Megacities Asia, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, responds ambitiously to the recent . It does so by focusing on the way artists have reacted to changes in their home cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Delhi, Mumbai and Seoul. There are no computer renderings of the latest record-breaking skyscrapers or interpretations of transformed skylines. The pieces here, created between 2003 and 2016, squarely challenge a new era of urban development.
In Yin Xiuzhen鈥檚 Temperature, scraps of clothing belonging to evicted tenants sprout from the rubble of their destroyed homes. Another Beijing resident, Song Dong, constructed a hutong, a vanishing style of courtyard house, usually self-built, for Wisdom of the Poor: Living with Pigeons. Hu Xiangcheng鈥檚 Doors Away from Home 鈥� Doors Back Home is a huge structure mostly composed of doors salvaged from Ming- and Qing-dynasty homes, which were dismantled during Shanghai鈥檚 early 1990s construction boom. (, only 22 per cent of Chinese homes were built before 2000.) Like many of the exhibition鈥檚 pieces, Doors is meant to be explored: you walk between miniature rooms, negotiating unexpected angles and finding yourself in strange hidey-holes, confronted by family photographs pasted just at eye level. As the curators write in the introduction, 鈥淢egacities are not only seen, but also felt.鈥�
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Asim Waqif鈥檚 Venu (2012) takes the immersion of the museum patron to another level. A bamboo playground that reacts to your presence with bird calls or mechanical purring, the piece also doubles as cage. You don鈥檛 notice this until you鈥檙e inside, while other patrons stalk its edges, videoing your exploits with their phones. Should we read Waqif鈥檚 use of bamboo, the traditional vernacular housing material, as a reaction to the idea of the oh-so-modern (and oh-so-governable) 鈥渟mart city鈥�?
Gilded present, broken past
India is embarking on a project to make 100 smart cities. These cities, much like Songdo in South Korea or Masdar in the UAE, will be built completely from scratch. New technologies woven through their infrastructure will quantify daily routines and engineer social spaces from the top down. Existing cities already have systems, developed ad hoc over years by a free citizenry, and many of the artists fear these ways of life are now being threatened by the idea of the city as a fully-planned, closed system. Hema Upadhyay鈥檚 8鈥� x 12鈥� is a walk-in box featuring mini-aerial views of Mumbai on its walls and ceiling, which are barnacled with shingle roofs, mosque domes, church spires and bulbous satellite dishes, all made from the same materials local families use to build their homes. This is a different kind of map from the one you will see on Google Earth, or on the Uber app you boot up the second you鈥檙e off the plane.
Not all of these pieces view technology in a negative light. Waqif incorporates sensors into Venu, and Han Seok Hyun鈥檚 Super-Natural glories in the technologies we use to preserve and recycle the stuff we consume. Suspiciously green and healthy-looking trash has been sourced both from Seoul and Boston: disposable packets of green tea, plastic bottles of soju, bear-like cartoony figures, feather dusters, plastic army men and bottles of (where the artist was in residency last year). Up close, as this is all soon-to-be-recycled junk, but from a distance, the piece begins to acquire a splendid nobility. Aaditi Joshi鈥檚 Untitled resembles a huge aquatic life form, for whom a pollution-choked canal would presumably be a nourishing medium. Headless, eyeless and gill-less, it is gorgeously coloured without being garish and is constructed from plastic bags. If you lie on your back underneath and look up into its belly, you鈥檒l be rewarded with a glimpse of its spine, lit by LEDs.
While most of the exhibits are grouped together in one central location, half a dozen others are larded throughout the museum, meaning that seeing the entire exhibition is a bit of a hike. It was on this long, tangled search that I encountered Yee Sookyung鈥檚 , an alien, soft-green-blue globular growth of broken ceramics held together by golden epoxy. It鈥檚 not part of the exhibit, and yet this massive, closed vase seemed the perfect capstone to it: a melding of the gilded present and the broken past.
Megacities Asia runs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston until 17 July
