Sensual City Studio

HOROSCOPE

Tell me which animal you are and I will tell you what kind of person you might be.
Being a pig has been proven to open Chinese doors. Whenever I mention my horoscope sign, it always elicits one of two reactions:
– Ohhh, good!
– Mmm, you are lucky!

FEELING SPECIAL 3

We started walking through the lanes, past the many shops. And then, at the junction between the compound and the lilong, a man took out a microphone and started singing. Some people nearby started singing along, too, while others continued to play mah-jong or folded their arms and just listened. We decided to go to the park. It was a hard decision initially, as so many unexpected things were happening in the street and it seemed that even looking away for just a second would mean missing something amazing. I took him by the hand, and we entered the park. He didn’t have to wait long to experience more of Shanghai.
There was a big group of Shanghainese people dancing in couples, and after a while my dad joined them. He was dancing with a woman to music he had never heard before. This became our ritual: we would sit down to eat and then go to the street corner or the park, and then sometimes someone would take my dad’s hand and offer him a folding chair, so that he could sit in the first row and hear that night’s singer more clearly. Othertimes, he would be distracted, and someone would ask him (us) to come back to their home, in one of the lilongs, so that they could explain to us the beauty of the wooden staircase, the spiritual and material value of it, and for how many generations it had served the family. We couldn’t speak Mandarin or Shanghainese, but that was never an issue.
He became like Shanghai: sleepless. And when he had to leave Shanghai, he left behind a whole city that had become a home.

TELEVISION

Of course, one of these lives on display could be mine, too, as I live in one of these towers where there is no need to hide. I used to live in a lilong, though,which taught me to understand that this whole city is mine, and that we all form it, create it and make it breathe together. No need to hide. My window becomes the best possible TV, a screen showing what is happening here and now. At home, I just want to watch the city passing by my eyes.

MIMICS

It is remarkable how you can have long conversations “just” using hand movements, facial contractions, bodily contortions and so forth… You find that there is always a way to communicate… well, maybe… actually, no, not always.
The way Westerners represent drinking with a hand gesture, for instance, might turn out to be the gesture for the number six in Chinese; the number eight might be used for indicating a person or object; and the number ten might mean to be close to someone. Most of these hand gestures correspond to the way we learned to make shadow animals on the walls, with our parents, before going to sleep. The way Westerners usually represent eating doesn’t mean anything to most Chinese people… but you can always keep trying… until the person on the receiving end gets bored and leaves, that is.

TREES

Trees are a little bit of nature in the concrete jungle, and dispensers of shade. As a Spanish saying goes, “everything happens in the shade  ” .
In the almost cruelly hot summers of Shanghai, nothing is put to its fullest use like trees. In the parks, it is under the leafy shade of the trees that people dance, practise martial arts and play all sorts of traditional Chinese games. Walking, driving and cycling is simply delightful under these huge canopies of coolness.
Chinese culture has a long tradition of gardens. They are places that are carefully planned as architectural artefacts.
In the emperor’s palaces, gardens were created for recreation, meetings and relaxation, as a meditative space in which to dwell. It is said that football was actually invented under the trees of one of these palaces by the concubines of an emperor. The girls got bored and started playing with a ball, forming teams, since there were so many of them for the emperor to choose from.
Plane trees were brought over by the French in around 1902, to embellish their concession, held between 1849 and 1943.
These providers of shade were first planted along what was then Avenue Joffre, which used to be a tram route, and which is nowadays known as Huaihai Road, one of the city’s most important shopping streets. And yet these plane trees, with their characteristic forms, have become a symbol of Shanghai, and the go-to location for brides and grooms posing for photos before their weddings.