Shanghai Project

The Shanghai Project is a yearlong multidisciplinary research platform instigating new dialogues by inviting practitioners from a variety of disciplines, including, not only art, architecture, design, film, performance, sound, but also the humanities, social and natural sciences. Under the co-artistic directorship of Yongwoo Lee, Executive Director of Shanghai Himalayas Museum, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of Serpentine Galleries London, the Inaugural Edition of Shanghai Project is organized by the Shanghai Himalayas Museum, and co-organized by the Shanghai International Culture Association, and supported by two lead sponsors, Envision Energy and Zendai Group.

History

The Shanghai Project was founded in 2015 by Yongwoo Lee in partnership with Dai Zhikang. The First Phase of Shanghai Project took place in 2016 at the Himalaya Center and Shanghai Himalayas Museum, its satellite venue at Zendai Zhujiajiao Art Museum, and various venues across Shanghai including Century Park in Pudong New District.

• 2016: Inaugural edition of Shanghai Project, Envision 2116, Co-Artistic Directors: Yongwoo Lee and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

First edition of Shanghai Project (2016)

The inaugural edition of the Shanghai Project launched on September 4, 2016 and took place over the duration of eleven months, ending in July 2017.

Taking “Envision 2116” as its theme, the festival gathered—from China and abroad—artists, filmmakers, performers, musicians, designers, architects, writers, poets, philosophers, historians, scientists, economists, geographers, ecopsychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, journalists, doctors, lawyers, engineers, hackers, bloggers, and the people of Shanghai to think, discuss, relate, and act on the sustainability of our futures in the 22nd century. The Shanghai Project experiments with the way people engage with ideas by providing multiple points of entry through a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds and formats.

Through exhibitions, gatherings, screenings, talks, workshops, an open call, a commissioned architectural pavilion, and public art installations across sites in Shanghai, the festival served to engage broader audiences both locally and beyond China. The Shanghai Project also hosted the annual International Biennial Association Conference in collaboration with the Power Station of Art from September 3-4, 2016.

Researchers included: Otobong Nkanga, Douglas Coupland, Liam Gillick, Liu Yi, Sou Fujimoto, and Cildo Meireles, etc.

Shanghai Project Pavilion

The Shanghai Project invites a renowned architect to design and construct a pavilion to house various cultural activities and amenities.

For the inaugural Shanghai Project Pavilion, titled “Envision Pavilion,” the commissioned architect Sou Fujimoto created a built environment where the natural and the man-made merge. Standing against the organic structure of the Arata Isozaki-designed Shanghai Himalayas Center, Fujimoto repositions the viewer’s relationship to their natural surroundings and imagines “futuristic” architecture in our present moment.

For the duration of the inaugural edition of the Shanghai Project, the “Envision Pavilion” acted as a site for public programming including lectures, panels, workshops, seminars, performances, and film screenings in the events space, as well as exhibitions in the gallery, and social gathering in the café.

Exhibitions Program

The exhibitions program serves as a primary platform where the ideas, figures and objects of the Shanghai Project manifest spatially and materially. The exhibitions program creates multiple narratives in response to the theme of the Shanghai Project, through an open and flexible configuration of multi-media installations.

Shanghai Project Public Program

The Shanghai Project’s public program includes a wide range of public activities, including performances, film and video screenings, discursive programs and participatory events.

The inaugural edition of the Shanghai Project began with the “Community Participation Program,” a series of neighborhood events intended to open a dialogue between the city of Shanghai and its residents that launched on July 15, 2016. It also included joint partnerships with Jifeng Bookstore and Shanghai Flaneur, a children’s program located in Century Park, as well as collateral events with the leading international universities, currently including the College of Fine Arts at Shanghai University, and Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

Qidian, Shanghai Project Open Call

From the nationwide open call in China, applicants from the fields of architecture, design, contemporary art, film, liberal arts and social science submit their proposals in response to the Shanghai Project’s theme.

The first open call, titled “Qidian,” which loosely translates into “starting point”, is an nationwide open call designed to tap into the talent and interests of China’s new generation, which is based on the long-term international project “89plus” co-curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist in collaboration with Katherine Dionysius. Comprising almost 15% of China’s entire population, the jiulinghou (post-'90s) population represents the ‘generation of digital natives’ who are well positioned to explore creative forms, models and languages of today’s increasingly globalized world in their speculations on the future.

Community Participation Program

A very important aspect of the Shanghai Project’s Community Participation Program is to allow architects and audiences alike to host events, exhibition or performance in the transformed abandoned or dis-used buildings. This method of design focuses on the remodeling of existing buildings rather than occupying or dominating vast areas of land to construct new buildings, as in the past.

Start with the collaboration with the shanghailander Yu Ting for the first program, “Small is Beautiful” exhibits the application of small yet multifunctional spaces and shows how these spaces can help bring cultural and community engagement to neighborhoods that would not normally encounter museum or gallery spaces. Employing these spaces to directly engage with local residents, the Community Participation Program began on July 15, 2016 and will continue through the First Edition of the Shanghai Project through collaborations for a variety of local architects.