What Mattered Over 40 Years? This Reform-and-Opening-Up Exhibition Has Unusual Answers

A scattered micro-exhibition, but the contents are genuinely interesting.

“Try this phone.”

A young volunteer in the gallery holds up a yellow receiver. It belongs to an old rotary telephone with an off-white body, but the cord between receiver and body is plainly broken. Nothing comes through, and she looks a little embarrassed. She moves the body aside; underneath sits an MP3 player.

“Something seems to be wrong again.” She fiddles with it for a while, and when she hands it over a man's voice comes out of the “phone”: “My wife worked at the Shanghai Library, and she knew the Twenty-Four Histories (《二十四史》) well. In the eighties there were no computers, and the Twenty-Four Histories was like an ocean. To know which volume sat on which shelf, you had to climb a ladder and look.” The man on the phone also makes a point of mentioning that his son now works at a foreign human-resources firm. Over the past few decades, foreign companies and Shanghai have welcomed each other; Shanghai people liked foreign firms and took it as natural that a job at one carried a certain respectability.

Right after that monologue comes a woman's voice, pitched high, speaking Shanghainese. She starts from the day she moved into Huaihai Mansion, when the building had three elevators: two for people, and one large one used only for hauling out the trash. Huaihai Mansion was built in 1930 and originally called Empire Mansions. By the time she moved in, a floor had probably already been added, to ease the terrible housing shortage of the 1980s. Living space in Shanghai then averaged about 4.3 square meters per person.

That is the end of the two oral histories. “Even if you want more, there isn't any,” said another volunteer, an elderly man, smiling. He was pointing out that this is a micro-exhibition: nothing here comes in quantity.

I agree with him. The exhibition is scattered, and it runs about as smoothly as that prop telephone, but the content is genuinely interesting. Its theme is billed as “commemorating the 40th anniversary of reform and opening up,” yet it looks nothing like the exhibitions of that kind that have spread across the country this year.

The gallery is small, under 20 square meters, at No. 37 Donghu Road in Shanghai's Xuhui District, on an unusual five-way intersection. The space used to be a tire shop. At the end of 2017, during a sweeping round of old-city redevelopment, it became a gallery called Hengfu Micro Space. Since then at least one exhibition or event on a different theme has been held here every month, which gives it the feel of a street-corner salon.

The facade is close to mint green, echoing a residence in the same color across the street, a Western-style garden lane house built in 1930. On this side, next to a wet market, a few men lie stretched out on folding chairs, cooling off. They only have to look up to see the three televisions on the outside wall, playing the theme song of The Bund (《上海滩》), the classic 1980s television drama.

Inside and out, the gallery has seven televisions. They are an important part of the exhibition; passersby are drawn in first by the moving images. Four of the screens play 29 clips of classic footage spanning the 1980s to the 2010s.

There is no fixed standard for what counts as a classic. The list the curatorial team put together includes some uncommon answers.

Black Cat Sheriff (《黑猫警长》), an animated series from the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, made the list. In 1984 its first two episodes aired on television; audiences loved the cat sheriff, but the studio halted production anyway. Founded in 1957, this was the oldest animation studio in China, and for a time most of the country's animated films came from it. Although films were “funded by the state, with output quotas handed down from above,” and then bought at a fixed price by the China Film Corporation, the animators always wanted to make something different. In 1961 the studio produced Little Tadpoles Look for Their Mother (《小蝌蚪找妈妈》), which won several international awards. Its classical ink-wash style was a novelty in animation. The animation director Isao Takahata said that he and Hayao Miyazaki both learned the beauty of empty space from it.

But by the time Black Cat Sheriff went on the air, the studio's good years were over. It planned a market-oriented transition but was unsure whether to start paying “by the piece.” The animators had their own doubts: keep stressing “national style,” or meet head-on the flood of foreign animation imported after the 1990s? In 1987, Black Cat Sheriff returned to the air. Episode four, “The Mantis Who Eats Her Husband,” had a clever premise. At the end of every episode the sheriff raised his gun and shot the words “please watch the next episode” onto the screen, one character at a time. The sign-off worked beautifully. But the show stopped after episode five. Accounts of why differ. Some think it may have had to do with censorship of children's film and television, since a “cops and robbers” story inevitably involves violence and death.

In the 1990s the studio still made one successful work, Shuke and Beita (《舒克和贝塔》), but another animation, Magic Cube Mansion (《魔方大厦》) from the Shanghai Film Studio, was pulled off the air partway through its 1994 run. Clips of both play on the gallery's screens, and Magic Cube Mansion is unquestionably the more gripping. Next to Zheng Yuanjie's original novel, the studio's character designs have a Fauvist flair, and the whole series carries a dystopian mood. Today's animation does the opposite: it works far too hard at pleasing children, and, more to the point, their guardians.

Most of the footage looping in the gallery is television drama. Chinese TV drama took off in the 1990s, starting with indoor sitcoms like I Love My Family (《我爱我家》) and an ethics drama, Yearning (《渴望》), whose ratings topped 90 percent. A Beijinger in New York (《北京人在纽约》) was set against the rush to go abroad around 1990. Wang Shuo stood behind all three as planner or screenwriter. He wrote a great deal of irreverent fiction from the 1980s into the early 1990s, and in some measure he also changed the register of television.

Historical drama soon found its market. My Fair Princess (《还珠格格》), which aired in 1998, was the signature work of the craze for playful history and Qing palace drama. Palace of Desire (《大明宫词》), which began in 2002, built a different court atmosphere, strange and mysterious, with dialogue pushed to romantic extremes, though nothing like it followed. Both can be watched at once in the gallery.

Some history is closer to hand, and whether it can be shown over and over depends on how it is told.

The gallery plays the first episode of Karmic Debt (《孽债》). It aired in 1995 and is about the “educated youth.” Young Shanghainese who went to Yunnan in the 1960s under the “up to the mountains, down to the countryside” campaign were called “educated youth.” They returned to the cities in the 1970s but could not take their children with them at the time. That produced the 1990s story of children traveling from Yunnan to Shanghai to find their birth parents.

Another historical drama on display, Towards the Republic (《走向共和》), takes on an important and complicated stretch of history, from the late Qing to the Republic. It took two years to shoot and more than 41 million yuan to make. Director Zhang Li's attempt to reopen the question of what historical figures got right and wrong is valuable; his Li Hongzhang, Yuan Shikai and Empress Dowager Cixi all depart from the official account. Even so, Towards the Republic drew ratings of only 3.1 percent in its first run on CCTV-1. The CCTV version cut some scenes, and the show is still not allowed to be rerun; it can be watched only on disc or online. Zhang Li later directed Ming Dynasty in 1566: Emperor Jiajing and Hai Rui (《大明王朝 1566：嘉靖与海瑞》), another show with weak first-run ratings and a strong reputation afterwards.

The television standing in for the 2010s is playing In the Name of the People (《人民的名义》). This anti-corruption drama, first shown in 2017, was likewise caught up in rumors that it could not be broadcast on television and could only be watched online. Even so, its premiere set the highest ratings record for a Chinese TV drama in nearly a decade. In some places it was at first used as “study material” for grassroots Party branches.

Talent shows were not left out. Between 2004 and 2007 came two of the most famous early ones, Go! Oriental Angel (《加油好男儿》) and Super Girl (《超级女声》). This first round of talent shows broke completely with the stiffness of official singing contests; they were more entertaining and more democratic. Both produced widely sung theme songs, Young Battlefield (《年轻的战场》) and Sing If You Want to Sing (《想唱就唱》). The curatorial team picked performance videos of those songs. In them the young singers wear hairstyles no one can explain today, and some of them were adored for their blurred gender presentation. For audiences, it was finally a chance to vote, even if the contest was half real and half staged. If you pay attention, you will notice that on today's talent shows, “voting” appears on screen only as “liking.”

In 2007 China's national broadcasting regulator issued rules restricting this kind of competition.

The team may have chosen these clips half-consciously, without much design or deliberation. The same goes for the 40 entries on the main wall. Huang Xiaoying, one of the curators, said the entries they picked may lack representativeness and reflect only the team's own experience. Huang is an architect. The curatorial team, Zhicheng Network, has only three or four core members and sits under an architecture studio, Ziyunzhai; it does not yet operate on its own.

On the main wall, the 40 entries are made up to look like 40 old almanacs, each one printed full with a single entry. They are divided by time into four decades and also sorted into ten categories: clothing, food, housing and transport, along with literature, film, television, music, animation and sport. The entries are blurry and speckled with white dots, but laid out at this scale they work. People walking into the gallery gather at this wall first, and the elderly volunteer will then suggest they write a few entries of their own.

The team calls this “crowd-curating.” They left a row of blank space above the almanacs, waiting for new entries.

One visitor wrote that he missed the overhead-wire cash system at department-store checkout counters. He attached a blurry, hastily printed photo, and it does look interesting: an envelope clipped to a steel wire, the wire ending at a counter two people high. That way of handling money existed only in the fifties and sixties, though just last year a Shanghai shopping mall brought it back in the name of nostalgia.

Someone wrote down a regret. “If I could, I'd have bought an apartment in Shanghai in 2000 too. In the 1990s, the A-share market was bound to climb from today's 2,800 points into the great era of stock mania.” “Better to play the market than rob a bank,” he added at the end.

The reference music the team supplied included the old song My Chinese Heart (《我的中国心》), 1990s campus folk, and the recently popular Rainbow Chamber Singers. The crowd curators added Jay Chou's Common Jasmine Orange (《七里香》) and called 2004, the year it came out, “the age when one cassette made the rounds of the whole class and people listened to music on tape recorders.” They also introduced Top Floor Circus, a Shanghainese-language punk rock band formed in 2001, and one of its best-known songs, Shanghai Childhood (《上海童年》). This is a flamboyant, fairly controversial band; in Shanghai Childhood they sing their way through everything, large and small, that happened in Shanghai in the seventies and eighties. Top Floor Circus has since broken up, after its lead singer left.

2002 is worth remembering: “China made the World Cup, the strongest national team we've ever had. I was in primary school then. For the first group match the whole school suspended classes to watch the broadcast, and that's how I learned the name Costa Rica. I hope sport can develop in a healthy way, and I hope one day I can watch the national team play at a World Cup in person.”

Sport is not all about the nation, either; it is one of the most exciting kinds of business and entertainment there is. Someone pinned up the famous close-up of Yao Ming's face: “Joined the Rockets on sheer ability (or became a meme).”

Hardly anyone brought up literature or film. Among the entries the team had prepared in advance was Ba Jin's Random Thoughts (《随想录》), a rare book that reckons with the Cultural Revolution. “Having spent ten years in the ‘cowshed,’ I have a duty to expose that appalling fraud, so that our children and grandchildren are not made to suffer it again.” “We swallowed that feudal package ourselves; that is the only reason Lin Biao and the ‘Gang of Four’ did such brisk business selling it. Otherwise how could a single casual ‘order’ have ruined families and taken lives?”

Jin Yucheng's Blossoms (《繁花》) touches on the same past: the everyday life of ordinary Shanghai people caught inside a vast political movement, and then, after the 1990s, forced to knead itself together with a commercial one as well. The team treats this novel, written in a strongly Shanghainese voice, as the representative work of 2010s literature.

Wolf Warrior (《战狼》) stands for the films of this period; its box-office record has yet to be broken. Chinese hero movies have in recent years moved away from the old epic style and set out to build fictional individual heroes. What they carry is entirely different in flavor, but in narrative, characters and industrial craft they grow more and more Hollywood. They also like transnational settings and an exotic air. That has another advantage: it usually doubles the return when it comes to stirring nationalist feeling.

The theme of “reform and opening up” was not in Huang Xiaoying's plans to begin with. She handles project coordination for Hengfu Micro Space, and draws up plans a quarter ahead. Since November 2017 the exhibitions here have changed roughly once a month, and they vary widely: a retrospective of an architecture magazine, an illustrator's show, a book club, experimental theater, art projects for children.

Still, “it's hard to say for certain that any one [exhibition format] is the right one.”

Four months ago the Hunan Subdistrict office, which the space belongs to, suggested Huang Xiaoying make the 40th anniversary of reform and opening up the theme of the July show. It was an unplanned theme and inevitably carries a tint of official propaganda, but the team decided to do it their own way. Huang said the subdistrict office offered no opinions on the actual content.

In the end, the grandest-looking part of the whole exhibition is an area called the “time capsule.” Lift a box lid marked with a year and you find a newspaper called Hengfu Daily (《衡复日报》). It is an invented paper, printing the big news of that year. Huang Xiaoying sees it as “a frame” that a reform-and-opening-up show needs.

The team wanted real old newspapers at first. They made several trips to the municipal library to look through them, but found that the retrieval system only pulls up a paper for one specific date, with no complete digital archive, so they gave up and relied on internet searches instead.

The big news these searches turned up was not as big as you might imagine. An item dated March 25, 2018 concerns Wukang Mansion, on the Hunan Subdistrict's streets: the Xuhui District government was carrying out an “overhead lines” project and planned to clear away the wires around the building, though not everyone approved.

An item dated May 31, 2010 concerns 64 “heritage-protected” streets in Shanghai, which, for the sake of “historical continuity” rather than traffic, may not be widened or narrowed. Yanqing Road, outside the gallery, is one of them.

The 1984 “paper” reads: “Huating Road Garment Market: China's No. 1 Clothing Street.” By the item dated November 1, 2000, every tent stall on Huating Road's clothing street had been torn down. The news said it had become “elegant.”

The “paper” dated January 18, 1992 carried Deng Xiaoping's remark from his Southern Tour: “Anyone who opposes reform can go to sleep.”

The team had also meant to run an open call for photographs from the public, but a broad collection drive was beyond them. So they looked online for an old Shanghai resident with a rich collection. Song Zhiliang, locally known for his stock analysis, began collecting old Shanghai material in 2010. He showed interest in the exhibition early on, in exchanges on Weibo, and came to the gallery a few times; the photos he finally provided were made into two commemorative albums and placed next to the “telephone.”

The changes this neighborhood has been through over the past few decades are projected onto a wall at the end of the long, narrow gallery. There are plenty of plane trees around here, and their canopy spills down over the top of the wall, so it really does feel like walking down the street.

A volunteer said that, compared with the other exhibitions held here, the reform-and-opening-up show has drawn more visitors. She thinks it may have to do with the theme: almost everyone is connected to it somehow.

The elderly volunteer said that at midday, white-collar workers who have just eaten nearby pack the gallery. “Old men and old women come too. They live right around here, and seeing all this is like seeing their old home. It feels close.”

Cover image from Douban, Yiran Ding on Unsplash (cropped)