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The Mobile Age: Part 3
He’s right too. Everyone would come. And not just for the raw dace carp, the Pertsovka infused with bhut jolokia “ghost” chilies. Vargas’ culinary sensibility is tuned more subtly to a cultural moment, references to place unencumbered by nostalgia for roots. He feeds a population that is in constant restless motion both physically and imaginatively. The masses. Expats thousands of kilometres from home in the newest hot spot on the planet. Locals with a suddenly exploding sense of what the world can offer. So it is that the experience of Azul Viva seems not to stem from globalization at all – that wide distribution of previously “local” ideas, that sense of a world where the distance between distinct places is shrinking. Instead, it seems to belong to something beyond locality itself, something beyond place. It’s true of Shanghai more broadly too. You can read the phenomenon in the city’s architecture. In Pudong, with its space-age Oriental Pearl, its comic-book megalith, the 88-storey Jin Mao Tower. But in People’s Square and Jing’an too, where every building bids for attention with a competitive architectural flourish. It’s a skyline that repudiates context, a cluster of drawing board ideas making as much intrinsic sense here as it would in, say, Dallas. “Shanghai wants what Hong Kong had in the 1980s,” photographer Greg Girard tells me, squinting a little skeptically as he remembers his own years spent in that formerly frenzied hub of the post-national. “Shanghai wants it all.” I find the phrasing astute. We’re sitting around the corner from the Starbucks in Xintiandi. The neighbourhood is an old-world-styled boutique mall, built around a few square blocks of restored shikumen longtang brick houses. These structures were once ubiquitous, defining the Shanghai social landscape, but are now being plowed under by the acre to make room for the construction sites, for the new forest of towers. Girard’s work has made this churning physical landscape one of its central concerns. In his newest book, Phantom Shanghai, a typical photograph depicts an exotic piece of Rococo European architecture, poised in the moments before destruction, adrift in the rubble of its former neighbourhood, while the gleaming spires and cranes of skyscraper-land catch sunlight in the distance. Here your view wraps up the vanished, the preserved, the emerging and the fait accompli all in a single glance, all of these folding toward and around one another in a single ideogram that represents the Shanghai future. |
