From Shangai to Montreal: Two Opposing Cultural Models Por Manuel Olveira*
The two cities exemplify two diffent models of cultural policy, not only because of an east/west geographical question, nor their different economic systems, nor even their opposing traditions or histories. If we look closely at their realities, institutions, cultural structures, and biennales, we can more easily discern these differences, their strong points, and the results they spawn.
In Shanghai, the 15th and 21st centuries cohabitate, though the latter is
modernity that, for them, results in industrial materials, aluminium,
the preponderant one. In fact, millenary Chinese culture’s survival
crystal and cement, as well as polished, glittering, profusely garnished
seemingly found a barrier that hardly could be surpassed without a
surfaces. Sydney, New York, Paris, fast-food chains, crappy, sugared
remarkable transformation. The city is getting startlingly bigger and
music, video mixing, kitsch and prosperity are the distinctive traits of
bigger while modern architecture –most of it versions of Western
those who not only are rich but also want to look rich. Only the
icons- supplants traditional urban conceptions and forms, which
elderly preserve a timeless dignity and the distinctive composure the
basically entails the loss of a tradition and the construction of a new
inheritors of any ancient knowledge have.
identity by means of a transformation of the urban features, even
The countryside-city dichotomy expresses the two opposing
though, when one gets to know the living conditions in these
lifestyles: preservation of tradition, on the one hand, and not-critical
traditional neighbourhoods, one questions if it is worth preserving a
fascination for a modernity imported from the Western imagery, on
state of things that is honestly awful.
the other, just what appears in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Chinese Bicycle. A
Such novelties are typical of a nouveau riche attitude: galactic,
significant number (almost a billion) of Asian peasants wish to move
futuristic, ostentatiously grandiose, with monumental forms ranging
to the cities, where they usually get incorporated to the mass of
from art deco to a fascist style and any post-modern neo-historicism
underpaid workers, with no laboral rights, eating and sleeping at their
in which aggressive advertising and light power are imposed, which is
workplaces because their homes, if they happen to have one, are
in fact a mere visual contamination. Big companies can afford such a
remotely located. Their work is actually nourishing an industry that
showy electricity bill while at dawn the shops in traditional
has no equal in the Western world and an emergent class of rich
neighbourhoods must be illuminated with candles, all of which is an
people.
example of the immense differences that tag along with easy money
To the customary effects of power, hierarchization or social
and dirty business. That’s happening in Shangai and, perhaps, in the
stratification –all of which have profoundly marked society and
whole of China. Those who make money are seduced by a Western
culture– we must add the collateral effects that the worshipping of
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