Culture junkies in Shanghai stomach a fair share of swill every time they venture to a new concert/museum/exhibition -- at times faith alone provides the hope that something exceptional will turn up.

Whether blind faith is noble or stupid is a question for another day. For once, the payoff is happening right now. Something exceptional has arrived in the form of "When I Look at It," an exhibition by Spanish artist Isidro Blasco at socialite Pearl Lam's Contrasts gallery just west of the Bund.


Jolting three-dimensional slices of city life accost you when you walk through the door of China's "heritage architecture" Commercial Bank building. Blasco has recreated Shanghai by nailing together variously sized and shaped wooden panels in (what appears to be haphazard but must in fact be) a well-ordered structural platform. The planks jut out into space at different depths where Blasco plasters them with white poster board bearing sleek photography.

Scenes of Shanghai extend out from all angles, and the images are deliberately disjointed. Seamlessness is a thing of the past and we are given the sense of a Shanghai street but not an exact replica. The works take on a holographic-like quality and their physicality makes them alluring. Because of the size Blasco embraces you're no longer staring at pictures, you're in them.



Yes, this is cubist work and Blasco admits that childhood influences included Picasso and Braque. But these three-dimensional collages delve into the realm of postmodern as the process of haphazard construction is as important to the art as the visual impact.

The techniques Blasco employs define the assemblages -- this is not fine art and we are not asked to pretend we are looking at the real thing -- these are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, delicately arranged to avoid mimicry of real life but at the same time capture its disjointed spirit.

Blasco sense of Shanghai's "reality" is informed by his initial visit to the city in 1997, when all the building had just commenced. Upon his return to Shanghai a decade later, Blasco was fascinated by the mingling of public and private spaces that resulted directly from the city’s attempt to quench its thirst for modernity.

With an architect's sense of space and preservationist's nostalgia for the old, Blasco captures scenes of Shanghai longtongs, outdoor kitchens, hanging laundry and crumbling buildings, rips these bits of culture into photographic shreds and then reassembles it all into a piece of artwork that will probably be preserved longer than the actual portions of the city.

Contrasts gallery's reputation precedes it. Although it's owned by the woman dubbed "Shanghai's Auntie Mame" by a December New York Times article, the gallery is sleek and demure -- quite unlike the media portrayal of Pearl Lam. This winter brought Ms. Lam even more negative media attention when construction workers camped out in the gallery demanding overdue pay. What does all this clamor about an individual's personal style and character prove? Little or nothing. Ms. Lam brings us the best show of the season.

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