Shanghai Art Museum and Hyperdesign

       The Shanghai Art Museum is an old European building designed like a cathedral, complete with an old clock tower. It’s become a familiar landmark for me now, located next to People’s Square. Inside, it looks like a palace and there’s a beautiful marble staircase with blue clouds painted on the steps so that when you look straight at it, people appear to be climbing a painting of clouds up to the next floor.

       I went there with Vivian’s little cousin, Chao Chao (pronounced chow chow and it means “super super” in Chinese), whose an art student studying up in the Shandong province. She stayed with us for a week and she adhered to a strict schedule of exploring as many art museums as she could find in this giant metropolis. I was sad I didn’t go with her one day. She showed me pictures of the exhibits she had discovered. One featured piece was of the body of an actual goat blown up with air inside so as to look like a grotesque balloon! It was painted bright blue and its legs stuck out behind it like it was flying.

       Anyway, the show Chao Chao and I went to was entitled Hyperdesign. It was a show to celebrate the art of design and mixed media. The exhibits showed everything from stylish furniture to paintings and from outlandish projections to traditional sculptures. Most of the art was interactive with the people. For example, there was a room with a light shining from one wall that projected your shadow onto the other and suddenly artificial shadows would appear, walking to music, so that your silhouette was part of the image. There was a room that displayed glass Buddhas filled with pills, aptly named Buddhist Pharmacy. My favorite room was of an apartment with all the furniture placed on the wall and the other walls and floors were all mirrors, so you had a different perspective of everything at a glance. Another room had projections of Chinese characters meaning mother, father, and family squirming around the dark walls like little amoebae.

       Everything was situated tastefully so that each piece of art seemed to lead into the next one. When in the side spiral stairway, you could hear the light tinkling of bells playing a simple tune. When you finally reached it, it consisted of a string of bells strung up by electric wire, and ringing in concentric order, each bell playing a different note. One bell was missing and it was placed on a stool below it. This piece was called The Missing Note. When you continued to the very top floor, everything was in white and had a blank feeling to it. One room had a projection of a stark, white room with a plant in the center and a window off to the side. Slowly, the sunbeam would move up and down, giving the plant a different shadow against the floor. This was called Serenity. The other room was white with natural light pouring in from windows in the ceiling high above us. The paintings were all white with simple line designs. It felt like we were much higher than the fourth floor. It was as if we had reached the pinnacle of this creative show, where the light from the day and a few lines on the wall were enough to communicate beauty to its visitors.