One World Insight Blog | Douglas "Las" Wengell

Ayn Rand’s Shanghai on the Hill

Howard Roark, the protagonist in Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead, is a budding young architect. His challenge is to embrace bold, ambitious, future-oriented design from the self-generated well of creativity and ignore convention. This formed the basis of Rand’s libertarianism and influenced a generation of leader’s like Alan Greenspan, who put his faith not in central planning the marketplace. OK, at least he admitted before Congress that his worldview was not entirely correct.

The shimmering architecture of Shanghai got me thinking about Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan. These buildings are not some Disneyland, or Las Vegas theme park. They are the psychic fabric of Shanghai, in perception and ethos, as well as the requisite urban infrastructure.  They are Shanghai. Here’s a city with attitude, like Beijing and Hong Kong. How unlike modern American urban architecture which, with some notable exception, has all but abandoned innovation for utility, banality over buttresses, functionality over form, mediocrity over majesty. Erase for a moment everything you know about the world and compare Shanghai architecture to America’s aging infrastructure, or JFK airport to Beijing International, and ask yourself who is aspiring and who is asphyxiating.

There’s bravado behind tarring down the old and creating something new. You’ll love Shanghai or hate it. But it’s something. It’s progress. It fosters innovation and creates new companies and new jobs. I laugh to myself when I think how long the new World Trade Center design took, or how the reconstruction of the San Francisco Bay Bridge is going on a decade. That just wouldn’t happen here.

America won World War II and has dominated the second part of the twentieth century. Good for us. But that was then and this is now. The world is changing; India and China are hungry and Americans overweight. “Only the paranoid survive,” said the founder of Intel. So if America is a company, what’s our new creation, our new product, our new skyline, our new marketing campaign, our employee training program, our new buildings, bridges, roads, trains and planes, our 2020?

If you don’t know where you are going, the saying goes, any road will take you there.

"Art Mirrors Life in China: Life and Death, Love and Hate, Sex and Violence"

The Chinese are reticent and reserved. The advent guard art districts of Beijing and Shanghai are populated by Chinese intellectuals and artists, and the Propaganda Department doesn’t much care what they paint. So it’s turned out to be an illuminating window into the Chinese soul. More in Shanghai.

Youthful artists push boundaries more than you’d think Maybe because they can’t elsewhere. This is an artist in Xi’an being interviewed by a western journalist: “There is nothing anymore in China that defines orthodoxy, in morality or anything else, so people just do what they want. Because life here in China is brutal. So art is just a mirror of life. Life and death, love and hate, sex and violence. People in other countries don’t have the pressure to survive that Chinese people have.”

Angkor Temple Complex, Cambodia

Angkor is an ancient temple complex built in the 12^th century, in Khmer architecture style for King Suryavarman. It was both the holy temple and capital city. Angkor Wat is the best preserved and famous temple in the complex, and is one the national flag.

 

It was first a Hindu formation, dedicated to the god Vishnu, but later became Buddhist. Amazingly, during all of Cambodia’s twentieth century conflict, most of the temple has survived.

 

The complex reminds me of Tikal in Guatemala. Siem Reap is pleasant. But for the debilitating heat, highly recommended.

 

These young monks live in the complex at an active temple. Like in Thailand, most go to school and work at the temple in exchange for room and board. They are eager to engage visitors and learn about life outside of Cambodia.

China Modern Art – 698 Beijing & Moganshan Shanghai

The Chinese soul is contending with radical development and change, rising alienation, hope and fear, repressed feelings, sexual and creative energy. Moganshan is an old factory neighborhood full of galleries and studios, similar to 798 in Beijing.

 urban capitalism, isolation, illusions of Mao's future

  

dejection, desperation, exhaustion

sexual repressions, oppressed emotions, fermenting desire if not expressed might destroy the Chinese soul but Beijing will do anything to repress the will of the people

Mao's Cultural Revolution all but destroyed religion and Christianity. In its wake is a deep emptiness, perhaps why Chinese culture can feel so cold.

 

Madison Avenue has arrived in China and with it an ambivalence as it rejects its past and embraces a Western capitalistic future

Who are we, as the new Chinese? Can the old become part of the new?  The emotional toll of a "century of humiliation" at the hands of the "Ocean People"

Modern Art in Thailand

Susanna and I scout our some galleries today. I am delighted to discover an impressive modern museum of art in the heart of bangkok. As in China, you can see these artists struggle with the sacred and the profane, their rich cultural heritage and their hedonistic (but untrue) reputation. In China and Thailand, and all of Asia, individualism is butting up against collective social values.

The huge mural (pictured) at first looks like a colorful, childlike fantasy of Thailand. Look a little closer and you’ll discover self-mutilation, murder and sordid sexual images.

A City on the Hill, Shanghai 2020

The Urban Planning Exhibition Hall is six stories devoted to the grand ambitions of Shanghai city planners for 2020. This is not government marketing; this is audacious on a scale unimaginable. With its methodically detailed plans and gigantic architectural models, 3D portrays, environmental impact efforts, Expo master plan – think Sim City, the video game, for real – you can’t help appreciate China’s autocratic ability to plan, design, and execute.

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The theme of the Expo is “Better City, Better Life”. The models are brilliant in design, innovation and creativity. There is an impressive emphasis on green technology and urban sustainability: solar hot water, waste water collection, plant irrigation, energy conservation air con, river geo thermal heat, rainwater collection systems, solar photovoltaic, low impact building materials, low energy electrical system, vertical green plant walls. Sure some of this is show. But this is the future, and America is still discovering low-wattage LCD lights.

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Then you see the mock-ups of each nations pavilion, and how Holland and Scandinavia will be illustrating green technology and design. More of the same. There are tens of countries but the United States pavilion is absent. That’s strange. Why is our emerging technology and engineering? Detractors will say that many of these technologies are experimental and will fail. That’s true. But that’s how innovation works. You get better because you try something, learn, and go at it again. It’s the same in art, in building a company, a product, and in building a nation. Many of our best inventors are by accident.

I ponder how much technology transfer will benefit China. The government is acting like a venture capitalist, here in Shanghai but also with capital projections around the nation. Throwing money at lots of things in the hope that a few might take root. Many will fail, some will be ok, but others might go big.

I am frustrated. What is America’s cohesive national policy? There isn’t one. Our investment in tomorrow? Short-term gains. Our long-term planning? Washington mired in deadlock. What is America’s 2020? To my fellow Americans who think we will always be on top of our game, who want their children to have an economic future, who think China makes inexpensive goods for export, visit Shanghai and the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall.

Shanghai Vaults into the Future

Shanghai makes you feel that China is on the verge of greatness.

With its fast rising, glitzy post-post-modern skyscrapers along either side of the Huangpu River, the Bund on one side, the Pudong business district on the other, the rocket-like Oriental Pearl TV Tower readies for takeoff, the ultra modern metro and international airport, the bullet-speed magnetic train—this is not the egalitarian communist China espoused by Chairman Mao. It’s a vibrant symbol of autocratic capitalism the world has never seen. It’s the Hong Kong of the mainland, home to the Shanghai Exchange, a banking and trade hub, outward looking. fashion conscious, frenetic and dense, a poster child to its citizens and the world that China is becoming a global player. It can play in the majors.

Among its European-style mansions, tree-lined boulevards and chic restaurants and cafes, there’s a nouveau riche exuberance. Make that swagger. Smart, preppy dress, fashion haircuts and black-rimmed glasses, the Chinese look smarter here. If Beijing is Washington, then Shanghai is surely its New York or London.

Rob Gibson has it right: “There is an intangible feel in Shanghai, an urgency, a hope and optimism that hangs in the air all around you from the minute your arrive. People are pushing forward, with their feet and in their heads, building a future, building a country, moving toward some distant, unseen goal.”

Since 1990, the city has witnessed the fastest economic expansion the world has even seen. It boasts more skyscrapers than New York, and more to come. Almost a third of China’s exports come from the region. It attracts almost a quarter of the country’s foreign investment and enjoys the highest incomes on the mainland. The sci-fi film Code 46 was filmed here—FX special affects were not needed. Image that just two decades ago the Pudong, the bustling business district across from The Bund, was just old docks and paddy fields, and you get a sense of China’s ambitions and ability to execute.

The Shanghai World Expo opens in five months, having won the bid in 2004, and expected 75 million visitors. Like the Beijing Olympics, it will be another spectacular event. Posters and countdown clocks litter the city. Construction across the river from the Bund, where the Expo will be held, continues 24/7, surely a pace that would take others three times as long to complete and ten times longer to plan.

It’s no coincidence that President Obama stopped here, where he staged a botched “town hall meeting” at the Science and Technology Museum. The audience turned out to be hand-selected Communist Party students.

Shanghai Disneyland was just announced, a joint venture between Disney and Beijing, ten years in the making, a consortium of Chinese and American construction companies, second largest only to Orlando, due to be online in 2014. I had lunch with a classmate who works from the inside of the deal. She agreed that much of its success will depend on making it uniquely Chinese. I image red rocket cars gliding through the sacred mountains Tai Shan outside Shanghai, in lieu of the Matterhorn. It will be grand, that much I know.

Modern Tibetian Art

This show is in Beijing, coinciding with National Day. Its “approved” by Beijing, so you’ll note that there’s no political controversy. But the Tibet culture is in full oil-in-canvas display!

Madison Avenue Marketing Arrives

This is not grandmother’s Marxism.  The ad campaigns are as sophisticated and sexy as in the West. It plays into the Chinese aspirational sense.

We have arrived! Behold!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Modern Art in China – The Gao Brothers

Irreverent, lost, naked, vulnerable, these guys are hot in China. Despite the censorship and zero tolerance of political dissent (unless protests against Japan, which stirs nationalism),

zero tolerance of political dissent (unless protests against Japan, which stirs nationalism), I was surprised to discover that Beijing seems to let the often young edgy artists do their thing and create what they will. I don't think the central government "gets" what they are sayng, but more so, doesn't think it will inspire peasants to riot, and they're probably right...

 

Still, the loftspace-like, no frills art districts in Beijing and Shanghai gave me the best glimpse into the depths, far below the picture the government paints.