Somewhere a Shanghai garden grows
"Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Garden" during installation.
Shanghai has been up a little more than a week, long enough for a number of media reviews, blog posts, and general discussion points to emerge. One piece that seems to elicit particular comment is Zhang Jian Jun’s installation Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Garden (2009).
Down in the shadowy basement and back halls of the museum services division, this is known affectionately as the piece with the bricks. Not just your garden variety red clay bricks, but some 3,000 antique grey bricks taken from the remains of buildings dating to the high-times of 1920s Shanghai, recently demolished to pave the way for new construction.
Bricks ready for unpacking.
Of course, bringing over 3,000 bricks from China is not as simple as dropping them off at the post office. Weighting in at over 11,000 pounds, the fifteen crates of individually packed bricks were flown from Shanghai to Los Angeles aboard a cargo plane, and then loaded onto a truck to San Francisco, accompanied by a museum registrar the entire way.
Museum preparators clean the surface of bricks to be stacked.
Because of earthquake concerns, the bricks stacked around the rock platforms needed to be secured against movement. With bricks fresh from a demolition site, this meant carefully cleaning the surfaces of loose debris so that adhesives could bond. As a result, the museum’s preparation team vacuumed a lot of bricks.
Zhang Jian Jun constructs his garden.
Each brick was carefully placed by the artist, who took advantage of the wide expanse of North Court to extend his installation in all directions. The completed work combines all those bricks with two pink silicone rubber scholar’s rocks (taihu), a silicone rubber vase, and tiny bits of artificial greenery emerging from the cracks. It’s an evocative statement about the transition between the city old and new, a theme our visitors will find woven throughout Shanghai.
11 Responses to “Somewhere a Shanghai garden grows”
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xensen on February 24th, 2010 at 10:49 am
FWIW, I was curious how the first image would look with a little pseudo drop-shift effect (a kind of graduated blur achieved by making a graduated mask and applying a lens blur) applied in Photoshop. I’m not sure how great the result is but I’ll share it here anyway. (One of the few places I have successfully used this effect was on some of the photos of Sui Jianguo’s dinosaurs.)
cristina on February 24th, 2010 at 11:15 am
It’s a cool effect, definitely ups the contrast and foregrounds the rocks nicely.
As an aside, for the curious, the little green waving “plants” are Tomy Flip Flaps, a line of solar-powered plastic plants with a bit of a cult following. Our registrar Cathy reports that no car in Shanghai was complete without one attached to the dash!
Nancy on February 24th, 2010 at 7:12 pm
I loved the tiny plants. I had to look twice to be sure that I wasn’t seeing things when their tiny leaves moved up and down. I appreciate the concept behind the brick installation but I’m just not sure that I buy it when paired with the large raspberry silicone pieces. The bricks alone were evocative of history and I would have LOVED to have seem the museum staff vacuuming them. Ah, the uses of a college education!
Xensen – I like the photo as I think you’ve done justice to their color and texture. Not an easy feat, I imagine.
xensen on February 26th, 2010 at 7:38 pm
I want one of the little plants!
nico on February 27th, 2010 at 6:50 pm
you would not believe how hard it is to get ahold of those wee leafy things…considering we don’t have them yet, perhaps you would.
bittermelon on March 2nd, 2010 at 11:30 am
I’ve seen those plants around, and just recently at the Chinatown Community Street Fair ($10 a pop). Should’ve bought a bunch, but alas…
Nancy on March 2nd, 2010 at 1:12 pm
You mean that they weren’t manufactured by the artist especially for this exhibit?
digi on March 2nd, 2010 at 1:30 pm
Wow thats amazing… So it flaps its leaves in a repetitive motion when the lights are on! Thats way better than an actual plant that converts carbon monoxide to breathable oxygen.. This thing is ingenious! And OMG spending tens of thousands of dollars transferring gray bricks overseas to form the foundation for a relatively bland and un-moving abstract piece…
Wow…
Human kind is doomed.
Can I trade my humanity in to become a sparrow or something?
laura on March 11th, 2010 at 11:55 am
i found flipflaps at thinkgeek and ordered enough for a little garden of solar goodness.
xensen, i have extras if you’d like one! and nico, i’m pretty sure they do bulk discounts…
dany on March 15th, 2010 at 8:42 am
Nancy, for the exhibit, the artist wrapped each individual plant with a rice-paper shell. Just as with the other pieces of the installation, he refashions the old and the new and ultimately blurs that temporal line.
idit on March 17th, 2010 at 9:41 am
Don’t miss the video, too, which contextualizes the piece!