Image: Chubbo129

Montreal resident Emmanuel Madan recently travelled to Shanghai to install an artwork called Ondulation. He sent us a series of dispatches about his experiences and we thought these were perfect for our feature on Shanghai.


Often it seems like all of China country is in a perpetual state of construction. Once the pool was set up and I was able to start working on the musical content of the piece, I had to start coming in at odd hours in order to hear the soundtrack and not be distracted by everything else going on in the building. Still a bit jetlagged, I managed to make it in at 6:30 one morning. I had 25 minutes of peace and quiet, then at 6:55 I was joined by the sound of jackhammers, doing some kind of modification to the outside of the building. Although this whole plaza had only been completed a year previously, it seems when they built this whole mezzanine-cum-balcony that goes around the pedestrian plaza they had left out an important detail: they were adding stairs.

I got more and more desperate to find a quiet time to work on the piece, trying to get an idea of (...read more...)