MCLC: faking it in China

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Han Meng <hanmeng at gmail.com>
Subject: faking it in China
***********************************************************

Source: NYRB (6/6/13):
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jun/06/faking-it-china/

Faking It in China
By Ian Johnson

One of the most striking features about daily life in China is how much of
what one encounters has been appropriated from elsewhere. It’s not just
the fake iPhones or luxury watches—pirated consumer goods are common in
many developing countries. In many Chinese cities, foreign ideas and
concepts are constantly being used to shape the external reality, from
clothes and pop music to contemporary art and film. As The New York Times
reported this week, there is even a smartphone CEO who consciously models
himself on Steve Jobs.

Above all are the physical spaces. All over China, planners are busy
emptying the countryside of people, leveling villages, and replacing the
small-plot agriculture that defined rural parts of the country for
millennia with American-style industrial agriculture. Urban areas,
meanwhile, have lost most of their distinctive characteristics. Even in
cities known for their beauty, uniformity rules: in Hangzhou, the entire
waterfront along the Grand Canal has been leveled except for one stone
bridge. The rest is now apartment blocks and bars. Cities like Wuxi are
even worse; the old city has been eradicated in favor of an industrial
park aesthetic wedded to 1950s-style American automobile culture, with
everything planned around highways, shopping malls, and subdivisions.

New architecture, when it is notable, is nearly always by foreigners or
copying foreign styles, a tendency that has led Western architects to
flood into China, often with second-rate projects for sale. When some sort
of indigenous style is attempted, as for example the now de rigeur
recreation of one or two old streets, it is usually an attempt to evoke an
idealized past rather than adhere to a particular historical idiom.

What drives this obsession with foreign styles? Bianca Bosker gives some
answers in her fascinating new book, Original Copies: Architectural
Mimicry in Contemporary China. Bosker focuses on the suburbs for the upper
class that began to be built in the late 1990s, following the
privatization of real estate. These are not just individual buildings but
entire streetscapes, with cobblestone alleys, faux churches (often used as
concert halls), towers, and landscaping designed to reproduce the feel of
European and North American cities. The city of Huizhou features a replica
of the Austrian village of Hallstatt; while Hangzhou, a city famous for
its own waterfront culture, now includes a “Venice Water Town” that has
Italian-style buildings, canals, and gondolas. Other cities in China now
feature Dutch colonial-style townhouses, German row houses, and
Spanish-style developments.

Original Copies is filled with analysis about why these developments
flourish. One reason, Bosker argues, is that replicas are highly valued in
Chinese culture—copies and mimicry of the innovations of others do not
carry any negative connotations. In small doses, this idea has some
validity. Great Chinese painting or calligraphy masters typically used to
pattern their work on those who went before, only creating distinctive
works later in their career. But it’s too glib to say that the sort of
second-rate reproductions being built in Chinese cities have ever been
accepted in Chinese or Asian culture. Copying was an homage, done at a
high level, and a precursor to true creation. One thinks, perhaps of how
Japanese jazzophiles curated and reissued classic American LPs that had
gone out of production in the 1970s. These were made to the highest
standards and implied true connoisseurship, rather than a superficial
understanding of the genre.

This is quite different from the subdivisions, which use some expensive
accoutrements (Italian marble, French chandeliers, American carpets) as
selling points, but which are instantly recognizable as poor imitations.
As Bosker notes, the buildings disregard the original proportions in order
to emphasize the monumental size of some features, such as towers or
clocks—a cartoonish vision. (Fascinatingly, almost all of the suburbs
Bosker studies are designed by Chinese architects for wealthy Chinese
clients; some foreign architects were tried but they represented their
home countries as they saw them, not in the historical pastiche that the
developers wanted for their clients.) This is hardly in the spirit of
another traditional Chinese cultural practice—of copies that change the
original but keep its essence. Instead we have the West as marketing
gimmick.

Indeed, Bosker’s most convincing explanation for the developments is
economics: Chinese tend to identify their culture with decline—old
buildings call to mind China’s poverty and backwardness, not its glory;
whereas achieving Western standards of living has been held up as a
primary goal of modernization. So for developers, copying foreign towns
became one way to gain cachet and jack up the price, especially as the new
rich in China were beginning to travel abroad more widely and gain
familiarity with these styles.

One wonders if this is different from what has happened with the newly
affluent in other parts of the world. Qatar boasts an artificial island
with a series of housing developments meant to evoke European
architecture. And one only has to think of the tacky architecture that
abounds in the United States: J. Paul Getty’s replica of a Vesuvian Roman
Villa, the Hearst Castle, or even Abbot Kinney’s “Venice of America” in
Los Angeles.

A larger difficulty with trying to identify some essential Chinese
attitudes at play in this kind of mimicry is that the people who live in
such developments are hardly ordinary Chinese. (Bosker introduces us to
one resident, a former ping pong star who has flashcards of famous
automobiles that he’s training his son to recognize. She explains this by
quoting from Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality: “Baroque rhetoric,
eclectic frenzy, and compulsive imitation prevail where wealth has no
history.”) As a result, these developments offer little insight into the
overall situation of urban planning in even the wealthiest cities, such as
Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong, let alone in the scores of second- and
third-tier cities, such as Shijiazhuang, Jinan, Xuzhou, Wuxi, Hefei, and
Bengbu. Most of the developments in these places are architectural
nightmares, built by technocrats who want to warehouse tens of millions of
peasants who have been kicked off their land.

As for their future, many of these architectural fancies—unlike the
originals on which they are modeled—already seem dated, part of the go-go
first decade of the twenty-first century when rich Chinese had serious
money for the first time and were trying to figure out how to spend it. As
in other countries that went through similar phases—one thinks especially
of Taiwan—slavish imitation of foreign things eventually gives way to an
appreciation of national culture. Bosker has a final chapter on the rise
of Chinese-style gated communities, which make use of domestic
architectural motifs like stone pathways lined with bamboo and slate roofs
meant to evoke traditional building methods.

Does this signify a rise of creativity and a change in how China looks?
It’s possible. Certainly China has creative architects, such as the
Pritzker Prize winner Wang Shu, who is known for recycling destroyed
Chinese buildings—especially tiles and wooden beams—in his own edgy
structures. In the past, when China wanted showpiece buildings it turned
to foreigners. Now architects like Wang are getting some commissions.

It’s not clear, however, whether creative minds like Wang represent
China’s future, or are an avant-garde enclave educated and feted in the
West. Part of the reason that fakes have an appeal in China is that the
country lacks cultural self-confidence. China’s leaders want to turn the
country into a cultural superpower but they still manage intellectual life
too tightly to allow for the free flow of ideas that would require.

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Bianca Bosker’s Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary
China is published by University of Hawai‘i Press.