STARTING IN THE mid-1970s, after the Cultural Revolution loosened its grip on the mainland, Shanghai photographer Deke Erh would stroll the streets of his home town recording the beguiling art deco style of architecture and design that flourished there in the 20s and 30s. Even as a boy, Erh had always liked the optimistic, progressive style, which seemed so western.
Little did he know he was falling for a style with a strong Chinese heritage.
'I would stroll around the city photographing the western-style buildings and I gradually fell in love with the style without knowing much about it,' says Erh, 47, a slender man with wary eyes and long, wavy hair. 'As kids in the evening in my home district of Xuhui we would go for a walk, and out of the windows of all these foreign-style houses you would hear piano music or someone playing the violin. For someone sensitive to art, it was very beautiful and moving.'
Today, Erh knows that art deco, the nearly 100-year-old style that arrived in Shanghai from Paris along with large-scale western investment in the treaty port, was strongly inspired by Chinese and Japanese aesthetics. In Shanghai, art deco returned to its eastern roots, and was refined and elaborated. 'I call it Shanghai art deco,' says Erh.
To celebrate Shanghai art deco, Erh recently collaborated on a book of the same name with Shanghai-based writer, conservationist and retired American diplomat Tess Johnston, with whom he has worked on other books about the city's cosmopolitan past. Erh photographed scores of buildings, and the pair devote a large section of the book to the relatively neglected subject of art deco furniture, household objects, magazines and advertising.
Long scorned by the Communist Party as a symbol of Shanghai's decadent, western past, art deco is enjoying a revival on the mainland. In the hopes of reaching a domestic readership, the book is written in English and Chinese.