Several years ago, Benjamin Godsill, curator at New York’s New Museum, began a search for a contemporary art culture in China. Instead, Godsill found a young, new magazine called Urban China that confronts the very current issues of the rapid urbanization in China and the transformation, movement and migration from rural areas to urban metropolises.
On April 26, the corner of Westwood and Wilshire Boulevards will become not only an intersection of roads, but also an intersection of ideas, cultures and worlds. In coordination with Godsill and the New Museum, the UCLA Hammer Museum’s newest exhibit, “Urban China: Informal Cities,” will bring the magazine to life as a full-scale installation.
Founded late in 2004, Urban China Magazine is the first and only magazine to directly confront the issues presented by China and its rapid urbanization. Thirty-six issues later, Urban China Magazine has evolved into a multi-dimensional medium synthesizing text and graphic design fleshing out and exploring where urban civilian voices and governmental policies divide.
“There is a gap between decision-makers and people in the centralized system of China,” said Jiang Jun, the editor-in-chief of Urban China Magazine. “This publication could be a bridge between the gap for both parts understanding each other to generate common ground in China’s urbanization.”
The Hammer Museum and Godsill have taken two-dimensional media and visual art of Urban China Magazine and expanded it into a three-dimensional graphic installation.
“We wanted to tap into the magazine’s intellectual fervor by making a physical manifestation of all the research and all the facts and the thousands of photos,” Godsill said. “We took a massive graphic file that brings in salient points and mini-graphs and turned it into a huge wallpaper that takes over the wall.”
Although the magazine itself is mostly in Chinese, the universality of images and design provides a bridge to the Hammer’s Los Angeles-based audience.
“The exhibit is so graphically compelling it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand what’s written,” Godsill said. “It’s not always about understanding all of it, but putting new filters in our mind allowing us to see the world in a different way and changing our abilities to view the world.”
The wallpaper presents the possibilities of interconnectivity between concepts such as “seasonal demography” ““ the daily movement of people throughout a city ““ and “dirtitecture” ““ architecture made of dirt or the process of living in dirt ““ with respect to the rapid urbanization occurring in contemporary China. Several computers stationed around the room will allow visitors access to massive databases and more than 5,000 images related to the ideas and themes presented by Urban China, creating a free-flowing network of information instantaneously customizable to each visitor’s interests.
“It’s like a “˜Choose Your Own Adventure,'” said Jessica Hough, the director of exhibitions, publications and programs at the Hammer Museum. “Some exhibitions are linear and passive, where you start at one place and end somewhere else, but because of the Internet and the way we surf through ideas today, even if you start looking in one direction, you often end up in odd places. We want this to have a similar experience.”
Through this nonlinear format, the exhibition hopes not only to represent Urban China’s basic themes, but also to recreate the dialectical discourse it embodies. “The exhibit is really about getting people to think differently about cities and strategies for survival, living and adaptation in the face of urbanization,” Hough said. “This is just a seed for thinking about other kinds of things.”
It is that very discussion that Sylvia Lavin ““ the director of critical studies and of the master’s and doctoral programs at the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design ““ hopes to prompt.
Lavin has put together related programming, “Conversations on Urban China,” which will feature an international compilation of architects, artists and curators addressing the issues, problems and solutions posed by rapid urbanization and the magazine’s relationship to it.
“China is not known for encouraging alternative understandings of its workings,” Lavin said. “The interest of the publication in the West is because it’s both telling people outside of China, but also inside China what’s happening and doing so with a flair and street style that begins to produce some room for critical discussion.”
In this sense, both Urban China and the Hammer’s exhibit share common goals.
“It’s not just about the final static issue. It’s about the back-and-forth between writers, editors, photographers and the readers,” Godsill said. “We want to capture that discursive energy like you’ve just finished a great conversation with three friends.”
Just as Urban China seeks to open discussion in China, the Hammer’s exhibit also hopes to provoke equal amounts of dialogue.
“It’s active. It won’t be clear where art and culture become information, science and sociology,” Lavin said. “It’s definitely not going to look like a painting on a wall.”