Are Cities Alive?
Virtual Art from Shanghai's Outstanding Art Gallery
www.outstandingartshanghai.com
All Images used with permission: © Outstanding Art
When you enter a city you get a feel for it. The feeling comes through the people you see, the sounds you hear, the way the streets unfold, the plants and animals, the buildings. The city feels alive, albeit in healthy or unhealthy ways. It is not alive the way an individual organism is alive. It does not have its own skin, which separates it sharply from the surrounding area. But it does have boundaries and city limits. It has its permeable membranes. Come to think of it, the city is like an individual organism.
Does the city have a soul? Is there a seat of awareness, residing somewhere close to its downtown area (maybe its financial district) where someone directs things? Maybe not. Maybe the soul of a city, like the soul of a human being, is more fluid and malleable, changing over time, moment by moment, but with continuities. Maybe the city has a Buddhist kind of soul: a soul that unfolds over time and is never quite the same at any two instants.
Still there are the continuities. They are the feeling-tones, the hopes and dreams, the memories and fears, the ideas and images, that flow throughout the city, affecting its inhabitants. They can be as pluralistic and differentiated as are the inhabitants themselves. A city may have many souls and they may be in conflict. Poor souls and rich souls; happy souls and sad souls; mean-spirited souls and kind souls; generous souls and greedy souls. Maybe all of these are part of the soul of a city.
This means that the soul is a city, like that of a human being, is complex, multi-faceted, and field-like rather than particulate. It is not exactly located anywhere. It is everywhere at once. And maybe the art of a city -- and the art displayed in a city -- reveals some of these feeling-tones. Maybe this is true of the architecture, too, which is a form of art. And of the way in which, in art, architecture is presented. Consider Shanghai and its many large buildings. Shanghai's large buildings are part of the make-up of its soul.
Does the city have a soul? Is there a seat of awareness, residing somewhere close to its downtown area (maybe its financial district) where someone directs things? Maybe not. Maybe the soul of a city, like the soul of a human being, is more fluid and malleable, changing over time, moment by moment, but with continuities. Maybe the city has a Buddhist kind of soul: a soul that unfolds over time and is never quite the same at any two instants.
Still there are the continuities. They are the feeling-tones, the hopes and dreams, the memories and fears, the ideas and images, that flow throughout the city, affecting its inhabitants. They can be as pluralistic and differentiated as are the inhabitants themselves. A city may have many souls and they may be in conflict. Poor souls and rich souls; happy souls and sad souls; mean-spirited souls and kind souls; generous souls and greedy souls. Maybe all of these are part of the soul of a city.
This means that the soul is a city, like that of a human being, is complex, multi-faceted, and field-like rather than particulate. It is not exactly located anywhere. It is everywhere at once. And maybe the art of a city -- and the art displayed in a city -- reveals some of these feeling-tones. Maybe this is true of the architecture, too, which is a form of art. And of the way in which, in art, architecture is presented. Consider Shanghai and its many large buildings. Shanghai's large buildings are part of the make-up of its soul.
Shanghai's Outstanding Art Gallery
What are buildings? Some of the buildings in Shanghai are closed and isolated. They are filled with officials who do not want to be observed. But others are like flowers for those with eyes to see. They blossom forth with their petals, saying to the world "I am here. Come explore me." They rise out of the ground like ordinary people saying, "Come into my mind, you will find a thousand rooms."
One such open building is Outstanding Art, located at M50 Art Zone in Shanghai. It is a professional art gallery specializing in Chinese contemporary arts. It doesn't have a thousand rooms, but it does have a thousand ideas, thanks to its creative director, Elizabeth Wu, and her staff. Since its establishment in 2005, Outstanding Art has gained fame both in China and in other parts of the world. It has two independent galleries in Moganshan Art Zone of Shanghai. We encourage JJB readers to visit its galleries when in Shanghai and explore its website. We will be sharing some of its art in the months to come, and you'll find one "virtual" example below called Flowers of Shanghai.
Flowers of Shanghai raises a basic question for all readers of JJB, wherever we are in the world. Can large Chinese cities -- Shanghai, for example -- be places that combine architectural design with organic form, such that they are humane and sustainable places to live. Can they be places where buildings partake of the essence of flowers, people, fruit. (We'll toss in sports, too, since one of the images is of a basketball player.) Indeed, do the buildings of some large cities already partake of such forms in their own ways, such that their architectural realities have lives of their their own.
But quite apart from such urgent questions, there is simply the fact that Shanghai is, in its way, a city bursting with organicism. Whitehead's "philosophy of organism" invites us to imagine that all things have a kind of life in them, not reducible to dead matter. In the images of Shanghai above, there is no dead matter at all. There is simply life -- a kind of humanized and vegetabalized qi -- bursting forth, again and again, from the buildings, saying "Here I am." The very idea of "dead matter" is a recent and somewhat Western idea. One way or another, says Whitehead, everything is alive in its way.
What are buildings? Some of the buildings in Shanghai are closed and isolated. They are filled with officials who do not want to be observed. But others are like flowers for those with eyes to see. They blossom forth with their petals, saying to the world "I am here. Come explore me." They rise out of the ground like ordinary people saying, "Come into my mind, you will find a thousand rooms."
One such open building is Outstanding Art, located at M50 Art Zone in Shanghai. It is a professional art gallery specializing in Chinese contemporary arts. It doesn't have a thousand rooms, but it does have a thousand ideas, thanks to its creative director, Elizabeth Wu, and her staff. Since its establishment in 2005, Outstanding Art has gained fame both in China and in other parts of the world. It has two independent galleries in Moganshan Art Zone of Shanghai. We encourage JJB readers to visit its galleries when in Shanghai and explore its website. We will be sharing some of its art in the months to come, and you'll find one "virtual" example below called Flowers of Shanghai.
Flowers of Shanghai raises a basic question for all readers of JJB, wherever we are in the world. Can large Chinese cities -- Shanghai, for example -- be places that combine architectural design with organic form, such that they are humane and sustainable places to live. Can they be places where buildings partake of the essence of flowers, people, fruit. (We'll toss in sports, too, since one of the images is of a basketball player.) Indeed, do the buildings of some large cities already partake of such forms in their own ways, such that their architectural realities have lives of their their own.
But quite apart from such urgent questions, there is simply the fact that Shanghai is, in its way, a city bursting with organicism. Whitehead's "philosophy of organism" invites us to imagine that all things have a kind of life in them, not reducible to dead matter. In the images of Shanghai above, there is no dead matter at all. There is simply life -- a kind of humanized and vegetabalized qi -- bursting forth, again and again, from the buildings, saying "Here I am." The very idea of "dead matter" is a recent and somewhat Western idea. One way or another, says Whitehead, everything is alive in its way.
Copyright 2010 Outstanding Art
