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Im Dafen Lisa: Architecture and Narratology
30 x9

the architecture Shenzhen, Frontier for China Dreams, curated by the Shenzhenbased architecture practice Urbanus, stands as part of the Urban Best Practice Area program in the Shanghai World Expo. Its shelled with two other pavilions in a one big space: it is a pavilion within a pavilion. The plot is long and slender, the architect installed a fully-enclosed cube. The front facade, measuring 30m in length and 9m in height, is a gigantic Mona Lisa painting laid horizontally. As the story goes, the Mona Lisa painting was produced in Dafen village in suburban Shenzhen by a thousand painters simultaneously. Famous for their assembly line production, each of the Dafen village painters finished a few squares of the original painting. From there the whole painting was assembled. Dafens oil painting exports take up about half the worlds market share, and Dafen represents only one of the many dreams of the 30 year old Shenzhen coming true. At the World Expo, the Shenzhen pavilion employs a narrative tactic. Guests first come across the Mona Lisa (fondly nicknamed Dafen Lisa ), the most obvious and ultimate manifestation of Dafen. The guests then make their way through a series of narrow walkways and cramped rooms that simulates the constraining feeling Dafens urban village topography imposes. There, audiences learn about Dafens history, the typical oil production workflow, and even meet the two head-machos of contrasting characteristics in the making of Dafen. Finally, guests descend down a flight of stairs and enter into a deep open theater space. A theater with no stage, but everywhere as its stage. A projected illusion on the grand stairs gives the impression that water is streaming down. From the walls, throughout the space, attendees will be presented with video portrayals of Shenzhen and its people. Audiences are invited to linger on the stage and extend their consciousness in the space. the narrative The question is, Will the architect-curated pavilion turn its own architecture into the one and only piece of artwork? Like a novel, architecture occupies the audiences spatial and temporal experience. To what extent can the architectural narrative and the exhibition narrative converge and reinforce one another? Narrative engages double temporal sequences. Thus, one may regard a given narrative as projecting a certain frame of time into another. While the running time of exhibits are predetermined and audiences take a linear path, there are a myarid of stories and temporal spaces that evolves for any audience. This is the narrative line of the exhibition.Wandering about the Shenzhen pavilion, as ateliers, signs, faces and sound come in symphonies and variations, the audience becomes a flneur in a Walter Benjamin sense. The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flneur as phantasmagoria--now a landscape, now a room.(Benjamin)

/ text by Umi / photos by

Meng Yan

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In light of constant realities, the flneur holds no preconceptions, free to capture flight of feeling and thought. Injected into the exhibition, the flneurship makes for spontaneous exuberance, just as one would expect from a street. Dramatic setting positions the audience into a looking and being-looked interaction. Being at a place with other people is essentially dramatic. The other people become part of the subject, and I become part of the other people. The audience in turn finds their own interpretation as part of the mega narrative. When the audience turns their interest from what is being narrated to the act of narration itself, from what is spoken to how to speak, it marks the starting point of a real interaction. The moment that one attempts to measure this, the other narrative -- the spatial narrative -comes into the limelight. When the exhibit narrative enters the design process, how much it influences the architects choice is critical to the architectural narrative. Otherwise, theres no need for the architect worry about reconciling the exhibit and architectural narrative. . Somehow, one finds the architectural narrative enveloped in the exhibition with the exterior and interior alike. This suggests a mysterious quality in space to the extent one doesnt feel the space. Others may argue that the architecture has wrapped up the exhibition, shaping the experience as diving through a series of vacuum walled by the concrete architecture. Whatever the case, this seems to be the start of a healthy discussion on form and content. Still, if there were anything else comparable between space and narrative, it would be in the realm of analogy and symbols. What does one expect of a space that aims to thread a narrative? It must dramatically represent itself; it must be acting. It not only is, but its role also suggests that its an art piece. (Whats more, it is self-

& Opposite: Painters in Dafen, photography and oil-painting This page: Shenzhen Time, multi-media image & Shengzhen Memory, archive-file installation

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 This page: Recycle Box, installation Opposite: Crown-cloud, sculpture

explanatory that it is an art piece -- no doubt about that.) Architecture commonly alters the quality of its surroundings through itself and, therefore, becomes a face in the landscape. Paintings follow the same process, only to present the whole of landscape as a face. As the French philosopher Deleuze and psychologist Guattari put it, facial close-ups transform a face into an artificial landscape. The super-scale Mona Lisa as the facade is both, a sign that communicates through allusion, and the face and landscape of the architecture as a whole. It is acting. This performative aspect of architecture derives from its reaction to the situation and condition it lays in, struggling between being an art in time or an art in space. In the infant days of the project, the design team considered bringing in live performance or performance art; now the pavilion claims itself to be the performer. From the outside, it isnt through chosen vocabulary and consequent detailed implementation that the pavilions strong persona is emanated. We may see too much of that in the World Expo. Rather, it proposes a sign in place of decorations. Hence, aesthetics are made communicative, legible and polysemic. Of course, one should always be cautious of signs turning into architectures. Is it mere rhetoric? Is it too ferocious? Does it generate a dialectical relation to the architecture? Dafen Lisa does it just right: The Eye is the key to entering the architectural face (one is not saying there should be any trick in the gigantic Mona Lisa painting). The Eye is the black hole on a White Wall. It takes everything in without any feedback, as opposed to the White Wall, which reflecting everything back without taking any in. Uninteresting architecture is like a face without Eyes, rather mask-like: the mask either assures the heads belonging to the body, or assures the erection, the construction of the face.

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