Who Remembers Ordinary People? An Exhibition About Urban Memory Tries to Answer

"Vegetable Basket Workstation" runs through March 2. If you're in Shanghai, it's worth a visit.

When the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society opened its "Vegetable Basket Workstation," a poster of a tiger — bright, folk-art in style — went up on the pale green outside wall, with a few large characters brushed on in ink: "Vegetable Basket Tiger Stove."

A mother walking past thought the place had rebuilt a tiger stove, the kind found only in Shanghai, and brought her child specially to see it. Apart from the poster, she found no trace of one inside. The tiger stove — a neighborhood gathering place that grew up around the supply of hot water to Shanghai's lane houses — vanished from downtown Shanghai in 2013, and became a memory no one can rebuild.

"Vegetable Basket Workstation" exists to tell the story of many such vanished memories. In form it is an exhibition staged at a five-way intersection in Shanghai; in content it is a patchwork, because what's on display happened in scattered corners of the city.

The exhibition hall is the Hengfu Micro Space, a small building pressed up against the Yanqing vegetable shop in Xuhui District. Tong Ming Studio at Tongji University renovated it into a tiny exhibition hall inside Shanghai's Hengfu Historic and Cultural Conservation Area. The Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society is the second tenant; after this show closes on March 2, the University of Hong Kong Shanghai Study Centre will put on the next one.

Chen Yun, who founded the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society, started mulling over what sort of program would suit the space back in 2017, while it was still being renovated. The vegetable market next door gave her an idea. In the end she and the Society's members settled on the market as their theme, because "anyone can talk about it" and "everyone has been through it."

Planning and installing the show took about two weeks.

The first exhibition here, led by the Hunan Road Subdistrict Office, left behind one interactive piece: you can walk in, push your own thumbtack and slip of paper onto a map on the wall, and write whatever you want to say to prove you exist. Many people wrote down old addresses they remembered, or places that had stayed with them — every note is intensely personal.

What "Vegetable Basket Workstation" shows includes: the seafood vendors of Yangpu District; Boss Miao, once a chef at the Jinjiang Hotel, making qingtuan, the green rice balls; the secret fresh-pork mooncake recipe worked out by Auntie Wang, a former fitter at the Shanghai General Machine Repair Plant who calls herself a "do-everything mom"; the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society carrying cheap, good local food from Dinghaiqiao to Dongsiwenli in Jing'an District to make contact with the people there; and the last day of Tangjiawan Market and the "community canteen" on Aiguo Road. Each was cut into one of five short documentaries, playing on a loop on several screens mounted on the outside wall.

Hung on the same wall are paintings from the artist Lü Desheng's Night Market series: men squatting on the ground slurping noodles, neon flickering over the crayfish stalls, the backs of diners blurring into the night.

The hall's two revolving doors face the street and stand wide open. Inside, in under 20 square meters, the walls are covered with photographs of three vegetable markets.

The photographer Xu Ming caught the now-demolished Tongchuan Road Seafood Market at 5 a.m., its most frantic hour: vendors unloading, fish thrashing in mid-air as they go into plastic crates, come off the trucks and get tipped into bigger plastic bins to wait their turn inside.

Goods from all over the world drew restaurants from across Shanghai here to stock up. An Australian lobster selling for 80 or 90 yuan could, after a nearby restaurant cooked it, sell again for 300 to 500 yuan — and at a smarter restaurant, for more than 1,000.

On October 31, 2016, the Tongchuan Road Seafood Market closed for good. It had once been called Shanghai's Tsukiji.

The Dinghai Road street market walks into the dark in Xu Ming's pictures: a family of three eating dinner on the walkway outside their shop, the table a stack of plastic buckets with a cutting board on top, a small boy standing beside his mother as she eats with her head down, sucking his finger.

The urban researcher Wang Yun arranged the vendors of Tangjiawan Market into two sets of photographs, so that one wall carries a shift in both time and identity. One side records February 24, 2017, the day this "cheapest vegetable market in downtown Shanghai" ended more than a hundred years of history; the other shows the new lives the scattered vendors began after the market was flattened in January 2018.

In one corner of the hall sits a cardboard box holding a few salted duck eggs, still curing. By the time the show ends in early March they will be fit to eat.

The oddest exhibit is a notice looking for a shop to rent.

Zhu Guoqing, who runs a small Ningbo noodle shop on Neijiang Road, was asked by the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society to write out his need in neat brush characters on colored xuan paper: "Urgently Seeking Storefront." It hangs on the wall inside like a piece of calligraphy.

Zhu Guoqing sells Ningbo-style yellow croaker noodles. Two fresh small croakers are fried to order and simmered into a broth, then razor clams and clams go in, then the noodles. A bowl costs 25 yuan. Zhao Yiren, the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society's local contact, is a regular. That ended when the shop was slated for demolition.

Zhu Guoqing is probably used to a life of moving on. When the Oriental Pearl Tower went up in the 1980s, he and his family were cleared out of the area near what is now the Taidong Road ferry dock, and have moved three times since. This will be the fourth — except that the notice came so suddenly he had no time to get ready.

So that more passers-by would see it, the notice was first stuck on the glass door outside the "Vegetable Basket Workstation." Staff from the Hunan Road subdistrict objected, and it had to move. Before "Vegetable Basket Workstation," the Hunan Road Subdistrict Office had itself led a show in this space, called "The Brand-New Everyday of the Historic District."

"They thought it looked like a petitioner's complaint… They told us to take it down, but we didn't. We just brought it inside," said Xu Ming, who installed the exhibition.

Inside the hall, Zhu Guoqing's eviction collides with what became of Tongchuan Road Seafood Market and Tangjiawan Market. The Dinghai Road street market survives for now, only because a property developer and the government have never settled their dispute over relocation.

What survives there is a way of life that has all but disappeared from downtown Shanghai. Low old buildings line both sides of the street, their ground floors packed with shops; no strict rulebook binds the vendors, who now and then spread their goods out past their own doorways and switch what they sell as the seasons turn.

Turn off a small side lane on Dinghai Road into Dinghaigang Road and you catch something of an urban village in the Pearl River Delta: old shantytown blocks tangled with illegal add-ons, walkways barely wide enough to pass, people eating at their own front doors, children playing on the ground — and high-rises overhead, not far away.

"When I first went to Dinghaiqiao I was quite taken aback, but it also felt very familiar. Taken aback because you had been cut off from this kind of life; familiar because it was only yesterday, and it wasn't as bad as people said when they threw it away — there was even a basic meaning and value in it that you never noticed and never tried to understand, before saying goodbye to it in a hurry," Chen Yun said in an interview.

If you want to reach the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society that Chen Yun set up, you have to walk through the Dinghai Road street market.

Chen Yun grew up in Shanghai. She is a researcher and project manager for West Heavens, an India-China exchange program, and organizing exhibitions, discussions and publications is a large part of her job.

She first heard that Dinghaiqiao existed in 2013, while running Same-Same, an urban-research workshop linking Mumbai and Shanghai. The neighborhood was built in the early 20th century on the site of the well-known State Cotton Mill No. 17, and it has taken in — and still takes in — newcomers to Shanghai from different eras and different places. State Cotton Mill No. 17 is now the Shanghai International Fashion Center, with a Starbucks inside its sawtooth-roofed workshops, but Dinghaiqiao, where the mill's workers once lived, is still a foothold for small traders who have come to Shanghai to make a living.

Pulled in by the question of "what life used to be like," Chen Yun began researching the history of the Dinghaiqiao area. In 2014 she was chosen for the first Emerging Curators Project at the Power Station of Art, where she curated the exhibition Dinghaiqiao: Art Practice on History.

Its base of operations was 252 Dinghaigang Road, a three-story house with under 20 square meters on each floor. When the exhibition ended she used the leftover budget to renew the lease, and in the summer of 2015 formally founded the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society.

As for what the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society actually is, the description on its WeChat official account is abstract: a self-organized site for learning, exchange, reflection and service; one that looks for ways of acting and creating that join community culture and value-building to art and knowledge production; and that interacts, works and cooperates with the local community and with like-minded people everywhere, on the principle of mutual aid.

Xu Ming, who takes part in the Society, has a shorter answer: "a network of people." In the first half of last year he was shooting a documentary photography project on Shanghai's street vendors, needed material, and was introduced to Zhao Yiren, the Society's liaison. He then became one of its members.

Plenty of the other members came in the same way — "because they're also chewing over things like urban history, the fight for survival, the ecology of people at the bottom" — or through one of the Society's activities. How much anyone does depends on how much time they have and how much the work interests them. Nobody is paid. The Society's funds come mostly from donations collected at each event and from selling its publications.

That makes the whole organization extremely flexible and fairly loose. How well any project turns out depends heavily on the will and the ability of whoever is pushing it.

"I worked out later that a thing really does need one very forceful person before it can happen, with everyone else assisting and taking part. Whoever pushes it has to have a very strong will… and fairly flexible time. If someone happens to want to do something at a given moment, we form a small group and push it forward," Chen Yun explained.

Chen Yun is usually the one pushing. This exhibition about the vegetable market is her doing too.

"We talk it over together, look at who has reported on, observed or recorded vegetable markets, take those people as the core, and add a few people in the Mutual-Aid Society who have been involved with market relationships all along. You grab a few cases as the initial push, then bring people into the space and let the work go from there — because they know they'll be the ones at the center of it, since they care about the question," Chen Yun explained.

Besides exhibitions, the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society runs a lot of regular activities.

"Dinghai Talks" is mostly lectures, drawing on scholars, artists and others passing through Shanghai to discuss Dinghaiqiao and wider questions of cities and history.

Among the short-term projects tied closely to Dinghaiqiao residents are the After-School Program and the "Dinghaiqiao Photo Studio," which offered a month of free portraits. And a residency launched last year recruits researchers, artists and writers who can join Dinghaiqiao projects and who share the Society's way of working, the aim being to draw in a wider range of people and bring different methods and viewpoints to its projects.

The old house at 252 Dinghaigang Road holds this "network of people" together. Visiting scholars and artists can stay on the second floor; the ground floor is used for lectures, screenings and shared meals.

As Chen Yun sees it, being planted in a real place, dealing with neighbors and the community, has given them "a somewhat bottom-up view" — and the most practical meaning of that, she thinks, is recording all these everyday situations and stories that look utterly ordinary.

The Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society planned and ran the "51 Personae" project at last year's Shanghai Biennale, which put out, in text, video, music and theater, a set of intriguing individual stories: "The Person Who Carves Flavor," "The Person Who Preserves Street Cries," "The Meditating Trader," "The Department Store Worker Peering Out From the Window Display," "The Person Holding Incense" — making them known as a part of the city's history that the official version leaves out.

That work of digging up individual histories has carried on into "Vegetable Basket Workstation."

Chen Yun put together a duty roster of more than ten people, one of whose jobs is to interview visitors passing through the hall who are willing to use the vegetable market as a way into talking about their own experience and memory of city life. She has also left a video camera and a voice recorder in the hall to record those conversations.

There is always someone who hesitates a couple of seconds at the door, puts their head in for a look, and says the same sentence: "This used to be a tire shop."

In the urban renewal of the Hengfu conservation area, the tire shop has left no trace. It did not match the government's idea of historic character, because it was neither tidy nor good-looking.

The places that were approved — Ba Jin's former residence, buildings designed by Laszlo Hudec — were made into miniature models and pinned to the Hengfu conservation area plan that hangs on the exhibition hall's wall.

"A city really does come into being through the way it's talked about. If you only have one account of it — the famous people's houses, say, or the cosmopolitan Shanghai culture — then the only people you'll be remembered by are those people. Parts of their lives get enlarged and turned into something supremely important. Not that they aren't important; they have their importance. But there are other very important sides of things that make remembering them possible in the first place. Who is it that remembers them? Isn't it ordinary people who remember them? So who remembers the ordinary people?" Chen Yun said in an interview.

She wants to record more of the history of ordinary people, and the history of this city hidden inside the lives of ordinary people. The vanished, and the ones still hanging on.

All of it loops back to the starting point, before the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society existed: research into Dinghaiqiao's history built out of the oral accounts of the people who live there.

Asked why it matters that these histories be known, she said: "Because otherwise you're left with a map like this one. These — Ke Ling's house, Ba Jin's house, Sun Daolin's house — stick out. Everyone else, the mass of ordinary people who made those lives possible, doesn't matter; whether they lived or never lived seems to make no difference. If we can accept that feeling, that view of history, then we can accept every kind of tyranny."

The cover image and all images in this article were taken and provided by the photographer Xu Ming.