Dafen Lisa: Architecture and Narratology

建筑

architecture

上海世博报导 之深圳馆

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“大芬丽莎” ：城市贫民中的新贵 “I’m Dafen Lisa”: Architecture and Narratology 由都市实践为总策展人的“深圳——中国梦想实验场” 展馆在上海世博会“最佳城市实践区”部分，为馆中之馆。 一片长条形的场地上，建筑师因地制宜制造了一个长盒子， 其30米x9米的正立面为横向放倒的巨幅蒙娜丽莎所充满。故 事由此开始——蒙娜丽莎是由深圳大芬村的千名油画画工以 每人几块分格的方式生产出来，又拼接在一起的，而正是工 人分工负责油画一个工序的这种油画生产加工线令这个中国 深圳郊区的大芬村闻名遐迩。在短短二十年里，这个悄无声 息的村落发展成为产业重镇，其油画产量据估计占到世界行 画市场的一半左右，是无数深圳成功故事中一例。 深圳展馆采用了一条若即若离的叙事线索：从蒙娜丽莎 （被昵称为“大芬丽莎”）——大芬产业一个重要标志，同 时亦是作品——出发，观众进入一片狭窄紧张的空间，模拟 大芬城中村的空间挤压感， 又由此进入不同的盒子房间， 在 这里领会大芬的发展历程，生产模式，鲜明甚至对峙的两位 元老人物，产业链条等。经过一段峰回路转的下行楼梯后， 观众突然被带入一个极深远的大空间，缓缓的梯级把空间在 视觉上延长到不可预知之限度，这体验同时被似乎流淌下来 的波光水纹加强，分布的影像抒情的表现深圳城市和人民生 活细节，任由观众徜徉，联想。

我们的问题是，建筑师策划的展馆，会不会使建筑变为 一个，同时是全部的作品？建筑同小说一样，占据观众空间 和时间的体验，它用自己的语言表述的人与空间相关的经 验。建筑的叙事与展览的叙事对于观众在何种程度上能够相 交并相互增强？

the architecture “Shenzhen, Frontier for China Dreams”, curated by the Shenzhenbased architecture practice Urbanus, stands as part of the “Urban Best Practice Area” program in the Shanghai World Expo. It’s shelled with two other pavilions in a one big space: it is a pavilion within a pavilion.

The plot is long and slender, the architect installed a fully-enclosed cube. The front facade, measuring 30m in length and 9m in height, is a gigantic Mona Lisa painting laid horizontally. As the story goes, the Mona Lisa painting was produced in Dafen village in suburban Shenzhen by a thousand painters simultaneously. Famous for their “assembly line” production, each of the Dafen village painters finished a few squares of the original painting. From there the whole painting was assembled. Dafen’s oil painting exports take up about half the world’s market share, and Dafen represents only one of the many dreams of the 30 year old Shenzhen coming true.

At the World Expo, the Shenzhen pavilion employs a narrative tactic.

Guests first come across the Mona Lisa (fondly nicknamed Dafen Lisa ), the most obvious and ultimate manifestation of Dafen. The guests then make their way through a series of narrow walkways and cramped rooms that simulates the constraining feeling Dafen’s “urban village” topography imposes. There, audiences learn about Dafen’s history, the typical oil production workflow, and even meet the two head-machos of contrasting characteristics in the making of Dafen.

Finally, guests descend down a flight of stairs and enter into a deep “open theater” space. A theater with no stage, but everywhere as its stage. A projected illusion on the grand stairs gives the impression that water is streaming down. From the walls, throughout the space, attendees will be presented with video portrayals of Shenzhen and its people. Audiences are invited to linger on the stage and extend their consciousness in the space.

叙事是一个双重的时间序列，它使我们将叙事的功能之 一视为将一种时间建构为另一种时间。即便展品的话语时 间，观众的行走路线是线性的，故事和时间则是多维的。作 为观众的我们在重构这个叙事序列时必须有非同线性均质时 间之省略、概要、延缓、停顿。这是展览的叙事。 观众在大芬村世博展览中漫步观看，正如本雅明笔下的 “闲逛者”在大芬市井游荡，任店铺、画室、标牌、脸孔和 声音的交响、变奏铺面而来。“异化的人的凝视，这是闲逛 者的凝视，保持在大都市的日渐荒芜中给予犹有的安抚微 光。在其中，城市现在是地景，现在是房间”（本雅明）。 在现实的流动中，“闲逛者”不怀任何成见的，捕捉到某种 意象和感觉，建构属于自己的时间和空间。 这种“闲逛”的开放性赋予于展览中抽象再现的大芬村 流动空间，从而产生有如街头巷尾的自发的活力。戏剧化的 布景处理邀请观众充分自主的选择接受信息，看与被看同时

the narrative The question is, “Will the architect-curated pavilion turn its own architecture into the one and only piece of artwork?” Like a novel, architecture occupies the audience’s spatial and temporal experience.

To what extent can the architectural narrative and the exhibition narrative converge and reinforce one another?

Narrative engages double temporal sequences. Thus, one may regard a given narrative as projecting a certain frame of time into another.

While the running time of exhibits are predetermined and audiences take a linear path, there are a myarid of stories and temporal spaces that evolves for any audience.

This is the narrative line of the exhibition.Wandering about the Shenzhen pavilion, as ateliers, signs, faces and sound come in symphonies and variations, the audience becomes a “flâneur” in a Walter Benjamin sense.

“The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria--now a landscape, now a room.”(Benjamin)

文 由宓 / text by Umi 摄影 孟岩 / photos by

Meng Yan

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存在，观看的多种视点亦同时存在，人与其他的人在一起， 在空间中的存在，本质即是戏剧的，观者身边的人成为主体 的一部分，而自己又成为身边的人 其内在构成机制和各 部分之间的相互联系由观众自行解读，而形成复合性很强的 叙事。 当观者的兴趣从叙述内容转到叙事行为上来，及从“什 么”转而思考“如何”之时，即为策展团队用心良苦与观众 建立互动交流的开始，何其微妙。这种互动是否有评判标 准？此时，建筑空间的叙事正好登台上场。 建筑空间叙事取决于意想的叙事在何时介入设计，又怎 样影响了建筑师划归空间的决定，否则，二者没有同时存在 的必要。接下来，把目光转向建筑的叙事，我们发现它已经 被展览的叙事包裹起来，外部空间和内部空间同样——空间 具有神秘性，它不以让人感到它为己任。或者也有人认为， 建筑把展览包裹了起来，以至于只感到在无论大小的空间中 偷生，这空隙是由建筑实体固定的。无论怎样，这能引发关 于形式与内容的积极讨论。 但是，如果 说建筑空间与叙事还有什么确定可比的范 畴，那恐怕是在修辞、比喻意义上的：一个以和盘托出叙事 情节为己任的空间，我们对它最高的期待是什么——它戏剧 性的再现了自己的角色，它自己在演一出戏。它的角色不仅 是，还象征了自己作为艺术品。（毋庸置疑，它同时也自我 证明自己是艺术品。） 通常，建筑通过自身转换其周围景观的性质，成为景观中 一面脸孔；绘画模拟了同样的过程，只是其把景观本身作为脸

In light of constant realities, the “flâneur” holds no preconceptions, free to capture flight of feeling and thought.

Injected into the exhibition, the flâneurship makes for spontaneous exuberance, just as one would expect from a street. Dramatic setting positions the audience into a looking and being-looked interaction.

Being at a place with other people is essentially dramatic. The “other” people become part of the subject, and “I” become part of the “other” people. The audience in turn finds their own interpretation as part of the mega narrative.

When the audience turns their interest from what is being narrated to the act of narration itself, from “what” is spoken to “how” to speak, it marks the starting point of a real interaction. The moment that one attempts to measure this, the other narrative -- the spatial narrative -comes into the limelight.

When the exhibit narrative enters the design process, how much it influences the architect’s choice is critical to the architectural narrative. Otherwise, there’s no need for the architect worry about reconciling the exhibit and architectural narrative. . Somehow, one finds the architectural narrative enveloped in the exhibition with the exterior and interior alike. This suggests a mysterious quality in space to the extent one doesn’t feel the space. Others may argue that the architecture has wrapped up the exhibition, shaping the experience as diving through a series of vacuum walled by the concrete architecture.

Whatever the case, this seems to be the start of a healthy discussion on form and content.

Still, if there were anything else comparable between space and narrative, it would be in the realm of analogy and symbols. What does one expect of a space that aims to thread a narrative? It must dramatically represent itself; it must be acting. It not only is, but its role also suggests that it’s an art piece. (What’s more, it is self-

对页：《大芬画家》摄影灯箱和油画实物 本页：《深圳时间》多媒体影像 &《深圳 记忆》文献档案装置 Opposite: Painters in Dafen, photography and oil-painting This page: Shenzhen Time, multi-media image & Shengzhen Memory, archive-file installation

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本页：《再生盒》装置 对页：《七彩浮云》雕塑 This page: Recycle Box, installation Opposite: Crown-cloud, sculpture

孔呈现。如哲学家德勒兹和心理分析家伽塔利所说，特写镜头 恰恰是把脸孔作为人为景观呈现。场馆外墙的蒙娜丽莎尺寸出 乎寻常之大，是其既为暗示性的与观众联系的符号，亦为建筑 整体的脸孔和景观，因而亦是演员，亦在表演。 建筑的这种表演性大体来自其本身对情境和周围环境的 反应，在为时间的艺术和空间的艺术之间争取其地位。展览 方案设计初期曾设想过在场馆中真正引入现场的表演或行为 成分，现在以整个场馆包装为艺术品出现，其本身是以成为 表演者。回到外立面，它不是通过建筑语汇施以强大的存在 感并由统一的细节修饰而令人折服——作为一个世博会的馆 中之馆，此策略难免流俗。反而，它以符号代替了单纯的装 饰物——它“是”，同时也“暗示”，进而美感脱离了空间 领域，而进入与观众自由交流的，可读的，和多义的疆土。 当然，我们从来应该对象征符号变成的建筑物保持警惕—— 一种修辞手法，它们所传递的信息在建筑和景观中是否不过 于聒噪，是否令人赏心悦目，更重要的，这信息是否在与建 筑的对应中产生辩证，引人思索。这一点，“大芬丽莎”是 做到了： 建筑这张脸孔的眼睛是出入它的关键——当然不是说巨 幅蒙娜丽莎画像本已足够神秘的眼睛还藏有什么玄机，“眼 睛”应该是白墙上的黑洞，把所有吸收到其内部的无底洞， 与无条件反射一切的白墙相对比。未能籍此引人入胜的建筑 即好似没有明眸的脸孔，或者说一幅面具，面具实在不能确 保它修饰与保护之对象与身体的必然联系，亦不能由此断出 脸孔本身的建构（德勒兹和伽塔利）。

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explanatory that it is an art piece -- no doubt about that.)

Architecture commonly alters the quality of its surroundings through itself and, therefore, becomes a face in the landscape. Paintings follow the same process, only to present the whole of landscape as a face. As the French philosopher Deleuze and psychologist Guattari put it, facial close-ups transform a face into an artificial landscape. The super-scale Mona Lisa as the facade is both, a sign that communicates through allusion, and the face and landscape of the architecture as a whole. It is acting.

This performative aspect of architecture derives from its reaction to the situation and condition it lays in, struggling between being an art in time or an art in space. In the infant days of the project, the design team considered bringing in live performance or performance art; now the pavilion claims itself to be the performer. From the outside, it isn’t through chosen vocabulary and consequent detailed implementation that the pavilion’s strong persona is emanated. We may see too much of that in the World Expo.

Rather, it proposes a sign in place of decorations. Hence, aesthetics are made communicative, legible and polysemic. Of course, one should always be cautious of signs turning into architectures.— Is it mere rhetoric? Is it too ferocious? Does it generate a dialectical relation to the architecture? “Dafen Lisa” does it just right: The Eye is the key to entering the architectural face (one is not saying there should be any trick in the gigantic Mona Lisa painting). The Eye is the black hole on a White Wall. It takes everything in without any feedback, as opposed to the White Wall, which reflecting everything back without taking any in. Uninteresting architecture is like a face without Eyes, rather mask-like: the mask either assures the head’s belonging to the body, or assures the erection, the construction of the face.

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