A Resonant Boom

Wang Gangfeng is a happy man. He tells me as much one afternoon in Shanghai. The photographer sits in his studio in the city’s west end. The studio occupies an upperfloor corner that in its day may have housed a dozen families in the forced intimacy for which China, and especially Shanghai, remains notorious. Now Wang, a boyish fifty-year-old attired in all black, including leather pants and boots, has the space to himself. Appropriately, he is equally the self-styled “first freelance photographer in China” and proprietor of the “Gang of One,” a business name drawn from a pun on the infamous Gang of Four clique that terrorized China in the 1970s.

His walls are as crowded as any city block. Though Wang earns his living doing commercial work, his art lies in portrait photography that shirks neither Shanghai grit nor rural backwardness. Images include elderly ladies in alleyways and bicyclists pushing impossible loads. His lens is intimate, and with even the most impersonal shots, including a well-known photo of a solitary biker parting a sea of fellow travellers heading in the opposite direction, the eye is drawn to the often serene expressions worn by those going about their arduous business.

It is a pleasure to meet Wang Gangfeng again after many years. I am back in Shanghai to talk to locals about the transformation of their city into a twenty-first-century colossus and — in the views of certain critics — an emblem of urban living at its most sterile and inhuman. Wang’s thinking, like his photography, reflects a sensibility particular to some Chinese; it is characterized by an elasticity of thought which seeks to reconcile the grand with the intimate, public necessity with private destiny. Such thinking may be how individuals here negotiate powerful impulses within the culture, especially tendencies toward the gargantuan. It may also be how they survive these impulses, and find a kind of beauty and selfesteem in the landscape they inhabit.

Wang, who returned to China from a self-imposed exile in Canada in 1995, says of the new Shanghai, “I am very happy to witness this period of history.” He likens it to nothing less monumental than the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the gold rush in America. But Wang’s observations about the upheaval, which has seen the city expand horizontally and vertically beyond even the most fevered of central-committee imaginings — as well as across the Huangpu River in the form of Pudong, a mirror of Shanghai that literally did not exist two decades ago — aren’t those of an urban planner, aloof from the consequences of his grand schemes.

In the 1990s, Wang’s parents were among the hundreds of thousands of Shanghainese displaced by the levelling of entire neighbourhoods for redevelopment as high-rise and commercial zones, or else to allow for the expressways that now lattice the city. His family wound up content with their replacement dwelling in an outlying suburb, but only after much anxiety, financial and otherwise. The photographer is a defender of the few remaining shikumen, the traditional red-brick neighbourhoods whose destruction has become almost a visual cliché for heedless progress. (Of the ten Shanghai photos in the book China, by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, for instance, no fewer than seven feature destroyed or partially destroyed housing units.) Wang now gives walking tours of the shikumen where he was raised, mostly for curious foreigners.

His own apartment, where he lives with his wife and young son, is in a new building, however, and he is stoic about local ambivalence toward these reminders of pre-transformed Shanghai. “My neighbours and friends don’t see anything special in the old houses,” he says. “Either they want modern apartments or else they are tired of history.” What about the cultural loss once the final shikumen is bulldozed? “We are going to lose the character of these neighbourhoods,” Wang answers. “But that’s the only thing we are losing. And we are gaining much more.”

The gain, simply, is dignified living conditions: indoor plumbing, individual kitchens, and privacy from neighbours. “It’s a completely different world now,” Wang says of Shanghai in 2006. Soaring prosperity — the city has a per-capita income nearly five times the national average — is, in turn, forging more-empowered homeowners, an evolution that has already begun to slow the runaway train of development. For Wang Gangfeng, this easing up is likewise part of the grand scheme. “Shanghai has been a construction site for many years,” he says, his thinking once more stretching out. “But now it is almost finished.” He even provides a date: the World’s Fair in 2010. “The city will be completed by then,” he adds with a smile.

The ongoing project that is Shanghai leaves many observers uneasy, especially westerners. Asian cities, from Bangkok to Manila to Saigon, share caffeinated lifestyles and organizational impulses with their Chinese counterparts, and have the same urgent needs as rapidly urbanizing populations. Visitors from the West, whose own cities seem church-hushed by comparison, are more awed and, often enough, disconcerted by such places. They also tend to be judgmental, summoning visions of the future cityscapes that await us all, dystopias of disorder and environmental meltdown evidenced by flickering neon and smoke rising from grates. A generation ago it was the Tokyo of William Gibson’s Neuromancer that induced these anxieties. Today it appears to be Shanghai.

Scale is what unsettles the most. The city is impossible to absorb in a single visual sweep. It seems, moreover, twice as distended as in 2001, the time of my last visit, and about twice that again from when I first negotiated an endless terrain of construction cranes and building sites back in 1997. (A preliminary experience, in 1989, belonged to another era, when Shanghai, still being punished by the central government for its pre-communist decadence and Cultural Revolution fanaticism, wore the rags and coal grime of a Dickens urchin, its beleaguered residents squeezed into a space designed for a third their number.) Every few years, a major new skyline sprouts from the marshy Yangtze basin. Over there is New York, replicated in central Pudong. Further down is Toronto, stretched along the river south of the inner core. The entirety of Montreal is visible from the front steps of the Shanghai Museum, facing north. Turn south and Vancouver suddenly materializes. West of People’s Square one sees all of Chicago, with Milwaukee thrown in for good measure. On rare haze-free days, visible to the west, south, and north are further office towers and high-rises — the assembled city vistas of, say, Texas.

Edward Burtynsky’s images trail me around this megalopolis. Once viewed, his extraordinary panoramas of Shanghai, often taken from on high and favouring the raw evidence of urban renewal, are difficult to erase from memory. Shanghai, which he has described as “capitalism on steroids,” comes across as monstrous, a chimera out of control. It has no shape, except for its bloated size, and seems without character. Most tellingly, the ten Shanghai pictures in China are devoid of people, aside from a few tiny figures scurrying among the rubble. A city of twenty million and counting, and scarcely anyone is around. Burtynsky’s subject, of course, is not the citizens of Shanghai. His interest lies in physical settings. He takes photographs of how human endeavours and actions have transformed — and generally devastated — nature, and his starting point for China is how the country is “the most recent participant to be seduced by Western ideals — the hollow promise of fulfillment and happiness through material gain.” A passionate environmentalist, Burtynsky won’t be dissuaded by arguments for exceptional Chinese circumstances. “I no longer see my world as delineated by countries, with borders, or language, but as 6.5 billion humans living off a precariously balanced, finite planet,” he writes.