The Color Imperative of Big City At Night: Rainbow City Shanghai

Rainbow City Shanghai, originally uploaded by cuellar.

The splash of primary colors is the last thing that a nocturnal river can ever let itself to be associated with; however, the city closing in on the waterway winding through it gives both a stage for its painting over in glaring neon-light stripes of color-tinged perspective on the other shore of the sky-line generically reminiscent of other cities but nevertheless coming together in a shape that is uniquely itself not least in the view it allows at itself from the opposite bank as a possibly exclusive promenade and a series of vantage points from which the unexpected succession of technicolor light fields calls into memory a free association between pointillism and impressionism thrown on photographically frozen water surface.

What Virtual Flaneur Would Find: Shanghai City Shape

shanghai city shape, originally uploaded by amadeuswhui.

Breathtaking reflection of bicycle itself similar to the carved frame that cuts it to its own round shape provides a spot of light irradiating from the image longingly staring into what must be an antiquities shop heaping in its insides floral furniture decoration from Europe, Asian animal-shaped finishings, and apparently local fruit of craftsmanship that has put the mirror into the shape going up in smoke-like curls of its chiseled framing waiting for an eyes-level place on the walls that any metropolis has in abundance in the apartments of its dwellers walking through the streets and arcades in search of what would arrest their acquisitive gaze.

Though the Looking Glass of Digital Photography: Shanghai Model City

Shanghai Model City, originally uploaded by Ivan Walsh.

It takes blowing up the initial image to see the words 'Virtual Worlds' in the background to what spreads itself in the fore- and middle ground: a city as a forest of buildings sprouting from the plane of immanence of their actual and/or future construction that unfolds before the eyes of their spectators as an always already presence of what time holds in its store as such, as a surface for modeling past and coming stage of how a city looks at different points of its time-line that unexpectedly becomes a three-dimensional spectacle of urban space scaled down for the scopic pleasure and its material anticipation.

Impossible Colors and Forms of Ideality No. 9

Ideality No. 9, originally uploaded by spicedfish.

It does strike as impossibly shiny and symmetrical that this structure riddles its on-looker with the representation of a structure that provocatively combines doubtful influences of Soviet Empire architectural style with unexpected use of red color in places that work their viewerly effect as colorful under-girds on a cream-cake-like three-level structure having perhaps its functional uses, but as likely being just a cynosure on a public square in one of these countless cities that traveling in-land might reveal to a browsing gaze traversing urban geography yet to be mapped through the movements of everyday life experienced in transit.

Shanghai Art Biennial Image Browsing: Dazzled

Dazzled, originally uploaded by spicedfish.

This is more of a reflection on what happens when social change occurs at warping speed, when sensibilities jumble together to create an overlapping geography of urban memory, when fresh combinations of materials, people and spaces draw in with their dazzling power the occasional virtual flaneurs through the traces of past events transpiring as copies without negatives of digital photography in image databases that spell out the urban experience of the present moment with tags, links and aliases that allow unexpected sides of places near and far to come forth.

Urbanism and Biennials in Hong Kong: Enigma of Documentation: DSC_4117x

DSC_4117x, originally uploaded by uhohphoto.

The otherness of places far away strangely stops being estranging as soon as the images their spectacular events supply pass over the threshold of aesthetic expectations to claim for themselves the same amount of cultural autonomy as more travelled locations on the international map of cultural exchanges do in order to bring the pieces of event institutions, everyday documentation and discursive supports into a configuration surprisingly close and far to sensibilities of global, and one hopes, audiences that seek to connect to emergent global cities, such as Hong Kong is, through their enigmatic aura.

Lightlines Drawing Speed Curves: 武汉 / Wuhan Street Warehouse

武汉 / wuhan street warehouse, originally uploaded by shanghaisoundbites.

Had it been a banquet table the pile of boxes must have been a heap of steaming white rice, hauling poles would be chop-sticks left standing in the plate as one turns to add soy sauce, and the warehouse box would be a hot-pot giving off smells of spices, freshly boiled meat and a specialty bouillon, the residential block in the background would be a bar across the floor where one could get salads and add-ons, the consumer of this delicious visual feast would still, however, be in the same position marveling across the lush table of what only in imagination becomes itself: cars speeding by fast enough to leave curves of light to be registered by the camera only.

Architectural Skeleton of Urban Unconscios: 重庆 / Chongqing Rising ...

重庆 / chongqing rising ..., originally uploaded by shanghaisoundbites.

Almost toylike playfulness with which the beams of the scaffolding draw their grid structure in the air hovering above the facades that as if made out of gingerbread with a caramel glazing give the perspective shattering thrust of the high-rises in the background an aura of felicitous unreality that an architectural vision reaching beyond appearances into the carrying forces of what constitutes urban space bring an urban unconscious about just as other cities, such as Chicago, that based on engineering, planning and transportation made themselves a name seemingly overnight must have carried a remainder of their bygone, miracle-like appearance on the map in the far corners of collective consciousness.

Graffiti Art on the Sidelines of Urban Text: New Wall - Urban 上海 ／ Shanghai

new wall - urban 上海 ／ shanghai, originally uploaded by shanghaisoundbites.

It is not just the proportions of the picture space that might have graced by its mixture of colours and lines museum walls that draw attention, but also the shades of green, brown and black that lend to this involuntary urban frame for, save for its emplacement in Shanghai, anonymous graffiti art that create an effect of a splash of lights washing across the image surface, as if soaring buildings were pulling out of the space around them the roots of everyday imagination cropping up on the vertical sidelines of otherwise mundane walkways.

A Space with a View on the Interplay between Nature and Architecture: Park Hotel - YMCA - Grand Theatre - Shanghai, China - 中国 上海

Park Hotel - YMCA - Grand Theatre - Shanghai, China - 中国 上海, originally uploaded by meckleychina.

What must feel like an age away, a photo taken somewhere close to the middle of the past decade in this city, still does not fail to mesmerise with its proportional perspective, receding brand names, and soaring landmarks that are as likely to tell the story of anywhere as of somewhere where they were embedded into a camera-shutters stopping moment as the picture taker shifted the LCD screen to see the original behind its freely framed portrayal stitching the green mass of the city park with the architectural echo of skyscrapers surrounding the central part of New York.

Iconicity of the City in the Reflection of Seventh Shanghai Biennale 第 七届上海双年展 - (31)

第七届上海双年展 - (31), originally uploaded by Sun Peng.

It is this distance from works on display, to the extent one can tell them from the urban context surrounding them, that pulls urban space and its lived qualities into the orbit of media existence that art biennials develop over time of their repetition and becoming forms of cultural regularity and landscape that ephemeral events contribute not only to their mapping but also to their creation in a transition from the material to the abstract.

A Sepia Take on 2008 Shanghai Biennale: Mise-en-Abyme of Screens

, originally uploaded by vAns☮.

Shining screen at the back of the room floats among shades of visitors to what should be, according to the subscript, the 7th Shanghai Biennale, I assume, for Contemporary Art thus pulling this globalizing city on a visual map that hides behind stock photography from the event that refers more to the photographer than to the goings on of the event that waits for its further embedding in the streams of secondary reflection and perception.

Year's Threshold Photos from Afar: Shanghai: New Year's Eve

Shanghai: New Year's Eve, originally uploaded by elkie v7.1.

Suddenly finding myself confronted with this transitional day from one year that has already slipped behind me into the past and the new year, or even a new decade, that has rushed to be upon me, or even a collective us, I look for distant shores and nightly skylines that might still carry a whiff of fireworks that have for a few brief moments marked the magic moment of the break of the New Year onto our collective consciousness as the earth turned and as the petards went off hour after hour, time zone after time zone around the globe.