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Shanghai as a cultural epicenter?

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, Shanghai
Thursday, Jul 08, 2004, Page 16

Wan Jingjing performs during rehearsal for Wild Zebra at Shanghai's Grand Theater. With newly built cultural institutions like the Grand Theater, Shanghai is hoping to find its spot as one of Asia's major cultural centers, along with Tokyo and Hong Kong. There are many, though, that say time, and not new buildings, will determine whether Shanghai becomes a vibrant cultural city. PHOTO: NY TIMES

With its bold and luminous cut-glass design, the Shanghai Grand Theater can stake a claim to being the heart of this city, and the dazzling impression it makes fits this pulsing business center's glittery self-image to a T.

On a recent evening here, as a full house settled in to watch an entirely Chinese production of a Broadway-style dance theater show, Wild Zebra, the opening event in an international dance competition, the city's vice mayor delivered a booming inaugural exhortation that recalled the style of party cadres past.

Shanghai, he announced stiffly, is moving toward the great goal of creating a modern international culture center in Asia. His language was perhaps a bit blunt, but given Shanghai's cultural ambitions, it was difficult to gainsay the message for exaggeration.

For as long as the Communist Party has ruled China, Shanghai has suffered a deep inferiority complex in relation to the capital, Beijing. The early 20th century was Shanghai's moment in the sun, when it had a global reputation as a flashy and fleshy sin city with top-flight Western architecture and a cabaret culture to match.

People outside the Shanghai Grand Theater on their way in to see Wild Zebra. PHOTO: NY TIMES

But much of what was most vibrant then was derived from abroad, at a time when the country was carved up into imperial concessions, and Shanghai was China's main door to the world. Before that, Shanghai, a mere infant of a city, had hardly registered in the long tableau of Chinese history.

Nowadays the city's cultural profile is changing as fast as its skyline, which barely 15 years ago was a drab and low-slung jumble and today ranks easily as one of the world's most fantastic. Determined to raise the city to the level of regional rivals like Tokyo and Hong Kong as well as Beijing, Shanghai officials have made culture a major priority.

Beijing has its Forbidden City, its prestigious national schools and museums, its centuries-old neighborhoods that breathe Chinese culture, none of which Shanghai can realistically challenge. But like Tokyo, all but destroyed in World War II, this city is making a virtue of its newness.

As a cornerstone of the revival, which began in earnest in the early 1990s, the Shanghai government spent US$226.8 million, an immense sum in a country still classified as a developing nation, to build a world-class cultural complex in the center city. The recently built structures include the Shanghai Grand Theater, the equally striking Shanghai Museum -- in the shape of an ancient Tang vessel -- and the Shanghai Art Museum.

The city's investment in premium performance and exhibition spaces, though still modest in comparison with major Western artistic centers, has given Shanghai not only a blush of self confidence but also a cockiness in its rivalry with Beijing.

"Shanghai can already attract talent from all over the country, in fact all over the world," said Chen Feihua, director of the Shanghai dance school that created Wild Zebra. "Our production values are broader and fit international tastes. Wild Zebra has toured on the best stages of Europe, Paris, Berlin, Madrid and other cities, and there is a business element to this that is very particular to Shanghai."

Build and hope

Shanghai's strategy of build and hope the visitors come seems to be gathering momentum but draws mixed reviews even among the city's artists, who are debating how the city goes about becoming a world-class cultural center.

An ambitious private museum, the Shanghai Gallery of Art, opened in January at Three on the Bund, a lavishly restored building in the historic riverfront district. It has become a premier place for displaying new Chinese artists and established stars. "Shanghai has already become an attractive cultural city," Weng Ling, director of the museum, said. "What we need now is more professionalism, more cultural exchanges and more support for artists."

Across the Huangpu River in the Pudong district, reclaimed swampland that is now home to the city's tallest, most gaudily lighted skyscrapers, the city government is planning a new art museum in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum in New York, raising doubts among some who wonder whether Shanghai is going too far, too fast.

Too much too fast?

"A year ago someone told me that China has built 35 cultural complexes, but who is going to perform in them?" asked Kai-Yin Lo, a Hong Kong designer who has advised that city on its artistic development. "The Germans and the Japanese have learned the lesson of hardware: that without the software, you can't maintain the flow. Just look at Bilbao."

"Freedom, too, is very important," she added. "That is what we in Hong Kong can boast."

Urban and cultural development experts agree that museums and other institutions are a starting point. But they say that to emerge as a real cultural powerhouse, a city must fulfill a variety of criteria, including some that defy government planning here.

"Cities that are really vibrant are creative in a lot of different ways," said Richard Florida, a professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the author of The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. "You look at a city like Pittsburgh, which built huge artistic institutions, really huge places, and drove all of their artists out -- people like Andy Warhol or Billy Strayhorn, because they were too edgy and unconventional, or maybe gay."

Florida said that, so far, the greatest cities of East Asia were falling short of these criteria. "It is important to have the institutions, but you also need vibrant street culture and an open culture, not only openness toward ethnic diversity, but also diversity in sexual orientation and freedom of expression," he said. "Asia certainly needs a city like this, and Shanghai could be the one. Certainly the city that figures it out first will have some tremendous advantages."

By reputation Shanghai is China's most cosmopolitan city, but even some artists who have succeeded here say the city falls short of the diversity needed to become a world-class cultural center.

"They don't have any international students, and I haven't noticed any international teachers, either," said Yuan Yuan Tan, 28, a native of Shanghai who dances with the San Francisco Ballet. "If Shanghai wants to be an international cultural center, they have to do something about that. The reason I left is that I wanted to explore what ballet is all about, and if I had stayed put, that wouldn't have happened."

Standing on its own

By one important measure, however, Shanghai has already succeeded. Increasingly, artists based here have proved they can flourish internationally with little need, as in the past, to go to Beijing first to establish themselves.

"As a new city, the software or the quality of the people and their artistic taste has to be boosted gradually," said Yang Fudong, a specialist in elaborate and deliberately puzzling multimedia displays who has become one of China's best known artists internationally.

At the Shanghai Gallery of Art recently, Yang was putting the finishing touches on a new exhibit, a labyrinthlike construction with two film projectors casting their images across the faces of people who wander inside. "In Shanghai I see people taking in the shows, going to the museums, even taking their children to the museums, and that's a beautiful thing," he said. "One doesn't become a fat man overnight, so we shouldn't be impatient."
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