shanghai and the deconstruction of its slums and old traditional neighborhoods.
One work that I found particularly interesting called Temporary Sculpture is a large photograph digitally altered by artist Zhou Xiaohu.  The works actually composed of multiple images of new Shanghai, characterized by the tall urban landscape, and old Shanghai, with its aged and dilapidated neighborhoods.  The images are combined to put a portion of old Shanghai, in the process of being demolished, at the center of focus.  This image is offset by a modern urban landscape that gives the impression of assimilation.  Xiaohu’s work seems bring to the forefront the issue of urbanization in modern day Shanghai and how the historic constitution of the city is giving way to a newly realized and independent social setting.
Another work located on the third level of the museum also deals with concepts of an advancing Shanghai but also the changing social conditions and new types of morality nurtured by the people that live there.  The work is from a series of images called “Super Absorbent” by artist/photographer Xu Zhen.  The series is composed of images of Shanghais nightlife and club scenes such as karaoke bars.  The work that happens to be on display depicts 5 or 6 teenage girls at a in what appears to be a nightclub.  The image itself is composed of lines and lines of text (in Chinese characters) from Internet chat forums, some of which is highly pornographic in nature.  Zhen’s work presents a convergence of several different transformations in Chinese culture.  The advent of computer and web-based communication along with newly realized sexual freedom composes the text of the work.  The image that text produces exemplifies the freedoms of the Chinese youth growing up in a social setting liberated from former communist limitations.