Christopher Phillips, James Brearley and Ikea not necessarily in that order

IKEA in the rainy morning, looking for, among other things, a toilet seat that fits the toilet... seems impossible
IKEA -same shit, same building-different street name

Lunch with
James Brearley
B A U I N T E R N A T I O N A L
BREARLEY ARCHITECTS + URBANISTS
www.bau.com.au
at Whisk which sells itself as a chocolate bar but you can get a mighty tuna salad with that pink salad dressing striped over the top as well. The large "shot" of thick, but not Jacques Torres thick, hot chocolate, all for a mere ... James picked up the tab, wasn't so bad either

James is a displaced Australian Urbanist Architect who has been in Shanghai long enough to build a glass boxed cafe atop an already impressive square 4 story building in the middle of the French quarter. He, and his modest staff including his sweet wife/partner, designs cities and buildings and then the designs get thrown out or fudged by the corrupt contractors or egotistical greedy city officials but in the end some slight variant of the original plan gets built, no time for being precious here.
I gave him the Learning from Hangzhou Powerpoint presentation (www.mabz.net has a small section under Imaging for those that read this stinking blog) and he scheduled me a lecture in his cafe sometime soon. It's nice to know some nice art.achiUrban minded people in Shanghai

Christopher Phillips, ICP curator, all the way from ice stormy New York or Newark, as planes for the middle kingdom sometimes depart from these days, was suffering the 13hr flight and time difference jet lag that had me down for weeks, but still made his way through a Tuesday full of museum openings in Pudong to dinner with me in Puxi at Lost Heaven, a heavenly under-lit Yunnanese restaurant. Yunnan is one of China's southwestern provinces bordering Laos, Burma and full of minority color. China has 56 ethnic minorities all with their own language, food, customs etc A good portion of these ethnicities are matriarchally structured

Christopher talked about the evolution of a museum culture in China and the currently backward, but quickly changing conditions; and the pet project cultural investments by the same, above mentioned, corrupt officials. We talked about art stars and the peripheral but very eclectic characters that dot the small but growing art world here, we talked about the market, the millions that the artists are sitting on, about Zhou Tiehai's new villa in some antiseptic corner of Pudong- a city that was a horizontal piece of farm land when I first visited in 1994 and then we talked about Daniel Libeskind's new museum wing in Toronto where Chritopher is curating an exhibition about Shanghai, and for which I will film some interviews... maybe.
It's all maybes here... until you build some museums, cities, etc.