Livrarias em Shanghai: vale a viagem... - Shanghai Daily

Book fair 'magic' casts spell on the new-look bookstores

 

Yao MinjiKe Jiayun

  Shanghai Daily, 19:38 UTC+8, 2020-08-14       

Jiang Xiaowei / SHINE

Booklovers enjoy the airy atmosphere at the Light Space Xinhua Bookstore in the Aegean Place shopping center in Minhang District.

“Books are a uniquely portable magic,” said Stephen King, the popular American author of horror, suspense and fantasy novels.

His observation might be an apt description of the ongoing Shanghai Book Fair, which is highlighting the magic of the written word in all aspects of life.

The fair, which ends on Tuesday, gives the floor to publishers and bookshop owners encouraging more people to read.

“The book fair has always responded to evolving reading habits, lifestyle and market trends,” said Xu Jiong, head of the Shanghai Press and Publication Bureau. “The promotion of reading should not be limited only to booklovers.”

Reading, of course, is undergoing bifurcation, branching into a competition between traditional books and e-books.

The onset of the digital age has forced many traditional bookshops to implement creative ways of attracting new readers while keeping their loyal customers.

They install cafes, sell crafts and adopt eye-catching decor. A book on floral design might come gift-wrapped in box with a flower bouquet. Coffee may be served in cups bearing quotes from a book, which can be ordered. Bookshops peddle books on livestreaming sites usually specializing in cosmetics.

All this new marketing flare is reflected at this year’s book fair.

“The coronavirus epidemic has pushed the fair to undergo an unprecedented transformation,” Xu said. “We need to break boundaries in order to upgrade the publishing industry.”

At the fair’s “sleeping library” section, books like Somerset Maugham’s “The Moon and Sixpence” and American poet Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” share space with pleasant aromatics, music and art to create the ideal environment for a bedtime read.

The two partners behind the “sleeping library” are Shanghai Salian Bookstore and Atour Hotel, which have worked together to build reading areas in Atour hotels and set up two-week flash bookstores in the city’s shopping malls.

At Atour hotels, patrons can take a book home from the reading area and return it to any of the chain’s sites.

“We also plan to work with tourism companies to create scenarios for reading in the scenic outdoors,” said Wu Hao, manager of Salian Bookstore. “We want to bring reading into forestlands and lakefronts.”

Books also are finding a place at the dinner table.

One of the fair’s new features is Writer’s Gourmet Menu. The seven-episode talk show series, with one segment aired each day of the fair, takes authors to seven restaurants specializing in different styles of cuisine. Over dinner, the authors discuss literature.

“It’s great to see,” said science-fiction writer Chen Qiufan, who was invited to discuss what aliens might eat while enjoying a gourmet meal at Jade Mansion in the IFC Mall in Pudong. “A book fair can ‘graft’ literature onto dining, merging literature and cuisine. This is a nice beginning.”

Bookstores around the city are serving as branches of the fair outside of the main venue at the Shanghai Exhibition Center. At the center, online reservations and restricted capacity have been imposed because of the coronavirus epidemic. Branch activities give more people the opportunity to participate.

“I’ve been going to the fair every year since it started,” said Wang Jianjun, 79, as he walked out of the bookstore in the Jing’an Kerry Center with his 12-year-old granddaughter. “But I was a bit slow to understand the online booking this year, and only day tickets for Tuesday were left when my granddaughter finally helped me. But I didn’t want to wait until Tuesday. It’s kind of a ceremonial thing for me to see the fair on its first day. So we decided to visit the branch venues in mall bookstores near home.”

Shopping malls have long been bookstore buddies. They were among the first to offer help when brick-and-mortar bookshops hit their lows in 2012, providing space for low or even no rent. In return, the malls have benefited from culturally minded customers attracted to the mall by its bookshops.

Over the years, the partnership between bookstores and malls has become more integrated.

Ti Gong

Tian Yimiao, a music writer and scholar, autographs her new book “I, Sea and Library” for fans at a book fair event hosted by Duoyun Bookstore. The bookstore on the 52nd floor of Shanghai Tower is the highest in the city.

One of the most successful collaborations is between Light Space Xinhua Bookstore in the Aegean Place shopping center in Minhang District.

It’s a marriage of books and architecture. The store interior was designed by renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando, best known for his poetic melding of light and space.

The exquisitely designed interior features a spiral stairway, arty bookshelves and cozy seating areas that transformed the more than 70-year-old shop into a cultural landmark.

“We host regular meetings at Aegean Place,” said Chen Yi, executive director of Light Space. “When we have themed book events, we hold them outside our bookshop or in other places in the shopping center, like the atrium. We also contribute our resources to help when Aegean holds cultural events.”

Chen cited a three-day event last year featuring illustrated books held in the mall’s gazebo every evening. It was so successful that the event was extended to several months. The event was suspended due to the epidemic, but Chen said she expects it to restart later in the year.

Her shop had annual foot traffic of nearly a million before the pandemic. She said customer numbers will gradually return as life in the city returns to normal.

“Aegean’s developer and our parent company wanted this shop to be more culturally inviting than shops usually found in shopping malls,” she said. “Commercial complexes used to be focused only on consumer demand, but now many of them are also addressing spiritual needs.”

People who visit Light Space often patronize restaurants in the mall. People who come to see the center’s grand music fountain often stop by the bookshop.

Light Space also works with other shops in the mall. It created a Marvel bookshelf when a Marvel movie was being screened in the cinema next door.

Jiang Xiaowei / SHINE

Duoyun Bookstore on the 52nd floor of Shanghai Tower

Duoyun Bookstore, on the 52nd floor of Shanghai Tower, the highest in the city, is another example of a cultural site that goes beyond just books.

The shop sponsors reading clubs specializing in books by local authors or with themes related to Shanghai.

“We have been a branch venue for the book fair for two years now,” said He Xiaomin, public relations manager at parent company Duoyun Books. “With our location, we can attract more people to join the fair’s events and provide a cultural experience for customers in this commercial complex.”

More bookstores are following suit.

A new outlet of China Publishing Bookstore opened on the first day of the book fair at a commercial complex in Fengxian District. Its design integrates elements of old waterfront towns with modern design concepts.

Japanese chain Tsutaya, which runs 1,400 bookstores in Japan, is expected to open in century-old Columbia Circle in Changning District by the end of this year.

The chain’s first shop in Shanghai is based on the concept of “lifestyle navigation” of its flagship store in Tokyo, fusing books, videos and music albums.

Source: SHINE   Editor: Xu Qing

A arquitetura stalinista kitsch da Coreia do Norte - book review (WSJ)

Oscar Niemeyer provavelmente elogiaria as horrendas construcoes da Coreia do Norte.

Kingdom of Kitsch
The oversize public monuments and buildings in the capital of North Korea confirm the subservience of the citizen to the state and display the ghastly aesthetic imperatives of totalitarian art.
By ERIC GIBSON
The Wall Street Journal, December 28, 212

Browse the travel section of any bookstore and along with old reliables such as Michelin you'll find a plethora of other titles and brands covering just about every destination and taste. Surely the strangest addition to this genre is the two-volume "Architectural and Cultural Guide: Pyongyang," edited by Philipp Meuser, a German architect and architectural historian. Strange because Pyongnang is unlikely to be on anyone's "see before you die" list and because, even if it were, it's not an easy place to see. The capital of the Hermit Kingdom receives only a few hundred visitors a year, the bulk of them officially sanctioned and accompanied every step of the way by government minders.

Architectural and Cultural Guide: Pyongyang
Edited by Philipp Meuser
DOM, 368 pages, $49.95

DOM
not to scale The Grand Monument on Mansu Hill features a 60-foot statue of Kim Il-sung; a sculpture celebrating the founding of the Communist Party (below).

"Architectural and Cultural Guide: Pyongyang" must also count as the only travel guide that comes with a warning to leave it behind. "It is possible that some of the information published is classified under North Korean law," reads an advisory note. "The publisher cannot accept liability for any problems with local authorities that may arise from taking this publication into North Korean territory."

Why write a guide to such a place? Mr. Meuser's stated aim is to "lend normalcy to the abnormal." He writes of the "pervasive feeling . . . of bemusement and perplexity in the face of the totalitarian regime" when you visit North Korea. Some of this feeling stems from the near-ghost-town character of Pyongyang. A city of some 1,200 square miles (about double New York's geographical size), it has a population of about three million. Although the book's photographs show vast residential areas populated by thick clusters of high-rise apartment buildings, the streets are virtually empty. One of the most memorable images in the book is of a traffic cop on duty at an intersection, without a single car in sight.

Enlarge Image

DOM
But the city's air of unreality derives in the main from the fact that Pyongyang is a suffocating propaganda hothouse where everything—the layout, buildings, monuments, billboards, signage—is designed to express the ideology of "Juche," or national self-reliance. As such, everything is geared to glorifying the state and its leader and reminding all the citizens that their primary raison d'être is to continue the revolutionary struggle. Mr. Meuser tries to understand all this by taking us through Pyongyang's streets "as though exploring this city were no different from rambling through Tokyo, Copenhagen or Berlin."

The book is not so much a Baedeker—there are no transportation tips, no business hours, no walking tours or other standard guidebook information—as an attempt to parse a city that Mr. Meuser describes as "an architectural cabinet of curiosities. . . . arguably the world's best preserved open-air museum of socialist architecture."

The first volume of the book consists primarily of photographs and is divided into sections such as "Urban Planning," "Residential Buildings" and "Monuments." The second is a collection of essays, three by Mr. Meuser and the rest by two other architectural historians, one South Korean and the other, like Mr. Meuser, German. As a bonus of sorts, "Architectural and Cultural Guide: Pyongyang" includes a 10,000-word excerpt from a manifesto titled "On Architecture" (1991). It was written—or so we are asked to believe—by Kim Jong-il, North Korea's leader from 1994 until his death in 2011. "It is more important that architectural structures reflect revolutionary ideals," reads a typical sentence.

For all its mix of elements, Mr. Meuser has produced a book that is at once unique and invaluable, the most in-depth study of totalitarian art and aesthetics since the Russian art historian Igor Golomstock published his sweeping history of the subject 12 years ago. Only this book has the advantage of being focused on work that is still standing and visible, unlike the material from the Nazi and Soviet eras discussed by Mr. Golomstock.

Pyongyang was 90% destroyed during the Korean War. So its later, ground-up rebuilding as a communist capital makes it a textbook showcase of totalitarian kitsch—that perverse byway of genuine art. The animating principle of totalitarian kitsch is the glorification of the state and its leader. The style borrows its vocabulary from the forms of legitimate art—the figure, the equestrian statue, the landscape—but it empties them of all but the most cloying, shallow emotion, relying on an inflated sense of scale and an off-the-shelf, formulaic realism.

Indeed, totalitarian kitsch uses scale as an autonomous aesthetic element. This quality is abundantly on display in Pyongyang, in its 60-foot statues of Kim Il-sung, the country's founding leader, and in the official buildings, with their floor areas running to hundreds of thousands of square feet. The idea here is that size is the message. By dwarfing the populace, such gigantism conveys the subservience of the individual to the state. Still, when it comes to size, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were pikers. Pyongyang's Arch of Triumph (1982) is about equal to Paris's Arc de Triomphe. The triumphal arch that Albert Speer designed for Hitler—part of a redesign of Berlin that was carefully planned but never built—was so vast that Paris's would have fit snugly into its aperture.

In Pyongyang, sometimes straining for the Big Statement has backfired, as in the case of the Ryugyong Hotel. Under construction since 1987, this 105-story, 6,000-bed pyramid is still unfinished, partly because its source of funding dried up with the collapse of the Soviet Union. "Looming over the city like a portent of doom, it is a daily reminder of the biblical Tower of Babel,'" writes Mr. Meuser. Or of a Potemkin village. Unusually for a building of that kind, the hotel is made entirely out of concrete. But "while a steel construction would have made better structural sense," writes Mr. Meuser, "it would have cost three times as much." Over the years, Pyongyang has moved away from Soviet-inspired concrete-block structures, seemingly the bastard children of Le Corbusier and a government planning bureau, to more modernistic, steel-and-glass structures like this hotel, all in an effort to appear more cosmopolitan.

If North Korea could be said to have made any "contribution" to the totalitarian-kitsch aesthetic, it is in Pyongyang's two giant memorial complexes, the Grand Monument on Mansu Hill (1972) and the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Memorial (1993). Both consist of enormous plazas, some 450,000 square feet in area, dominated by a statue and subordinate sculptural groups. The Mansu Hill monument features, at its center, a 60-foot-high statue of Kim Il-sung; flanking him are two 150-foot-long sculptural groups, each with more than 100 figures parading ecstatically alongside a stylized, 75-foot-long flag. The war memorial is similarly designed but even more elaborate.

These memorial complexes allow us to speak of something totally new: the theater of totalitarian commemorative art. They are a hybrid form, a fusion of the traditional, stand-alone, single-figure monument and the Party rally. Think Nuremberg, only with dictator and martial attendants frozen in a perpetual act of exhortation. Visitors to these monuments become participants in a display of coercive propaganda as much as if they were attending a live outdoor assembly.

It's easy to make fun of Pyongyang's Ozymandias statuary, its comical anachronisms (such as the monument, unveiled in April, showing the late Kim Jong-il astride a rearing charger) and its government buildings dolled up with Vegas levels of glitz. But this book takes us beyond the laughter to see the cost to the Korean people of this preening ideological environment. Public monuments and buildings in Pyongyang are illuminated at night, but private residences are largely dark. Artists aren't independent creators but cogs working in teams with hundreds of others to crank out propaganda images of the Kims. Official buildings may be constructed of lavish materials—quarried stone and solid-gold door pulls—but housing for "the masses" is made from pre-cast concrete that quickly begins to crack and leak. The $100 million cost of the mammoth Mangyongdae Schoolchildren's Palace (1989), notes Mr. Meuser drily, "exceeds the total monthly income of the entire working population of North Korea." No wonder this book carries a warning.

One day the regime will fall and democracy will come to North Korea. We can only hope that, when it does, the successor government will preserve the monumental, public, propagandistic Pyongyang in all its perverse glory. It would be a real tourist destination, the world's only totalitarian-kitsch theme park—a kind of lopsided Disneyworld—and an object lesson in what happens when art is hijacked by the state, and the individual is ground beneath the wheels of a repressive ideology.

—Mr. Gibson is the Journal's Leisure & Arts Features editor.