Sensual City Studio

GREY

Grey is an omnipresent colour in the city. It is the colour of the sky as seen by the citizens of Shanghai. It is the background of most pictures, regardless of the weather, the season or the time of  day.

SEVEN – GHOST MONTH – GHOST DAY

Seven is one of the few numbers that is as lucky in the West as it is in the East.   In Chinese culture, all annual rituals are determined in accordance with the moon. In Chinese, as in Latin-based languages, the moon is female; it is the yin  ; and it is the moon  that determines the propitious day for every Chinese ritual. Accordingly, the seventh month in the lunar calendar belongs to the ghosts, and so it is known as the “Ghost Month”; (鬼月) and the fifteenth day of this month is the “Ghost Day”. On this day, the deceased, emerging from the lower realms, are believed to visit the living. As an important Buddhist and Taoist festival, many rituals are performed in order to ease the pain of the deceased, by transmuting and absolving their suffering; to achieve this, their appetite should be satisfied and prayers should be said.

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.

BALANCE

Balance is not just a word for the Chinese. Neither is it merely the act of remaining vertical in a given place at a given time. Rather, it is about according equal importance to all emotions, and the positioning of the essential places that contribute to the accomplishment of one’s personal rituals.
It is about the dichotomy of all things, which isn’t   necessarily real but perceived. It’s   about how all  forces are interconnected, and how  they complement one another – and how this duality in fact corresponds to unity.

EIGHT

“Luck” is probably the best translation of the word for “eight” in Chinese culture.   It has many interpretations and can be used in many different ways. For example:Bā   sounds like the word for prosperity and wealth. In different rituals, one can use the power of the number eight in a date to multiply good fortune.
There is also a visual resemblance between the digits “88” and 囍, the shuāng xĭ,   meaning “double happiness”. Furthermore, when turned on its side, the number eight resembles the mathematical symbol for infinity.  My impression, therefore, is that eight is the number of infinite luck and happiness.
The number eight is viewed as such an auspicious number that even being assigned a number containing several eights is considered very lucky. Chinese people devote a lot of money and effort to having the figure eight in their telephone numbers and car registration numbers.

THREE-DIMENSIONALITY

Every turn you make, every step you take, however fast or slow you travel  , you cannot fail to notice that Shanghai, despite being flat, is a highly three-dimensional city. When you take a taxi at night, you climb up and over and down so many bridges, flyovers and junctions, some as high as a ten-storey building. All the buildings display a cross-section of their living innards to the outside world. The light flooding in and shining out of their windows exposes the lives of their occupants to the random passengers of a car, just for an instant. I, sitting in the back of the taxi, get a glimpse of these lives, and it is then up to me to either abandon these memories or imagine the possible lives that these people lead.

MASKS

Coming to Shanghai was an experience for all my senses: my nose would be filled with different smells simply crossing from one street corner to another; my sense of touch was mesmerised by new, different surfaces; my ears couldn’t comprehend most of what was going on around me, as they were bombarded with explosions of different sounds everywhere I went; my tongue was happier than ever before, tasting so many different foods and so many different consistencies, compositions and combinations; the way it looked was often at odds from the way it tasted – and, most of the time, it was my eyes that were happily proven wrong.
Every day, my eyes would be caught up in a symphony of movements and experiences – and, like the weather in any harbour city, the elements would change day by day, minute by minute. I made a promise to myself to observe more attentively, to concentrate on just one thing at a time and breathe it in, as if I were inspecting it. These inspections would sometimes take less than a minute. Sometimes, they would involve a combination of several observations made at different times, while others would occupy a much longer span of time, of relaxation, depending on whether the element was fixed or in motion. In most cases, without willing it, my brain would conduct a series of categorizations – categorizations that in most cases were proven wrong, because even static objects in Shanghai are constantly changing and moving; being displaced, relocated and dissolved.
The way Shanghainese people dressed on a normal day would always arouse my curiosity. Women especially, on a sunny day, would often wear gloves and large hats, carry umbrellas, and also wear masks – and men, too, would also wear masks. Indeed, after living in Shanghai for a while, there was no way I would contemplate riding my bike without a mask; some of my colleagues would not dare to go outside without one. Paradoxically, these layers of clothing that were meant to keep everything me   white, clean and healthy would suppress the senses that were ordinarily revealed to me by Shanghai – the city where it is said   that going jogging is more harmful that not exercising at all, as you simply end up inhaling, even more deeply than usual, the reason the Shanghainese don’t see the stars…

WALLS AND PATHS

Many books have been written about the typologies of the built space in Shanghai, in terms of form, in terms of function and even in terms of the absence of both. Many have dissected its built forms and subdivided them into many categories. But we can all agree that Shanghainese walls are both impermeable and porous, solid and fragmented, opening and closing gaps in the city.
In the Chinese tradition, it is written that ghosts cannot walk along paths that turn around corners. Furthermore, they have to take on the form of the bridges in Chinese gardens in order to cross the ponds they straddle.
In Chinese philosophy, a walk through a garden should command all of a person’s attention, as there is only one time and one space: the here and now. The lack or presence in a given dimension of railings, which are more decorative than functional, is to exalt this dimension of being. Being lost in one’s thoughts can result in one  falling into a pond… in the here and now.