Recently, my good friend Cecilia Jansson held an open studio party in her luxurious rooms at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, her home and creative workspace for the past six months.
Despite the large supply of beer and wine, it was a sad occasion, as it doubled as her farewell party—an all-too-familiar ritual in this city, given the transitory nature of us expats.
Drinks in hand, we all wandered around the unusual space, staring at the seemingly bizarre drawings, prints, and ceramics.
In one corner of the room, a giant piece of ripped-up carpet depicted a huge muscular man glaring menacingly from a chair while dead fish flapped around his feet.
Meanwhile, on the left wall, bulging-eyed cow faces loomed out of canvases, staring at us disconcertingly. On the other side of the room, near an open window overlooking the Bund, long sheets of silk flapped by in the wind, on which were printed pictures of busy blue-suited factory workers. Four ceramic cups sat innocently next to the drinks tray and at first glance looked perfectly normal, but upon further inspection they revealed two sinister rows of crooked teeth embedded in the porcelain.
An odd collection, perhaps, but what I like most about Cecilia’s work is her ability to make us consider things we’ve probably overlooked.
In a country like China, often known as the world’s factory, the people behind the products are often unobserved, or at least there is no firsthand evidence of their presence, and it’s around this theme that the artist draws her inspiration.
The “teeth cups,” for example (easily my favorite of her works), come from her time in a pottery factory in Jingdezhen, when she managed to persuade a local dentist to give her moulds of the teeth of some of the local pottery makers. She then incorporated the moulds into her pottery, thereby granting the artisans an identity within the work. The results are quite astonishing!
For her silk project, she snapped photos of Chinese factory workers and then printed them onto several sheets of silk that were produced in the factory that employs her subjects. The workers themselves were apparently amused and delighted at the idea and gave her full permission to use their images.
I love it.
Cecilia is one of several artists to have undertaken the residency program at Shanghai’s newly refurbished Peace Hotel, a venue which, over the years, has hosted guests as diverse as Mao Tse-tung and Noël Coward, the latter of whom penned the play Private Lives in his room while recovering from influenza in 1929.
Always a magnet for artists, writers, and musicians, Shanghai continues to attract creative talent from all over the world. In honor of this tradition, the Swatch Group—the primary investor in the hotel—invites a number of international artists like Cecilia to live and work in the deluxe 18 rooms on the hotel’s upper stories for up to six months, entirely free of charge.
They don’t even really expect any work from the artists. The primary focus is just to inspire, swap, and create ideas in the hope that something interesting appears.
The only condition is that actor George Clooney, a Swatch Group board member, can (and often does) pop in to the hotel for an unannounced visit. He was a big fan of Cecilia’s teeth cups, even though he said he thought she was crazy when he showed up the other day. Apparently he likes to make funny comments about the work, like, “Oh, yeah. And why would you do something like that?” He is very good-natured and his visits are probably a small price to pay, all things considered.
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