As part of the 2012 Jue Festival, the island6 Arts Center is proud to present Across the Waibaidu. A continuation of Liu Dao’s show Goddamned Shanghai, which features Shanghai’s Golden Ages in the 1930s. In this installment, however, the artists seek to explore the era from the alternative perspective of the Chinese, capturing the debauchery of the city through the bewildered eyes of the locals. What was all this glamour and fuzz to the Chinese citizens of Shanghai, this constant flirting with the devil and “living for the moment” attitude to those who dwelled in the old quarters? Did these two utterly different spheres that the metropolis consisted of mingle at all? The infamous Garden Bridge (waibaidu qiao 外白渡桥) which led over the Soochow Creek down to the glitzy Bund formed a literal and metaphorical separation of the Chinese and Western settlements. Such was the reclusiveness of the foreign trade sector, as well as of its legendary party world.
As the parties glittered and champagne corks popped across the Waibaidu, the denizens on the other side of the bridge were seeking out their own brand of survival. The boom of the 1930s brought both possibility and paucity for the Chinese. Educated English-speakers set up promising careers as compradors, or go-betweens, for the Western companies and local suppliers and laborers. Savvy merchants grew rich and fat, heralding the rise of a new entrepreneurial class. The less fortunate Chinese formed the bulk of the toiling labor class by day and sought belonging and comradeship in guilds and gangs by night. And everyone – rich, modest, desperately destitute – filled the opium dens in droves, wittling away their hours in slack-lidded recline.
Come on a dusky drive with the Liu Dao art collective along the nightly rumble of Bubbling Well Road, where young dapper gents danced with their dark-haired vixens to the swinging saxophone. Indeed, Western ideas mesmerized many young Chinese, who eagerly adopted Western dress, habits and culture. The lovely local beauty of “Charleston Craze” taps her way between the frames as expertly as any Parisian Josephine Baker. The sight of glittering steel airplanes crossing the city as in “Thanks for the Memories” and the dernier cri of automotive mobility passing through the poplar tree alleys soon became daily occurrences. Chinese ladies embraced emancipated and modernity in “Modeng Gouer”. Elsewhere, papercutting of opium beds and 1930s furnishing materialize in clouds of LED smoke. Old photographs unearthed by the art collective in antique-style frames capture snippets of local life in “Machismo Under Fire” and “Xiaofang’s New Toy”.
The other side of Waibaidu was not just populated by Chinese. Not all Westerners were welcome in the International Settlement. Russian ex-aristocrats, fallen from grace in their flight from Bolshevik Russia, found themselves working as taxi dancers, escorts and prostitutes. “Many Men and One Lily”, featuring a beautiful Russian stripper, captures the essence of the 1930s depravity that relentlessly abandons itself to the delights of the night.
As we move further into the Dragon year, Across the Waibaidu is Liu Dao’s homage to the resilience and enterprise of the Dragon’s descendents, who carved out an enduring existence for themselves in this metropolis, growing and flourishing relentlessly amidst the coming and going of all foreigners.
