🇨🇳 Shanghai - Art Galleries, Immersive Theatre, Clubbing

Chasing the proverbial dragon

After having just been to Beijing and Seoul, I was thinking of skipping Shanghai. I kept it in the end, and I’m glad I did so. It’s a very modern city, with lots of emphasis on ancient and contemporary culture. That comes in the form of interesting architecture, a good music scene, and some of the best galleries I’ve been to. It was also much more lively and easier to navigate than Beijing, which was also a relief.

Art Galleries

Shanghai is full of art galleries. I could spend weeks hopping between them, so instead, I only went to the ones that interested me the most.

Propaganda Poster Art Centre

This gallery was a little hard to find, located upstairs in a hotel. You wouldn’t come across it accidentally. It houses a fascinating collection of Chinese propaganda posters, dating back to the 60s. It was a great way to learn about Chinese history, and having spoken to my parents about them, they shared a lot of similarities to Polish propaganda posters during the Cold War.

In the gallery’s gift shop, you could buy some of the posters and even old children’s workbooks. One of the first sentences you’d learn in English class in China under Mao’s rule was apparently “I wish Chairman Mao a long life”.

Techno Worlds at the Power Station of Art

This was an exhibition on techno and the surrounding culture. It was set in The Power Station of Art, an art gallery set in an old power station. It’s one of the coolest gallery spaces I’ve been to.

I was excited for this, and a few of the exhibits were interesting. I particularly liked a collection of 90s German pop culture magazines. Sadly, much of the rest of the exhibition felt like duds, with the works feeling a little contrived.

Fotografiska

I visited Fotografiska in Stockholm before, and it’s remained one of my favourite galleries. It’s a photography gallery which felt really well curated, had a good variety, and was open until 11 PM daily. I think the opening times alone made it shine; I loved being able to go to an art gallery in the evening.

I was pleased to find that the same pros carried over to Shanghai. My favourite exhibition here was from the Beijing Silvermine archive. It’s an archive of photos from film found in a recycling plant in Beijing. It reminded me a bit of those rammed vintage shops that sell random people’s old photos, except it was curated a little a this time. Through the photos, I could be exposed to a dimension of Chinese culture that you’d only otherwise get if you looked at a Chinese friend’s family photo album.

Sightseeing

There’s a touristy place in Shanghai called Yu Garden, which gets lit up at night. Admittedly it looks cool when you’re there, but it does feel like something that’s made entirely for tourists, so I didn’t spend too long there.

I spent much more time looking at the ugly buildings in Shanghai. 1993 Old Millfun was a highlight. It’s an old brutalist building that used to be the biggest slaughterhouse in Shanghai. Now it’s home to edgy fashion brands, empty rooms, and a Starbucks.

I spent a while exploring the place, with a lot of it being largely abandoned. It was designed in such a manner that there were many alternate ways to navigate horizontally and vertically throughout the building. A design more reminiscent of a Berlin nightclub, not quite a slaughterhouse. If you like the Barbican in London, you’d love this place.

Other than that, I spent a good bit of time strolling around the river at night with a local, passing Chinese uncles fishing on the riverbank. It was peaceful and felt very safe.

Immersive Theatre - ‘Sleep No More’ by Punchdrunk

Punchdrunk is a company that puts on immersive theatre productions. I’ve been to 3 of their productions in London, and while they’ve varied in quality, they’ve always felt unique and left me with plenty to think about. I remembered that they put on things in Shanghai before, and as luck would have it, they had a production on right when I was visiting - “Sleep No More”.

The production was allegedly based on the story of Macbeth, but to be honest, it was really hard to follow. That’s due to the story being told with many plotlines on the go concurrently, so you only get to cover part of the story during your visit. Part of the fun is piecing the plot together with your friends afterwards, who have likely seen parts that you didn’t.

If you’ve seen The Burnt City by Punchdrunk, then the structure of the whole production was pretty much identical. If you haven’t, then I’ll describe it briefly. On the way in, you’re broken up into groups and given a plague doctor-esque mask. Throughout the production, you can follow the actors as they act out plot lines in front of you, but not communicate with them. Otherwise, you can explore the set and all the props however you like.

A bar you can go to before and after the production

Overall, I enjoyed the production, especially the more choreographed parts. The set was also well-designed and worthy of admiration by itself. However, having seen The Burnt City and the story being difficult to follow, it fell a little short for me. For a first-time viewer, I think this would have been very impressive. They’ve really tightened a lot of the weak parts from The Burnt City, for example, the filler dialogue between side characters, and much less (or none that I witnessed) looping of plotlines. In fact, there was no dialogue at all, making it accessible to anyone who doesn’t speak Mandarin.

The production also maintained some of the magic from The Burnt City - the highlight of that for me was one of the actors taking me to a small room and enacting part of the story with only me present. The same thing happened to me in Sleep No More, exposing me to a pretty interesting part of the story that not many other people would have seen.

I don’t know if I’m chasing the dragon by continuing to see Punchdrunk’s productions. They always leave me feeling simultaneously impressed by the novelty, but also underwhelmed by the storytelling. ‘Viola’s Room’ is my favourite production of theirs, which had a much more linear story and better tapped into the immersive element through a carefully designed soundtrack. The groups were much smaller there, though, so maybe due to the logistics of a larger audience, it’s too difficult to tell a convincing story.

The theatre was also outside a curiously named agency; I had to snap a photo.

run the riddim

Clubbing - Kavari at Reactor

I stayed in Shanghai for a little while to catch Kavari playing at Reactor (RA link). Being left wanting more after my last two nights out in Asia, I was hoping that seeing a DJ and producer I adore would break that streak. Kavari blends various harder electronic music genres with the occasional tasteful edit and her own masterful productions (‘Attachment Style’ getting Aphex Twin’s co-sign).

Reactor is the coolest venue I’ve been to in Asia so far. It’s spacious and industrial-looking. At the same time, it’s got a good sound system, and the techs were very alert with the lights and smoke. The crowd looked cool to boot, everyone trying to dress more alternatively than the next person. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many liberty spikes in person.

Kavari played a solid 2-hour set. It was very drop-heavy, though, making it feel more like a gig than a club night where you can really get in a sustained groove. In retrospect, though, I think maybe this was to keep the crowd interested. Despite the crowd looking cool, most only started swaying after about 40 minutes of collecting footage for their VPN-powered Instagram stories. There was a small group of people at the front dancing away around a really locked-in tall Chinese guy, so I stuck with them.

After Kavari’s set, the club nearly completely emptied despite there being about 3 hours until closing - similar to what I’ve experienced in Beijing. It’s a bit of a shame as the DJ after Kavari, Vibekiller, was playing some really good stuff. Another dragon I’ll be chasing for the rest of my travels is going to a club night here where the crowd feels entranced. Taipei and Tokyo have a low bar to meet.

Marriage Market

The Shanghai Marriage Market is a regular matchmaking event held on weekends in a park. Parents of unmarried adults gather to find partners for their children, with the children not present. The park gets filled with adverts of prospective partners, listing their attributes such as height, occupation, and salary.

I went through the market briefly, as I was aware that using this gathering of anxious parents as a tourist attraction might not be well perceived. I found the market fascinating; it’s so different from the dating customs I’m used to. It especially seemed that property ownership, rank in corporate hierarchy, and height were paramount to being desired - things that don’t matter to me and many people I know. Very few adverts also had photos on them or listed physical features other than height. If I wasn’t unemployed and owned property, I’d be a catch here.

Food

I was eating well in Shanghai. Some of my highlights were:

• Incredible Sichuan noodles from a place under my hostel.

• Authentic steamed buns and wontons from a place seemingly frequented by old people. I would go here every morning for breakfast, with the buns running me 25p each (15 times less than what you can get in London’s Chinatown).

• A small plates vegetarian restaurant, which had very reasonable prices and amazing vegetarian versions of Chinese staples.

• This coconut-heavy dessert place. It wasn’t clear what they were selling from outside, so I popped in and ordered the most popular thing after seeing it was coconut-related. I ended up getting a coconut mousse inside a coconut, with two different types of coconut shavings on top, and a tool to scrape the coconut off the sides. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but I was honestly blown away. I returned twice, and sadly, they ran out of coconut both times. At this point there’s an army of dragons I’m chasing.

China’s Google Maps alternative, Amap, is pretty bad for restaurant recommendations, so I’ve mostly just been going to restaurants that look full of Chinese people. The Chinese use another app called ‘Dianping’ for restaurant recommendations, but sadly, the UI is unworkable after you translate it to English in WeChat, so I found using it is just not worth the effort. Saying this, a bit of a game-changer for me has been finding a WeChat program that shows vegetarian and vegan restaurants nearby, called ‘素食雷达’. There’s one restaurant it listed that I tried looking for, but I think it renamed:

The Chinese make up poetic names for many of their dishes, instead of just describing what’s in them. This results in some amazing English translations, which are part of the fun of going to a restaurant here:

One what a fucking goddam.🦐 please lao ban 🙏

As a little cherry on top, I’ve also gone to, I think, the coolest cocktail bar I’ve ever been to, called Bar Rock. It’s a Tibetan bar, with the cocktail menu being Tibetan-inspired and using ingredients local to the Himalayas. It reminded me a lot of my time in Nepal, which I hugely cherish. The design of the menu was incredible and I spent a long time admiring it.

The bar had the wanky listening bar-type setup you get in some cocktail bars, with Louie Parker providing the perfect backdrop for the night. You can take the boy out of East London, but you can’t take East London out of the boy.