Review: Urban China: Informal Cities

Abstract

Urban China: Informal Cities. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 16 October 2010–3 April 2011. We live in an age of extreme urbanization. Nowhere is this more palpable then in the cities of China. In a country with the fastest urban growth rate recorded in human history, where a new cocktail of capitalist enterprise and socialist political regime pushes market boundaries and spatial conditions alike, and where the city is increasingly challenged and reconditioned beyond previous notions of urbanity, the public's inventiveness to engage these terrains is constantly tested. It is at this juncture between bureaucratic policy and public myth, political doctrine and vernacular improvisation, urban infrastructure and rural almanac, that a particularly vivid condition between the formal organizations of the city and the informal engagements with it can be observed. Urban China: Informal Cities, a recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, worked at exactly this intersection where formal impositions and informal engagements collide. Commissioned as part of the Three M Project (a series organized by the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago), the exhibition aimed to raise awareness about unprecedented urban expansion in China and its relationship to everyday urban inventions and activism. Originating in the research and publications of the only recognized Chinese magazine on urbanism, Urban China , led by editor- in-chief Jiang Jun, the material for the exhibition traveled from the streets of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou to museums in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. As the venues changed, the collection of urban facts and artifacts was rearranged, constructing an environment of impressions rather than communicating a single idea. At the MCA in Chicago, a wallpaper of graphics, images, objects, and short descriptions filled the gallery walls on the northern wing's third floor with a dizzying exhibition of multiple narratives …