a full plate: Fifty Moganshan Road

Last week, there was an article in one of the local magazines about a growing artist neighborhood in Northwest Shanghai at a place called 50 Moganshan Road. This Sunday, I met up with a classmate from Stanford (Katie) who's also in Shanghai for the summer, and we thought we'd give it a go and see what we found there. A metro ride and one very sweaty and dusty walk later, we were walking down Moganshan Road and trying to figure out which editor had goofed and let such a big typo in their magazine. It didn't seem that this 50 Moganshan Road place existed - all that was between number 100 and number 20 Moganshan Road was a big construction site full of scaffolding and green tarp. We'd come all the way down there, so we figured we ought to at least go inspect a bit more and see what we could find. Further back into the construction site, we saw that there were some big concrete block buildings that looked pretty sturdy, so we went on inside.

The hallways were lined with piles of boxes and assorted junk, but once we'd walked down a bit we started to see colorful signs directing us into some of the rooms along the hall. It turns out that inside these big warehouse buildings, local artists had made spaces for themselves. A lot of them were combined studio and gallery spaces, where the artists were working and displaying their finished pieces for sale together. Some even had apartment-like extensions with kids running in and out and TV's blasting in back rooms. We wandered around for the afternoon, and found everything from modern conceptual sculpture to more traditional still life paintings of apples to multimedia and photo projects.

There were only a couple of other people who had managed to find the place at the same time as us, so it was a strange feeling to be walking around as the only intruders into many of these studio spaces. A lot of times that artists just looked up and nodded when we came in and then went back to their work, but some took more interest in us. We first got stopped by one young artist who wanted to know whether we thought Chinese or American art was more powerful, and then went on to give us a detailed explanation of these French artists who were making art out of lighting gundpowder patterns and photographing it: that was a fun one to translate... We had a slightly more successful conversation with a young woman artist who studied philosophy at Beijing Univerisity and was very enthusiastic about Tibetan Buddhism and traditional Chinese musical instruments. After an afternoon of climbing up and down dusty stairways and over rickety bridge constructions to little studios that were tucked away down alleys and on the top floors of warehouse buildings, I felt a little thrill at finding a place that still seemed like a bit of a secret from the hordes.