Dusk – Shanghai (text)

Dusk – Shanghai by Michael Atavar Dusk comes quickly. At 16:15 the sun is already halfway in the sky, slicing through a gap in the high-rise blocks. I'm here in Shanghai on a journey, trying to access a space of the unconscious, through light. Watching, standing still, waiting for things. For me the steps I take are this piece dusk. Qingpu, Mo Gan Shan Lu, Tongji, Pudong, Dong Daming Lu. This work, here on the page, is a record of the number of steps that I take on my journey. Down into a single breath. I'm travelling in the back of a taxi from Yangshupu Lu, near the Huangpu River, by the Yangpu Suspension Bridge. The site is a former general electric factory now being imaginatively reformatted into an art and architecture complex. On the taxi ride back the light begins to falter. Dusk comes early at 16:30. We get stuck in traffic and the sunset spills intermittently through the buildings turning the car bright gold. The city sends its spell of sensuousness across the evening air. High places, yellow slide motorway, chrome flowers. In the car I talk to Petra about my interest in shamanism – what I would describe as personal magic. This has come to us down the ages, through the dark tangle of the mind, but it can be clearly seen within a more codified form in its modern manifestation in psychotherapy and psychology. We talk about the magician – how he makes his spell. We, the audience, following the gold coin on its journey across imaginary air. From fingers, to pocket, to lapel, to ear. We journey with it and believe in its imaginary trajectory. We are the coins. But the magician is not the only one who can inhabit dusk. In fact it's a time that belongs to everyone. 16:15, 16:20, 16:35, 16:40, 16:50, 17:00. Watch it, then it's gone. The sky tips from rose, to orange, to gold. Even the ordinary man can own dusk for himself. It's free in the city – just breathe it in and you'll be everything. All the artist does is point at the sky. On the streets here at Mo Gan Shan Lu the debris is incredible. On the corner is a big green building that's a recycling station. Daily, huge piles of paper, polystyrene, plastic and metal arrive to be parcelled up and sent away again on handcarts and bicycles. People here are living on the street, in holes in the walls. I see a woman crouched on the floor slurping a bowl of noodles. A man counts some metal discs, a part of a previously crushed machine. Discarded in the west, these objects are precious commodities here – jumpers, shirts, knickers, socks all hung out to dry. I'm following a man pushing a cart filled with white polystyrene. In the darkness, from behind, it looks as though he's carrying a cloud. Surprisingly the legacy of communism is that people are not the same, or have access to the same things. They are different. There are multiple cities co-existing in the same place. The bright skyscrapers filled with electric light, minimum drinks charge 50 RMB and the more primitive streets, the debris, the effluent, the dirty river, both high and low often within a few yards of each other. Dusk makes everything one. It challenges the boundaries between this thing and the next, so the man with the polystyrene bundle can actually float up slowly step by step into the evening sky. I watch him go. My journey around this city is by cheap taxi or long-distance bus. Freed from the pedestrian nature of everyday life – the crowds, the shops, the subway – the journey by car allows me to meditate on the landscape, the sky, the colour and the people. The sun sets its dial to me and I respond with the click-click of my digital camera, recording images, impressions, sounds. Qingpu is a district of Shanghai on the outskirts of the city, where several modern buildings are being constructed, far away from the bustle of downtown. Here the evening sky meets me, spilling images of light down the wide highway. It appears endless, like I could walk on it forever, taking me somewhere unique, unpredictable, immense, powerful. I linger as long as I can taking photographs of the TV tower, trees, the road, cars whilst in the distance my companions try to flag down a taxi on the motorway's edge. Eventually I join them. At Qingpu sometimes the light hits the surface of the yellow glass building we're inside and turns the walls molten, even the pools of water on the road become fluid and sensual. A road, a reservoir, black branches of a tree fill out the sky. At 17:00 workers unload a delivery of bricks from a blue lorry and women on bicycles drive past looking at us. We're the different ones here and stand out. I think about seeing. What do I really look at when I see my world? The ordinary idea is that we emerge on to a stage that's already here even before we are born but Kōshō Uchiyama says that when we come into existence we bring our own individual world with us and when we die we take it away again. The world has no objective reality separate from us. I believe this but at dusk I really feel I fully understand it. My eyes come alive, my feelings vibrate and every object I encounter lights up with the magic of meeting it for the first time. In the sparkling silence of Qingpu I come towards a building, a tree, a TV tower, a lake without any preconceptions of what these things are. That night Petra, Alan and myself travel to a performance at DDM, a space in the warehouse district of Shanghai at Dong Daming Lu. On the road waiting to go home we find ourselves behind the backs of the big neon signs on the quayside, their bright fluorescent colours just visible. Here it feels like the reverse of the mirror, no man's land, the outside of the world. We jump in a taxi that's practically falling apart. I notice that wherever I travel from downtown home to Brilliant City where I'm living, the taxi ride always costs 32 RMB but every time the driver takes a different route. Motorway, back street, highway, interchange – it's always a completely unique way home. Dusk comes to this city by 22:00. From the 34th floor of my high-rise apartment I can see that the city is already shrouded in a foggy mist – the light defused, delegated. It feels like it's already mid-afternoon even on the sunniest of days. This lack of detail in the city gives rise to feeling and despite the inhospitable nature of the space, it's the feelings that come to the surface here. For example, I find that often humanity comes to meet me in the most unlikely places – walking to my studio at Mo Gan Shan Lu, on a freezing cold winter's day, in the middle of the afternoon, a homeless man living on the street, sleeping under a thin quilt, blithely waves at me. He's not begging, or selling DVDs, or watches, he's just saying 'Hello'. Dusk is a cocoon that allows the separation between things to dissolve, disintegrate. In the last short semaphore glimpses of the sun, engagement is possible and worlds come together – a person can see no separation between himself and a tree, money, a house, the sky. In Mircea Eliade's book Shamanism – Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy I read that the Altaic shaman ritually climbs the birch tree upwards, step by step, along the channels cut in the bark. I fantasise that he climbs the sky tree at dusk because the world of reality, as we know it, and the other worlds, of spirits, energy, liminal forces, are closer together at this hour. At dusk the nature of reality starts to blur. Streaks of shadows melt away the concrete, the day expands. So I wait here every day in Shanghai at 16:00, listening to the hum of subway trains, distant TV noise, firecrackers, car horns. Instead of the shaman's birch, in an impoverished act of improvisation, at dusk I climb the highest building in Shanghai, the Hyatt Hotel in Pudong, all fifty-four floors to the silvery-white internal atrium thirty-five storeys high. It's beautiful. What surprises me is that this hotel has brought dusk to the inside of the building 24 hours a day. Warm light creates a soft seductive cocoon of possibility in which relationships can happen – between client and receptionist, barman and drinker, lift attendant and public. Playful, powerful, hopeful. Outside the city is available from every window – east to The Bund, west to the new Superbrand Mall developments of Pudong and downstairs, from the entrance by taxi, to every corner of Shanghai that money can buy. But what you pay for in this super-expensive hotel is 'warmth' and 'light' and I don't mean just the overflowing central heating; you pay for the possibility of relationship, a metaphorical warmth that's offered to you for all your stay, if you can afford the price. As I walk back to the Lujiazui Underground Station I think about dusk. I believe that at this time of day relationship is possible and available to anyone, if you pay attention. It's a possibility for the sweet potato sellers at the ferry terminal, the McDonald's workers on the shoreline of Pudong, the DVD hawkers on Nanjing Lu, the homeless man on the street. All can participate in the possibility of feeling. And it's free. With this realisation the Shanghai fog disappears. Then the world changes again and the possibilities of dusk are over for another day. Surprisingly it takes me only 35 minutes to get home on the underground; even the carriages are half-empty. For Shanghai this truly is a miracle. Only when I go to Tongji University with Petra and Alan, to talk to the Department of Architecture, do I realise that my relationship with cities is really about relationship itself. It's about feelings. Su Yunsheng, the Head of the Team, says that Shanghai is often thought of as a woman – as opposed to the phallic city of government, Beijing. This makes sense to me – the soft, foggy nature of the drifting landscape here being the archetype of the feminine. Wu Yu, Su Yunsheng's friendly assistant, asks me what my conclusions are about architectural space. What is needed for conditions to be right for human beings? I say 'light' is really important, then I realise that what I mean is metaphorical light, access to the face-to-face, to contact, to mirroring, to dreaming. Although I've made a lot of work extolling the virtues of virtual space, it now seems to me that what really works is imaginative reality, i.e. what happens creatively now. In a world brimming with dislocation, Shanghai being a good example, it's the quality of presence, of interiority, of beauty, of sensuality, of transformation that I believe is really important. And you can only get that by looking at someone. That night, after a poorly cooked meal, parasites in my stomach bring me a strange disturbed sleep of ideas that no human drug could ever produce. My bed billows out into the night sky and floats in shamanistic space over the teeming, living city. I realise that my ironic distance keeps me away from the transformative space of the dreamer within myself. I was very moved when a Chinese student at Tongji University said to me after my talk, 'I think you are a poet.' Being here in Shanghai makes me realise that my energy needs to go outwards to contact, to connection, to correspondence. But I can only do that by going inwards to myself. Like a radio signal from a tall tower, beep-beep-beep, I say to the sleeping people below, 'I'm here, I'm here.’ The next day in the bright light of our balcony on the 34th floor, despite my feverishness, or because of it, I do a little dance, in praise of the not-blue sky of Shanghai. The experience strikes me as clearly related to my stay here – the value of displacement in another culture, without language or signposts, without goals, must surely be the importance of getting lost. It's also about a different kind of loss, an abandonment of the psychological self – something that's so valued in the West. Here, without the structures of the known self being consistently present, the experience allows me to see a bigger and different self emerging. A big self. An 'I' that doesn't see itself as different from places, objects, people. It's as big as the world. And the big 'I' can't get lost because wherever it finds itself it knows that it's always 'home'. Displacement in another culture is the ultimate opportunity. One week it's wonderful, two the fog starts to lift, three it's fading fast, four it's almost gone. Then you're back to being where you always were – yourself. But for that single pure moment you're invisible and yet at the same time the most complete version of yourself. You disappear and yet survive. Ironically it appears the only way to find your own self is to lose it. It's also useful to note that it doesn't need Shanghai, São Paulo, Los Angeles or even Berlin to do this. It can be done for you here, now, wherever you are. These techniques only facilitate or echo internal states. However valuable it is to be somewhere else, it isn't necessary to go there to have a different experience. You can do it now at your desk, in your office or in your own home. I believe that dusk itself can enable you to be receptive to different kinds of order, line and time. It can encourage a place in you where you can begin to see the dissolution between yourself and other objects. Physically at dusk you can actually see this happening. I keep thinking about dissolving. As I go with the out breath, I enter into loss, exchange, lack of meaning, absence of self. In this foggy city of mixed meanings – rules, formality, etiquette and freedom all overlapping and contradicting each other – it seems entirely appropriate to disappear, to blend in with the sunshine. On the trains and buses, I don't notice myself as different any more, I don't look at anyone, I just go with the crowd. I quickly press my underground pass down on the turnstile and head in. The window is closing. A skylight is sliding shut to obscure the sky. I'm coming down from my 34th-floor eyrie – a place where I can see narratives from afar – back down to the entanglement of the ground. People, houses, cars, trains – relationships, family, home. Before I leave I decide to visit Pudong, the redevelopment district on the other side of the Huangpu River, famous for its high-rise skyline. Once there my attention is drawn to the side streets around these tower blocks, where real people live. The ruins of low-rises which must have come and gone since Pudong's emergence barely ten years ago. These abandoned places aren't visible from M on The Bund or the windows of the Hyatt Hotel but I find their straight empty roads and their lack of façade totally beautiful. To get warm I eat in a McDonald's restaurant, 17.5 RMB for a Happy Meal of two Filet-o-Fish, fries and milky tea. It's delicious. Just down the road I buy pirate CDs in a shop – Air, Aphex Twin and Sigur Rós for 5 RMB each. I take a photograph of a scar on a burnt wall and when I've finished I turn around to find I'm surrounded by a group of street workers watching me. I suppose they're thinking why point your camera at a burn mark on a wall but for me the power of transformation inherent in Shanghai lies here at this intersection. Birds scatter, the roads are empty and you get the best view of the river, a straight walk to the motorbike ferry There are some spikes of glass on a wall which echo the architecture of the high-rise office blocks. It's 15:54 and the light begins to fade. I chase the sun along Zhangyang Lu, down to the ferry, where I follow the last blood-red drips of light across the river to Zhongshan Nanlu. The Kodak sign comes on bright red. Dusk moves to sunset and rapidly to night. The apartments light up against the black sky, abandoned hoardings silhouetted against the fading light. I'm following a window that's rapidly closing. With the sunset tonight comes a loss of magic, a failure of empowerment and the inability to lose myself. I finally know where I am. The chaos, the muddle, the street noise, the roar become part of me. I step off the pavement onto the east-side highway. My hands too cold almost to hold the camera, I take the last few photographs of the dying day. I go with the traffic into the night. During the making of this e-say I was reading David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous; Mircea Eliade, Shamanism – Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy; Shunryu Suzuki, Not Always So – Practising the True Spirit of Zen; Kōshō Uchiyama The Wholehearted Way – A Translation of Eihei Dōgen's Bendōwa and Richard Wilhelm's Translation of I-Ching or Book of Changes. (c) Michael Atavar 2006–2026