TWO MONTHS AGO, 19-year-old Hong Kong design student Jessie Cheung Tse-yan took a big leap: she left school and moved to Shanghai by herself to work. But Chang Zhiying, as she is now known on the mainland, was not lured by a cushy job, as so many young Hongkongers are. Instead, she works in an artists' community called Moganshan, which is part of a larger sprawling industrial area that runs along Shanghai's Suzhou Creek.
Moganshan is one of many such places popping up on the mainland, as cash-strapped artists flood into industrial spaces being abandoned as rapidly rising rents, coupled with government initiatives to control pollution, force factories out of major urban areas. Landlords, left with enormous, un-renovated and remotely located spaces, are desperate to find new tenants. And young artists have jumped at the chance to rent studios and galleries many times larger than what they could afford downtown.
'This place is so raw and so exciting,' Chang says, standing in the middle of
H-Space, a 700-square-metre (7,530 square-feet) Moganshan exhibition space just opened by established art gallery ShanghART. 'There are artists and gallery owners from all over the world, but there are local people, too.'
Moganshan is a mixed neighbourhood. Inside H-Space are digital photos and installation works by Shi Yong, including what looks like an enormous half-deflated condom/see-through plastic skyscraper meant to symbolise the folly of Shanghai's construction mania. Outside H-Space, factory labourers walk around in blue work suits, while a local grandma holding an infant in a traditional cloth pouch peers in and giggles at the giant condom. By Moganshan's main gate, a gaggle of workers plaster coloured pebbles to their new elaborately carved water fountain in an attempt, I was told, to make the area look 'more cultural' for their new artistic neighbours.
Moganshan is in an early phase of development because, until recently, there were rumours the area was going to be razed and redeveloped. Though there is a slim chance that still might happen, the number of artists and galleries who have moved in - about 40 at last count - give Moganshan strength in numbers.
