Bund Queueing - island6 Arts Center

1928 - At the opening of the Grand Theater on Nanjing Lu, everyone was there. It was a cold night to stand outside but they didn't feel it when cuddled up within the velvet ropes and still warm from the brandy and cognac they'd been drinking in the smoky bars before heading over to the theater. The British scholar of Chinese gardens took a break from her research through the provinces to reroute herself through Shanghai to be there, and Henry Morris Jr., he newspaper magnate, didn't even need to be dragged by his wife. All the European diplomats brought their favorite of favorite girlfriends. Even though these prominent figures reduced everyone else to queuing status, something about standing under the Art Deco facades and classic columns of the Bund once in awhile put everything in perspective for the night owls of Shanghai in the late 1920s. They were in the Orient, as far away from home as possible, eating exotic food and meeting unordinary people, learning from the Chinese, watching the world develop, and through all the meals, shows and drinks, doing it together. Smoking and laughing in the freezing cold at the Bund, it was the same crowd at the nightclub on Fuxing Lu last night, and watching Buck Clayton and his band play blues the night before. The recurring friends turned the glorious architecture of the Golden Mile and the rest of Shanghai into a home away from home.
"Bund Queueing" is a Liu Dao work that isolates a single glimpse from an entire lifetime and glorifies it for eternity by turning the 20 seconds of footage into an LED animation that loops continuously. The happiness of a girl out from the crowds is illuminated through pixels that show her waiting but still lit up and enjoying life as she knows it.

http://island6.org/BundQueueing.html

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