JOURNALISM - SHANGHAI STAR

CREATIVE OASIS IN SHANGHAI

April, 2008

What does it mean to be ‘creative’ anymore? Certainly this catchiest of catch-words means different things to different people; in New York it might mean designing the next great zero carbon T-shirt. In Paris it could be inventing a chic baguette holder. Then again it could be just sitting under a park tree in London composing poetry that no one will ever read.

But what about being creative in Shanghai? This is a land after all, that celebrates copying just as much, if not more than inventing. A good idea here is truly open game: something to be mimicked, copied, reproduced - and this leads to a big East-West conundrum for the so-called creative industries - at least those run by foreigners like Charles Belin of SAS (Shanghai Art Studio), who’s motto is ‘Design to the People’. Started in 2006 in Shanghai, SAS has gradually built up a loyal client base who value innovation over imitation.

A transplanted Frenchman, Belin moved to Shanghai in 2002 and has worked extensively in F&B (most notably as the creative force at Mint, the now defunct House Music Mecca). By 2006 he noticed a gap in the local market for creative marketing tools such as club flyers, websites, promotional videos, and event planning. With a few of the more adventurous local designers under his wing he took a space on arty Taikang Lu and hung a shingle outside. In fact two shingles, as he also runs Kiken Productions, his event company out of the same office. So far they have worked on a wide variety of projects – everything from club parties and corporate events, to promotional videos and websites. At present he boasts a staff of four full-time Chinese designers and one French documentary filmmaker/videographer. And it’s his intention to make SAS/KIKEN into a self-styled creative salon, where artists share ideas and present cutting edge works in progress through a variety of mediums.

One of the major stumbling blocks Belin first encountered when working with his young staff was trying to get them to think ‘outside the box’ when designing event flyers. The natural instinct is to copy something that’s already successful, only changing the colors or icons, but leaving the basic style unchanged. This is why you often see the exact same style on everything from club ads to product advertisements, but nobody seems interested enough to change it.

Enter the Motivator. Belin has decided to excite the creative juices of his staff through a series of weekly in-house tasks, and even a contest. Every Friday he and his team have a creative ‘bull session’, where they discuss the projects they are doing, and try to come up with new ways to approach them. Then each employee is given a weekly DVD to take home and watch over the weekend, such as Pink Floyd’s The Wall, or Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich. On Monday they get together and discuss what they saw, ideas, techniques, and art direction – anything to get the creative juices flowing. To this end, SAS created an interactive website called www.imaginumvitae.com, where people (anyone is free to join) are encouraged to submit a creative work that corresponds to a changing weekly theme. SAS staff is required to submit, and discuss their work.

Certainly part of what Belin is doing is team building, but in a larger sense he is trying to instill a sense of pride in creativity that he finds lacking in his local staff. In his own words, ‘Design is not an honorable job here. It’s just a job for money, like any other. There is no glamour attached to being a creative person or starving artist the way there is in the West. So if this is the case, then why pay attention to details or think outside the box?’

When he interviews potential designers he always asks them a few key questions: What designs do you do in your free time? How do you spend your free time? More often than not he gets the same answers – they spend free time with their friends, shopping, surfing the web, or watching DVDs, and inevitably they don’t do any design work. After all, who wants to do their job on the weekends? When young Chinese designers show him their portfolios he asks them, ‘What were you trying to express with this?’ Almost without fail the answer is that they weren’t trying to express anything at all, but that they thought it was fun, beautiful, or that the colors matched.

‘My challenge’ says Belin, ‘is that SAS is an international company with international clients, but I have local Chinese designers. I am not a teacher, but I have to try to get my staff to see the value of innovation, and how it can be rewarded. If they have come from a Chinese firm they have been taught to simply satisfy the clients’ requirements, but never to go beyond that. I want to show them that if we come up with something new we can win a big job, and they will be rewarded for that.’

So for now Belin is focusing on his small, but eclectic core of international clients, such as event art for top UK record label Hed Kandi, a website for A00, the Canadian interior design firm behind some of Shanghai’s most cutting edge eateries, and ongoing design and event work with a host of Japanese clients. He is firmly committed to the future of design in China, and to that end SAS looks to be a seminal force in its evolution for years to come.

SAS Design Studio – 220 Taikang Lu, 2^nd Floor

Tel. 5465 9373

www.designtothepeople.com

www.imaginumvitae.com

JOURNALISM - SHANGHAI STAR

HAMACHAN TONKATSU HOUSE

March, 2008

Shanghai is a city of hard, often psychedelic contrasts – sometimes confusing, usually amusing, and always informing to the curious soul. ‘Here today, gone tomorrow’ is more law than maxim in this city evolving in real time. Look down any nongtang alleyway, past the bicycles and basins, the plants and fluttering laundry lines, through the jagged silhouettes up to the sky – at the shimmering skyscraper under construction across the street. This is Shanghai.

And so as I sat in the humming, streamlined reception area of the URBN Hotel on Jiaozhou Rd. (near Beijing Rd.), Shanghai’s latest - and arguably coolest - boutique hotel, I looked out through the floor to ceiling windows with some amusement as I remembered a meeting there only six months prior when the owners pointed to a shell of an old wire factory and told me: this will be the lobby area, and we’ll be opening by Christmas. My friend was late for our meeting, and as I perused the drinks menu I noted the confidence of the thick beige paper, the lettering, and the pricing. The waiter gave me a sideways glance as I told him that I would wait for my friend, and handed him back the menu. With a flip of his moody coif he set it back down in front of me and glided away. Even the waiters are more confident these days.

At precisely ten minutes late my friend called to tell me that he would meet me across the street at a little Japanese tonkatsu place called Hamachan. There’s no English sign, he told me, but look for some Japanese writing on the painted window, right next to a video shop. This was already going in a direction I like: a real best kept secret. Walking out of URBN’s lobby I noted the newness of it, like an expensive haircut – confident, styled, chic. Conversely, I wondered what was in store for me at my friend’s hole in the wall Japanese place across the street.

It’s a good thing that he mentioned the video shop, because I walked past Hamachan twice, each time thinking that the door wasn’t in use, as a derelict or under construction building might look. But walking two doors down there was the video shop, and so I circled back and looked at the squiggly lettering on the opaque window and tried the door. Sure enough it opened into a small, dimly lit room, with around twenty humble seats. As I stepped up and shut the door behind me, I had the distinct feeling that I halted a few conversations in mid-sentence. If there had been a juke box it would have stopped. The two waitresses looked at me, looked at each other and then, just a moment too late bleated out their memorized Japanese greeting. Of course I’ve had this kind of reaction many times in Shanghai when walking into a place unfrequented by foreigners – unfamiliarity to the point of speechlessness. But the place is tiny, and a second later I saw my friend waving across the room.

Hamachan looks like it has been around since at least the forties (without renovation), and is certainly a no-frills affair, with its basic wood chairs, plastic table cloths, and old Japanese pin-up girl posters. In fact it looks like an old Shanghai dining room, with a small kitchen in the back and one muttering cook peering over the counter. But my friend tells me that Mr. Hama only opened his namesake restaurant three years ago. He must have taken the space ‘as is’ and basically left it that way.

But the food! This is real, authentic Japanese tonkatsu style. A line of ceramic piggy dolls along the window let’s you know that the main fare on the very limited menu is pork. In fact, of the six main choices five are pork and one is eel. The pork comes breaded and deep fried, or in variations like lean, fat, or sautéed in ginger, and always comes with cabbage, miso soup, pickles, and unlimited rice. If you want extra soup or cabbage it’s 5 RMB. The barbecue sauce is brown and tangy, and at an average of 55 RMB, you could do a lot worse in this town. The eel is the most expensive at 80 RMB, and is a huge piece of fish broiled expertly in a thick, tartly sweet sauce. The other pork offering is curry pork over rice. One of the best offerings on the menu is the cold bean curd, which is soft but at a perfect texture, and comes slathered in spring onions. After a good dousing with soy sauce, this dish is simply sublime, and large enough for two to share. Other small dishes are kimchi, cooked lotus root, tomato carpaccio, soybean paste, and bizarrely, Camembert cheese.

Hamachan knows what it does, and does it well. The food is served confidently, and my friend, who lived in Japan for ten years, told me that it’s as good as any place of its ilk in Tokyo. Like the menu, the drinks list is confidently sparse. One red wine and one white. A few Japanese beers, and surprisingly Shanghai’s local Xinjiang ‘black beer’. As the tables quickly filled up with Japanese salary men and office girls sipping beer and happily tucking into their tonkatsu sets, a small man came in and immediately almost everyone started bowing and smiling. Mr. Hama knows his customers well. You get the sense that he knows what he likes and he wants to share it with us. I for one am glad he decided to.

HAMACHAN RESTAURANT: Daily 6 p.m.-10 p.m.

Like all the best kept secrets, you will have to find it for yourself!

It’s on Jiaozhou Rd. across from URBN Hotel, next to the video store, and not far from Beijing Rd. Have fun…

JOURNALISM - SHANGHAI STAR

MR. ZHANG'S TEA SHOP

March, 2008

Shanghai is a tough town. It is also a great town, just as New York, Moscow, or Paris are great. We love it and hate if for all the same reasons too. It can be a struggle to survive here: the cold makes you appreciate the heat, and five straight days of cold drizzle definitely makes you appreciate the sun. Cold, seemingly indifferent people can make you lose faith in humanity just as fast as one small human kindness can restore it. It is this diversity, this ever evolving yin and yang that makes us love a place more than we could ever love a tropical island somewhere. We are tougher, funnier, and crazier for it. It’s what makes a city great.

Exactly two years ago Valentine’s Day I moved to Shanghai from Bangkok. One day I was pulling myself up out of the pool in my condo, looking up at the hot blue sky, and thinking: It’ll be nice to have seasons again. The next I was in a rattletrap taxi with the windows mysteriously open, hurtling through the grey post-nuclear Pudong countryside, while the driver yelled into his cell phone while smoking. Smoking! And this is what they call culture shock.

My fist week in Shanghai was spent in a friend’s old lane house apartment. It was colder than a witch’s tit (inside and out), and I couldn’t speak the language. The ayi came in one day, and after a bizarre game of charades, I finally worked out how to turn on the air conditioner. Silly me, I thought the air conditioner was just for cold air. I was like a helpless, freezing child. All the directions on everything were in Chinese.

At the end of my first week I nailed down a new apartment, in a high-rise, with all mod cons. I decided I needed a bit of furniture, and on a friend’s suggestion I headed down to Dongtai Lu, and it’s overflowing (mostly) fake antique stalls and shops. Walking around Shanghai, I’d been pushed, pulled, bullied, bumped, and banged around for a week, and was just starting to get the hang of it as I headed into Dongtai Lu – ready for the best they could throw at me. It was a cold, windy day, and the dishonest sun was long gone as I reached the end of Dongtai Lu empty handed, and it must be said, heavy hearted. Shanghai seemed a cold, unforgiving place indeed. And then I saw a sign outside of a small teashop that read: Tea goods will be delivered to you with free delivering fees within Shanghai City. If you feel satisfied after tasting it, please pay for it…Otherwise, if you feel unsatisfied we’ll immediately exchange or cancel this order for you and you don’t need to pay for this change.

I was intrigued to say the least. I was also cold, and it occurred to me that I had been living in China for a week and hadn’t bought or drank any tea yet. Walking into the Chinese Tea Specific Store, I was warmly greeted by Mr. Zhang ling Mu, who was at that moment busy tending to his very pregnant wife. She also gave me a cheery ‘hello’ and then scuttled off into the back of the shop. Mr. Zhang then proceeded to bring out a variety of teas, as he started his wizardly preparations – which I had never seen before. The hot water, the small earthen pots, the screens, the many little cups…the aromas! I was hooked, and at this point started to take a slightly different view of Shanghai, as the hot liquid warmed me up, body and soul.

With his broken English and my new-found ability at charades, we were able to ascertain among other things, that I was indeed American, new to Shanghai, and that his wife was due to burst at any moment. We must have spent an hour like this, only semi-communicating linguistically, but totally communing with good will and hot, delicious tea. The most delicious tea that he served was a floral Oolong from Anxi, in Fujian province called Gui Hua, because it grows next to the gui hua flowers, and takes on their aroma. It is the most subtly sweet and beguiling tea I’ve ever tasted. Uncooked it smells like some rare exotic moonflower, but then when u drink it, it doesn’t taste sweet at all. It has a classic Oolong flavor, but with just a hint of that lovely floral aroma. This is surely a world class tea, and one not to be missed if you are lucky enough to be in Shanghai.

In the past two years I have given out many of Mr. Zhang’s attractive little 50g boxes of Gui Hua tea as gifts. In fact, last Christmas that’s all I gave my family and friends back home. I’ve already got orders for more. One Aunt who considers herself a bit of a tea connoisseur praised it to the heavens, even going so far as to quote somebody named Carole Manchester (Tea in the East). According to Carole, ‘The best Oolong has the odor of peaches’. I guess she got her hands on some Gui Hua back in the day.

As I walked over to Mr. Zhang’s little shop today I noticed how much the neighborhood has changed since that first chilly February day. I live not far from here, and already the blocks on three out of four sides of my apartment are gone to the wrecking ball. There are new high rises and two new hotels obscuring the skyline over towards Xintiandi. Dongtai Lu remains the same: cramped, full of foreigners (guidebook in hand) bargaining in a hundred different languages, picturesque, expanding. The faces remain the same, an so does the hustle (and bustle) of Shanghai. It can be maddening surely.

Mr. Zhang is always happy to see me, as I am happy to see him. I buy a lot of tea from him. I turn a lot of people on to his shop. I once brought a friend from Bangkok in and she wrote about him in two different Thai guidebooks. His soft sell approach, his warmth and kindness, his great selection of teas with a money back guarantee – all of these are the antithesis of the usual big city experience. He is the yin to Shanghai’s yang, and therefore he has won my loyal custom. I realized today that his happy, red-cheeked son is now two. And that means I’ve been here for two years too. I’ve adapted to Shanghai, and been able to find its fleeting beauty, its tough love and hidden gems. Surely one of the best is this gentle, unassuming ambassador.

JOURNALISM - SHANGHAI STAR

Whoa! What a difference four months makes (happy 2008 by the way)...
Well, and just like that suddenly blogspot is back in the good graces of you know whom - for how long is anyone's guess with the the way things have been going lately. So I better get this thing as up to date as possible.
I have started writing for the Shanghai Star (which is part of China Daily) so I will add those articles always under this heading: JOURNALISM - SHANGHAI STAR.
So here's the first few I have written - generally I have sort of a free hand to write about people/places/things I like. Lucky me.