“Bourgeoisified Proletariat” is the type of exhibition that Shanghai has seen far too little of in recent years, but back in 2009 this kind of spontaneous show sprouted fairly frequently. In the coastal city’s suburban Songjiang, in an old industrial space amid its renovation into trendy offices, awkwardly large, conceptual installation sets—courtesy of both famed and emerging artists—trickled in as part of the four-day show. Among the 40-plus participants were Polit-Sheer-Form Office (PSFO), a collective formed in 2005 by renowned artists Song Dong, Liu Jianhua, Xiao Yu, and Hong Hao, along with critic and curator Leng Lin. For an artwork titled Tofu (2009), the coterie of old friends constructed in the factory a bland white cube of four thin, wooden walls. Using five axes, members of the audience and collective painstakingly hacked holes into the surface.
I thought about a lot in late April, about halfway into Shanghai’s two-month lockdown, as flimsy but dramatic plywood walls went up along many downtown streets in an attempt to keep people from leaving their homes. The walls replaced a series of green fencing, comically identical to that widely used in zoos, erected earlier around older buildings without easily controlled central entrances. Symbolic indignity aside, the zoo fencing proved to be no match for stubborn opposable thumbs wielding pliers, reassured that even these very physical barriers are, with time, still ephemeral. Walls will fall.
