Shenzhen Biennale: glowing stairs and metal-free bras are the Chinese dream
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Version 0 of 1. Tall stacks of brightly coloured shipping containers teeter beneath orange cliffs, while endless cranes march out into the misty distance, bobbing their heads like an army of mechanical storks. Down below, teams of workers are welding vast sheets of steel, as a horizon of glassy towers fades into the smog. This 360-degree panorama of production – which feels like watching the live making of modern China – is what awaits visitors at the top of an old silo building in the port of Shenzhen, where the city's fifth Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture opens this month. “It is a fantastic place to ponder the position of the country, culturally and economically, in the world,” says Ole Bouman, the Dutch curator of this year's exhibition, standing on the wooden deck that bridges the top of the silos, projecting out towards the port like a vertiginous gangplank. Over 200m tonnes of cargo come and go here every year, fuelling the hyper-speed development of a city that was nothing more than a fishing village 35 years ago – and is now a teeming metropolis of 15 million people. “A new high-rise every day and a new boulevard every three,” was Shenzhen's motto in the early 1990s, as towers sprouted from rice fields at what became known as “Shenzhen speed.” Now, sprawling below us, are the defunct sheds that helped to make that possible: the furnaces, production plants and storage yards of the old Guangdong Float Glass Factory, the world's largest manufacturer of curtain-wall glazing until it closed in 2009. “This place was the seed of modern China,” says Bouman, sweeping his arm over the Shekou Industrial Zone, where the factory sits. The tip of this peninsula at the bottom of the Pearl River Delta was the testing ground for what would become the country's first Special Economic Zone in 1979. It was where China first flirted with land reform and private enterprise, a deregulated laboratory that would soon foster an amorous embrace of free-market capitalism, cementing Shenzhen's position as the country's “Trailblazing Ox”. Triumphant displays in the city museum recount how “the thunder of bombing mountains” could be heard across the region in the 1970s, as hills were flattened to make way for the port and “old systems were bluntly smashed”. Shekou port is central to the narrative as the hallowed site of “the first blasting” of Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up policy – the very place where it all began. “The glass factory was one of the first industries here,” says Bouman. “It provided the face of cities all over the world, from cars to building facades – it was the key ingredient of modernity.” After lying derelict for the last four years, the rambling 12 hectare complex has now been opened up for the biennale, its gargantuan halls and towering silos transformed into exhibition spaces, recast as the “Value Factory”. A master of the polemic platitude, Bouman weaves his own role into the grand narrative, asserting that this year's biennale represents a “demarcation from the city's industrial past to its cultural future.” The appropriation of the factory marks a shift in Shenzhen, he says, “from just mass-production to creating value through quality.” So how does an architecture show attempt to embody such radical change? With 4.3 hectares of floor area (the equivalent of six football pitches), the factory is a big place to fill. Thankfully, the decision has been to leave much of it empty. Walking into the machine hall is similar to entering Rotherham's Magna Centre or the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. A new elevated walkway, with glowing handrails, skirts around the colossal void, leading to smaller exhibition rooms. Here, a number of international cultural institutions have been invited to put on mini shows. From Rotterdam's New Institute, to New York's MoMA and Rome's Maxxi, they range from the vaguely intriguing to the downright embarrassing, as curators have struggled to interpret the loose theme of “urban border” through variously immersive, participatory, but often meaningless installations. By far and away the highlight is the V&A's contribution, which does the radical thing of doing what it does best: displaying a collection of artefacts through which an engaging story can be told. Curated by Kieran Long and Corinna Gardner, of the museum's new contemporary architecture and design department, it is the first product of their “Rapid Response Collecting” initiative. A light-footed approach to acquisition, it is predicated on collecting key zeitgeist objects, from the first 3D-printed gun, to a pair of Primark jeans made in the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh the week it collapsed. For the biennale, the pair have invited architects, designers and curators engaged with Shenzhen to nominate objects that give a picture of the city at the moment. The results are everything from locally-manufactured iPhone fakes (that improve on the original, with double SIM card slots and even cigarette lighters built-in), to metal-free bras that allow women workers to avoid invasive searches at factory gates. There are piles of parking tickets (an irritation, rather than a deterrent, for Shenzhen's city slickers), and the standardised school uniform trousers – which students continue to wear with pride after graduating, as an identifying marker when in other cities, a bit like a college scarf. Throughout the preview days, the V&A space was always the busiest, proving that people prefer looking at things they can understand, with concise captions, rather than being baffled by walls of text and obfuscating interactive nonsense. OMA's room is another highlight, presenting a forensic analysis of the roofing chapter of the Yingzao Fashi, one of China's earliest construction manuals, written in 1100AD. Over the course of the exhibition, the practice will construct an intricate scale replica of these ancient joinery techniques in blue styrofoam, through workshops with local students. The results will be exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale next summer as part of OMA's study of the Elements of Architecture, which promises to be a refreshing examination of how and why we make buildings. An even more primal architectural experience is to be found next door, where the silos have been transformed into an immersive exploratory route, which Bouman describes as “an adventure in which you meet all the qualities of architecture. No fancy installations, no distractions, just architecture itself, speaking.” Walking through the gaping containers is a thrilling experience, enhanced by the surreal clanging of a timber beam swinging inside one of the tallest tanks, and a Piranesian stair spiralling down through a concrete vat. These are spaces with a latent, soot-encrusted charge as powerful as the Tate Tanks, or the coal refineries and gasometers of the Emscher Park in Germany. Substantial effort has been put into the erection of new walkways, staircases and platforms around the site, to provide changing perspectives on the complex of concrete hulks, along with a big elevated restaurant that rises on stilts above one machine hall in a touch of surrealist whimsy. But the question remains as to why quite so much permanent infrastructure has been built for a rather content-light three-month exhibition? “We see the biennale as an urban catalyst,” says Bouman, dodging the question. “It is a vehicle for real urban change.” He says he has no idea what the final budget was, but estimates the sponsor, developer China Merchants, which owns the site, must have spent around RMB 60m (£6m) on the renovation. And their long-term plan? “Nobody knows,” he says. “Their original masterplan didn't retain the factory building at all, just lots of towers built across the site. But it feels like there's been a shift. Our idea was to really expose the building's incredible qualities, to postpone the question of demolishing it – and maybe the question never returns.” He sees the Value Factory as a long-term endeavour, the biennale as a “test phase, to learn how to programme it more precisely.” The participating international institutions, he says, “now have an address in Shenzhen”. A brand new road – apparently also built for the biennale – connects the factory with the old customs warehouse on the other side of the port, where co-curators Li Xiangning and Jeffrey Johnson have put on what they describe as a “more academic” interpretation of the theme, a “documentary on border conditions.” Once again, there is much that can be skipped – from models of Ma Yansong's blobby mountain-shaped buildings for Nanjing, to sub-Atelier Bow Wow axonometric drawings of informal urban conditions – but there are highlights in the work selected by local architect Young Zhang. A particularly provocative series of proposals, by Shenzhen practice FCHA, takes the frontier tensions with Hong Kong as a starting point for a group of new hybrid border buildings. From the 16,000 primary school children who cross the border daily for free education in Hong Kong, to those who travel to Shenzhen for cut-price cosmetic surgery, to the elderly Chinese people who smuggle back lucrative baby milk powder to the mainland, the plethora of cross-border transactions lead to fantastical structures housing deregulated trading posts of mutual benefit. It is one of few exhibits in the entire biennale (which also includes a smaller Hong Kong section, not open at the time of writing) that tackles the border debate head-on, leaving a nagging feeling that there is so much deeper ground to be mined, over which most of the exhibition skims. We are now almost a third of the way into the 50-year period, following the handover of Hong Kong, of the “one country, two systems” agreement, set to expire in 2047, when in theory the border could be lifted. It is such a contentious issue that no one wants to talk about it, indeed most Hong Kongers are in denial that the day will ever come. But what happens up to and beyond that point is some of the richest territory for architectural and urban speculation in the region, as the two social, legal and financial systems collide – and yet it is curiously absent from much of the biennale. The reason is perhaps because the actual content of this biennial extravaganza is always doomed to play second fiddle to the commercial role it serves in the lucrative development of the city's fallow districts. Visiting the OCT Lofts today, a former industrial area nearer the centre of Shenzhen that has hosted the biennale in the past, is a vivid lesson in the power fleeting cultural events can play. It is a fairytale vision of Richard Florida with Chinese characteristics: a branch of Starbucks now peeps out from an old warehouse, across from a group of expansive gallery buildings, where a weekly crafts market convenes to peddle wares to the city's cappuccino-supping youth. The developer, OCT, has not been slow to realise the added value to its development of luxury apartments nearby. This is the future, no doubt, of Shekou. And it is maybe no bad thing. OMA has been commissioned to plan a brand new district between the glass factory and the customs warehouse, which will take the form of a field of towers, intersected by what looks startlingly like Rem Koolhaas's Exodus project and a halo of housing. Will it be the realisation of his Generic City dystopia? Probably. But if the glass factory survives, along with the customs warehouse and the other bits of youthful 1980s heritage that dot the area, then Bouman and his team can be congratulated for preserving one of the first physical fragments of the Chinese Dream. I'm just not sure they needed to put on a biennale to do it. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |