Hangzhou tells exhibition proposal

‘Hangzhou Tells’ Exhibition Proposal and Museum Reviews

QIN YUN LIN

An old Chinese saying goes ‘there is a paradise in heaven, but there is Suzhou and Hangzhou on earth’. With more than 80 million tourists home and abroad every year, Hangzhou has an ambition to attract more international tourists. The city has been putting on adverts, with the catchphrase ‘Unseen Beauty’, on London’s double-decker buses and cabs since last year.

Hangzhou is well known by the West Lake (Xi Hu) and many people take a one-day tour to the city for the lake. However, Hangzhou city is advertised too narrowly on the West Lake and scenery. As a significant cultural centre for hundreds of years in eastern China, there is more worth visiting in the city. In this exhibition proposal, I tend to interpret Hangzhou as a place dwellers living in rather than a carrier of the lake. I believe it is the people and the stories enrich a city. The exhibition will present a ‘reading of the city as a layered parchment, with countless fragments of possible stories emerging through constant overwriting’, and more importantly, neither of the scenery nor story can be read in isolation or completeness. (Chaplin S. & Stara A., 2009, p.2) This exhibition will be related to my on-going project of rebranding Hangzhou to the international audience.

Hangzhou Adverts on cabs and double-decker buses in London

CONCEPT OF EXHIBITION ‘Hangzhou Tells’ will be an exhibition aiming at promoting the Hangzhou City as a travel destination to public in London by telling interesting stories happening in the city and certain supporting elements to create an immersive experience of daily life in the city. The exhibition is expected to expand the city image from a scenery spot to a lively and interesting city.

Through a unique and abstract representation, the exhibit is also expected to provide mnemonics of Hangzhou and raise the curiosity of viewers.

Urbanism have always been considered as complex and creative acts that are uniquely sensitive as they work on a scale that requires keen calibration between various extremes of function, attitudes, objectives and thoughts. It is reasonable to consider contemporary city as a ‘hybrid system’ that is constantly ‘becoming’. With different intentions, interventions and narratives involving in a city system, it is not possible to inform the whole city to exhibition viewers. Curators cannot expect to include everything when exhibiting cities.

It has been seen commonly in local museums to display a city from a huge scale like architecture, population, history, culture and main interests. However, to introduce a city to the audience never been there can be different. Instead of the whole ‘hybrid system’ of the city, choosing a small but detailed part, in this case meaning stories from the Hangzhounese and the city, to attract people and raise the curiosity of viewers so that they will have the motivation to explore the rest of the city by themselves. Approaching any information has been easier and easier due to the internet, but as the other edge of the sword, it is also becoming harder to make viewers be interested for the amount they might have seen online. The visiting is not worth telling unless it is a unique experience that is created and memorized.

LOCATION AND CONTENT The exhibition is curated for Hayward Project Space. The space is designed to accommodate regularly changing programmes of single installations and small exhibitions. It is free to the public and open all year round. Considering the previous exhibitions, which are in various types and styles, it is a suitable space for works of small size and particular point of view.

The works displayed in the exhibition will be divided into three rooms. Facing the entrance will be Room 1 displaying framed drawing maps on the wall and 4 teleportors in the middle of the room. Room 2 will be set with scent display aside the wall. Some videos will be put in View Area with sofas.

The main body of the exhibition will be the maps drawn from Hangzhounese to tell their best experience happened in the city. It is part of my on-going project. Every map will be mounted in wooden frame with natural colour. The city’s standard colour tone is grey and it is forbidden by the government to paint exterior walls in bright colours. A short description of the author, with photo and text, will be attached aside the map by transferring to the wall neatly.

The wall will maintain white in all rooms. In an initial thought, I tended to decorate the wall into a traditional Chinese flagging wall, which is the traditional building style of southern China. Nevertheless, according to the theory of Brain O’Doherty (1976), in the white cube space, the artwork is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself. White space provides art works expanse in imagination. The drawing maps in the exhibition with the description, as a role of story container, include large amount of information.

Surrounded by white, with no disturbance, the stories are provided the space to unfold to the viewers.

Sample blank map for people to draw

Traditional flagging wall and display artwork (Museum of Ningbo)

Teleporters of Chrome Web Lab in Science Museum, London

Live video wrapped onto a cylinder

After viewing drawings, visitors will be led to the display of teleporters in the middle of the room. They will provide bird’s views of the city through live webcams. With all the stories in mind, viewers will be shown a lively image of how the city looks like in a real-time view, which can be capped in the drawing maps and bring the stories to live. The teleporter technology is created by the Chrome Web Lab, displaying in the Science Museum, London.

According to the explanation from the developer, they distorted a flat piece of video using small programs called Shaders, which is more commonly used in video games. The live video is then wrapped onto a cylinder so that viewers can have the experience of exploring a panoramic 360 Ëš scene in real-time. (Chrome Web Lab, 2012) It is very attractive that the Lab also makes it possible to take and save live photos through the teleporters. Every photo is unique in the world for the real-time running. By emphasizing the timeliness, viewers are more engaged when realizing the scene random and unsettled.

Another supporting element will be presented is the scent of city in Room 2. Smell is our oldest sense and is the most powerful. About 2% of our genes are devoted to olfaction; other genes that can compare to this quantity are those for the immune system, which as we know are important for our survival. (Catherine Sarah Young, 2012) In the olfactory memory experiment called ‘Smellbound’ created by Catherine Sarah Young, the artist printed the smell by microencapsulation technology and let the participants guess the origin. When the participants are asked to describe the smell, people tend to link smell with specific memory.

For example, the smell of tea tree recalled the memory of winter and a really famous clothing store in India for it uses organic dyes. The idea of display a place by smell is supported by this project. Living in the city for 20 years, I believe the smells can represent the city can be chosen from below: Fragrant olive, Yulan magnolia, Wetland, Longjing Tea, Tide of Qiantang river, Incense from temples, Dongpo pork and Cong Bao Hui (a traditional street snake).

Some of them are very special and only belong to the city. In the exhibition ‘The Art of Scent’,

Exhibition ‘ The Art of Scent 1889-2012 ’ Museum of Arts and Design, New York

a special installation is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro as the showcase of scent. The designer is trying to ‘emphasize the distinct combination of artistry and raw materials’ (Senay Gokcen, 2012) and the genius of the use of dry fragrances in this part of the exhibit allows the ‘sniffer’ to go from one scent to the next without bringing the scent with viewers (Simon Tooley, 2013). To make the scent stand out, the space is minimally designed to be as close to white space as possible. I think, as a result, it is proven attractive and powerful. In Room 2, the descriptions will be transferred neatly on the wall above the showcase of scent, and other space will be kept white space with spotlight. In a quiet and imaginative atmosphere, it is expected that viewers can link the city stories with the scent.

The exhibition ‘Hangzhou Tells’ is set to attract the people visit art shows frequently and the people willing to travel to China. With the exhibition, I want to explore a way to showcase a city with less materiality beings and more abstract storytelling. My project ‘Hangzhou Tells’ is still on going and there are more drawings and stories to be collected. Everything is not completed yet and stays in a very conceptual stage. However, promoting my hometown is a thing I have passion working on in future and as a beautiful city, Hangzhou is definitely worth

BIBLIOGRAPHY • Chaplin S. & Stara A. (2009). Curating Architecture and The City. London: Routledge.

• Chrome Web Lab. (2012). How it works: Revealing the computer science behind each Chrome Experiment. [Internet]. Available from <http://www.chromeweblab.com/ basic/teleporter.html/>. [Accessed 13 March 2013].

• Gokcen S. (2012). The Art of Scent 1889-2012. [Internet]. Available from <http:// www.dexigner.com/news/26009>. [Accessed 13 March 2013].

• O’Doherty B. (1976). Inside the white cube : the ideology of the gallery space. Santa Monica : Lapis Press.

• Tooley S. (2013). Review: The Art of Scent (1889-2012) at the Museum of Arts and Design. [Internet]. Available from <http://www.etiket.ca/blog/review-the-art-of-scent1889-2012-at-the-museum-of-arts-and-design/>. [Accessed 13 March 2013].

• Young C.S. (2012). Smellbound: an olfactory memory Experiment. [Internet]. Available from <http://theperceptionalist.com/2012/02/25/smellbound-an-olfactory-memory-experiment/>. [Accessed 13 March 2013].

Review: The Museum of London

City is a canvas that carries and absorbs all the happenings with time. It is the most complex kind of story as covered layer by layer and everything is related to each other more or less. The duty of a city museum is to scan the canvas through very small details and highlight them up. By selecting certain elements of every layer of time, the story of a city build up. In the traditional sense, the purpose of building a museum of city is to educate the dwellers the city’s history - how the place has been changed step by step. Whereas, I find it differently in the case of Museum of London. Describing their own mission and purpose as ‘to inspire a passion for London, a passion for learning’, the Museum of London is putting efforts in inspiration while curating the story of city.

As a certain impression of viewers, through visiting, there is so much going on, especially the lower floor, which is telling the story of London from the Great Fire in 1666 to today.

Coming down from the upper floor through a zigzag routine, I believe the well-designed sign system plays a vital role. In the middle, the artwork LDN24 is inevitably eye-catching. This 48-metre-long elliptical chandelier screen features thousands of LEDs illuminating information from more than 35 real-time feeds, according to the Light Surgeons who designed it.

In the chronological galleries, London’s story is separated into three: Expanding City looks at London’s growth after the great fire, People’s City shows the massive development from 1850s to the 1940s, which covers the war period and World City displays the post-war and modern London as a creative and capitalist hub.

The curators emphasize the idea of people’s story and how city and the people influenced and changed each other in the exhibition. For example, the gallery of Victorian London is set as a narrow lane with caliginous streetlight. There are bakery, china shop and flat people living in. With everything unlabelled, the pressure of being educated is unloaded so that viewers are free to put themselves into the scene and into the time. The experience is enhanced and rather than reading description, viewers are expected to examine more of the details of the physical evidence of Victorian London. Aside the Victorian gallery, other galleries are labelled clearly with good introduction and short captions carrying the story along briskly. Technology is imaginative applied in various cases, touchable fountain with fish swimming, video running in the red phone boxes and etc. As a terrific idea of how museum can communicate with viewers, an interactive model of river Thames is asking visitors about the challenges London faces, and the opinion visitors holds to various aspects of London. It is very interesting that the Museum of London is making viewers to think, rather than look or acknowledge.

The galleries are dim, crowded, creative, and multifarious. Somehow everything gets into a harmony, just like the city. Everyone gets an own view of London but from the view of people’s story, London is well told. And it is unlikely that visitors are not inspired after visiting.

Review: Turbine Hall at Tate Modern

September 2012, Tate Modern unveiled a performance art work, ‘These Associations’, created by Anglo German artist Tino Sehgal. It is the first time a performance work being installed as the Turbine Hall commission and it is the only performance work among the 12 art pieces of Unilever Series. Performers wearing casual, young and old, men and women, sit, stand or walk among all the visitors. Suddenly they start to sing a hymn-like song. There are visitors walking through, staring at them and people trying to join them by picking up the words occasionally. You could not tell which one is a performer and who is just a visitor standing with them. And the show continues: the atmosphere in the hall changes. The capacious space echoes. It is filled by the singings and the air turned warm. People gather round, sit down and listen. Confounded the boundary of viewer and performers, everyone feels more blending in. It is dramatic but not estranging away from the daily life to install hymnsinging atmosphere into an industrial hall. Viewers are put into the performance stage and take a part in the stage. The stage iterates itself continually and gets more and more people involved as the powerful Turbine Hall holding it.

The Turbine Hall is frequently referred as ‘cathedral-like’ due to its spacious, emptiness and the heavy industrial tone it wears. The huge space creates innumerable potentials for artists and curators. Take the works from Tate Unilever Series as example. As all works created especially for Turbine Hall space, prodigious scale is possible and becomes a necessary choice of artists. Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas filled the whole space with the red gigantic sculptural itself. Kapoor said that he think the only way he could challenge the daunting height of Turbine Hall was paradoxically to use its length. Marsyas changed the hall thoroughly by taking possession of the whole emptiness and recombining it into a space of powerful monochromatic field. It was impossible to view the entire conformation of Marsyas. In stead, audience experience it as a ‘series of discrete encounters’, in which viewers are left to construct the whole of own mind.

The idea of putting gigantic artworks into Turbine Hall can be compared to the garish sculptures and flowery pipe organs in cathedrals. Once the breathtaking artwork installed in the hall, viewers are shocked by the power of art. But the power is not only from the work itself. The Turbine Hall contributes a lot. Just like in cathedrals, if you take all the sculptures down the wall, the space left is still stunning for its structure and sometimes simply for the emptiness.

About half the time of recent 12 years, the Turbine hall is occupied by artwork from Unilever Series. Visiting the hall when it is empty is like an experience as pilgrimage. With around 4.7million visitors coming worldwide, Tate Modern is one of the most visited contemporary museums. It is because the art collections. But to some extent, I believe it is also about the building.

QINYUN LIN

LIN11346010 Q.LIN017@ GMAIL.COM