COLORS ON SHOW IN SHANGHAI

Press releases

COLORS ON SHOW IN SHANGHAI

In the heart of the Chinese megalopolis, the magazine “about the rest of the world” presents the exhibition TRANSPORT: homemade vehicles from around the world.

6 - 18 September 2011

Hong Miao Art Gallery

Shanghai

COLORS is going to Shanghai to present an exhibition inspired by its latest monographic issue, Transport. The magazine, presented in the form of a survival guide, explores where, why and how individuals are inventing new ways of getting from A to B.

Intricate transport networks over land, sea and air are wrapping the earth in a thickening web of routes, vehicles and trade. Oil powers over 90% of transport, but this resource is running out fast. In the not-too-distant future we will no longer be able to fill the tanks of the 140 million cars driven in the United States today, nor move from port to port the 100 million freight containers loaded every year onto cargo ships, nor keep in the air the 500,000 people who at this very moment are flying somewhere around the world.

Through photographic reportage, illustration, video, and the original vehicles themselves, this exhibition in the beautiful Hong Miao Gallery – a converted Taoist temple – takes the visitor on a quirky tour of unusual transport from around the world. Brilliant inventors and their ingeniously resourceful transportation created due to poverty, local material constraints or simply in the pursuit of dreams.

Inventors such as Wu Yulu, a Chinese farmer from near Beijing, who built a customised vehicle to take him and his wife to market. Comfortably seated in his rickshaw, he lets Wu Lao 32 ferry him around. Wu Lao 32 is a humanoid robot powered by an electric motor who can walk for six hours at a rate of 30-40 steps per minute.

Elsewhere in China, in Jiangjiang, inspired by photovoltaic street lamps, inventor Chen Shengui decided to find his own solution to his country's transport problems. China is both experiencing the biggest automobile boom the world has ever seen and is the world's foremost producer of solar panels. With both facts in mind, Chen set about building a prototype of a solar-powered car. He hopes that sooner or later the government will give financial support to this project.

Wang Qiang, 35, from China's Sichuan province, is a self-taught pilot who sold his barber’s shop to pursue his dreams of flight. He is the inventor of Wang Qiang2, an imaginative aircraft built from metal scraps and assembled by hand using homemade tools.

In the Indian state of Gujarat, only one person in eighty owns a car. Government-run rural transport infrastructure in Gujarat is almost non-existent, but chakdasare the solution to all manner of transport problems. Built from motorcycles and water pumps, a chakda can carry tradable goods, gas supplies, or as many passengers as a minibus.

China makes 58% of the bicycles pedalled around the world, and many of these end up on the busy streets of Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu, where they are converted into cheap, sustainable and charming bicycle taxis, known as boda-bodas.

Ten leading figures from the academic and social worlds, including Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food; Domenico Luciani, an international landscape and gardens expert with the Benetton Studies Foundation in Treviso; and U.S. designer and social engineer Jacques Fresco, spoke to COLORS about their personal vision of transport in the future.

Founded in 1991, COLORS is a quarterly magazine sold in more than 40 countries and published in five languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian and Korean). Today, COLORS is part of the publishing activities of Fabrica, Benetton Group’s communication research centre in Treviso, Italy.

www.colorsmagazine.com

www.fabrica.it

To download high resolution images of COLORS 81 TRANSPORT, please visit: http://www.fabrica.it/image-galleries

FABRICA AND CHINA

The COLORS exhibition in Shanghai provides an opportunity to reassert Fabrica’s long-standing special interest in China, to which numerous projects developed over the years testify. From the co-production of director Zhang Yuan’s Seventeen Years (Silver Lion for Best Director at the 1999 Venice Film Festival); to the issues of COLORS that dealt with daily life in the Chinese capital (COLORS 70 Beijing, 2007) and, just before the Beijing Olympic Games of 2008, launched a message of peace and hope when they published the prayers of thirty Tibetan monks for the Chinese victims of the Sichuan earthquake (COLORS 74 Victims, 2008). Also, a Chinese-language issue of COLORS no. 72, COLORS Without COLORS, was published in association with the Today Art Museum and China Youth Publishing House. We should also remember the many exhibitions that created an ideal bridge between Fabrica and Chinese culture, such as REMOTE/CONTROL at MoCA Shanghai (2007), where Fabrica presented an interactive art installation Piacere, Fabrica designed as an opportunity for interchange between international and local artists; Les Yeux Ouverts at the Shanghai Art Museum (2007), with an overview of Fabrica’s wide-ranging communication research work; The Secrets of the Forbidden City - Matteo Ricci at the Court of the Ming Dynasty (2009), a Fabrica-curated exhibition on the Dynasty of Splendour held in Treviso (Italy), one of a cycle of three exhibitions which the National Board of the Museums of China described as, “the most significant window ever opened in the West onto Chinese civilisation”. Last but not least, the Chinese production of Decode: Digital Design Sensations, an exhibition from the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, on the best of contemporary digital art and design, held at the prestigious CAFA Art Museum in Beijing (2010).

Shanghai is also one of the cities featured in Benetton Live Windows, a new communication channel wholly developed by Fabrica. Large, HD video walls replace traditional store windows to become a visual magnet on the urban landscape and create a new, participatory experience for customers. Hyper-scale, interactivity, the user plays a leading role: these are the key concepts geared to capturing the public’s attention and entertaining it in a playful, amusing way. In addition to Shanghai, at present Benetton Live Windows can also be found in Benetton stores in Milan (Piazza Duomo and the Central Railway Station), Bologna, Munich, Barcelona and Moscow.

TRANSPORT

homemade vehicles from around the world

6 – 18 September 2011

Opening: Tuesday, 6 September, 6 p.m.

Hong Miao Art Gallery

50 Shitan Lane

496 East Nanjing Road

Shanghai – China

Opening hours

10 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

More information:

Sarah LEE