Shanghai museum a dazzler

Author: By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, April 20, 1997

Page: M13

Section: Travel

Some of those bronzes now play starring roles in the museum's dazzling new $70 million building. Designed by Xing Tonghe of the Shanghai Architectural Institute, it is so state-of-the-art it has a thing or two to teach its Western counterparts. Shanghai, once the most progressive of China's great cities, is making a bid to reclaim its reputation as cultural hub. There is now a sprinkling of commercial galleries in the city, and Sotheby's and Christie's, the world's two leading art auction houses, both have representatives here.

The Shanghai Museum, which opened in December, 1995, is easily the finest in China. You might reasonably expect that honor to go to a museum in Beijing, but, sadly, the capital's museums are shockingly bedraggled. In Beijing's Forbidden City, astounding jade carvings languish in outdated, shoddy, poorly lit cases. Even more depressing is Beijing's National Gallery, where the gallery space is actually for rent. The most polite thing you can say about the results is that they're mixed.

While the Shanghai Museum ranks first in the nation, the Shaanxi History Museum in China's ancient capital, Xian, runs an impressive second. Built in 1991 in the style of a vast, sprawling Tang Dynasty palace, it is a storehouse and showcase for more than 4,000 objects -- bronzes, jades, porcelains, murals, and fragments of the architecture of this city which was the first in the world to be laid out on a grid.

Most visitors to Xian come on a pilgrimage to see the famous terra-cotta warriors: 7,000 life-sized figures built to guard an emperor's tomb. More than 2,000 years old, they were unearthed only in 1974, and still stand in huge burial vaults. The vaults are an easy drive from Xian, and there's a startling experience to wake you up en route. Suddenly on the horizon, there they are -- the Pyramids and the Sphinx. They've been re-created for the domestic tourists who would have a tough time getting to Egypt.

The Shaanxi Museum features four of the terra-cotta warriors, and you can get closer to them there than you can if you view them in situ, in those subterranean chambers. Their individuality startles: Each has a slightly different body type, facial features, and hairdo. Among the museum's other treasures are Tang Dynasty pottery figures of polo players, their horses stretched out horizontally to indicate risky speed; remnants of paper more than 2,000 years old; and, in a fascinating costume display, wigs ``in the shape of a frightened crane,'' the bilingual label says. Having labels and wall texts in both English and Chinese makes the Shaanxi Museum accessible to Westerners.

The museum is worth visiting not only for its architecture and collections but also for its sharp contrast with Western institutions. There is a separate ``Foreigners Entrance,'' with higher admission prices and a compulsory trip through a sea of concession stands where you're expected to bargain even on postcards. The hawking continues right through the museum, with people sitting on the floor in hallways that double as bizarre bazaars, selling candy bars and ``antiques'' that somehow don't look quite the same as the ones in the galleries.

You first notice the odd shape of the Shanghai Museum from quite some distance away. It sits isolated in the center of the city's most prestigious real estate, People's Square. It has a square bottom floor and round top, reflecting the ancient Chinese belief that the sky is round and the Earth, square. Eight fierce stone mythical beasts guard its entrance. Just inside is a huge, echoing lobby with polished granite floor and sophisticated, touch-screen computer guides to the collection, elegantly encased in green marble. The interior is palatial. With a four-story atrium crisscrossed by escalators and staircases with wrought iron banisters, it resembles a swank hotel more than an art museum.

What's even more impressive is the welcome Westerners receive. I visited the museum twice, the first time under the protection of my charming and knowledgeable American guide from Abercrombie & Kent, Matt Hannan, a man expert in smoothing the way for foreign first-timers in China. The second time was on my own. I was the only blonde among the tide of people sweeping through the doors that Sunday morning. (Of the 700,000 visitors to the museum in its first half year, only 50,000 were foreigners.)

Immediately, a museum employee who clearly did not speak English but just as clearly wanted to help, latched on to me and brought me to the desk where audio tours of the museum are available in several languages -- including English. The excellent tape describes particular objects in the collections; little headphone symbols appear on the labels of those so featured. (The labels, by the way, are bilingual, in Chinese and English.) The headphone symbols were so little, though, and so few and far between, that hunting for them would have been a needle-in-haystack project. I didn't have to. A friendly guard trailed me through the galleries, tugging at my sleeve and guiding me from one object described on the tape to the next. A group of Chinese children trailed me, too, not because I was a foreigner, but because they saw me taking notes and noticed I'm left-handed, which trait they thought funny enough to imitate.

The museum's individual galleries are sumptuous, arranged according to medium, so there are separate and quite large quarters for bronzes, ceramics, sculpture and so on. The decor is dramatic. In the Ancient Chinese Bronze Gallery, the works stand on rugged wooden and marble bases, silhouetted against dark green walls. Photographs of blown-up details of some bronzes give a sense of their intricacy. In the Ancient Chinese Sculpture Gallery, the introductory text is printed on a rock that looks something like a Chinese version of the Rosetta Stone.

As for the two ceramics galleries, they're knockouts. In ``Measure for Measure,'' Shakespeare indicates in what esteem Chinese ceramics were held even in the 17th century: ``They are not China dishes, but very good dishes,'' a servant says apologetically to a noble visitor in ``Measure For Measure.'' The plates are not, in other words, up to the standard of a country whose English name is synonymous with its pottery.

The Shanghai Museum's ceramics galleries are filled with works that are sumptuous in both color and form. Many were donated by two Hong Kong private collectors: T.T. Tsui, who has his own stunning little museum in Hong Kong; and J.H. Hu, who died in 1995, having given 359 pieces of Chinese ceramics to the Shanghai Museum. ``Pottery belongs to all mankind,'' reads a wall text in the ceramics galleries, ``but porcelain is China's invention.'' And the hundreds of porcelain pieces on view are both delicate and opulent.

The museum's deputy director, Chen Pei Feng, spoke with me in a conference room that was quaintly reminiscent of the views American television used to give us of diplomatic talks held in communist countries: overstuffed, antimacassar-draped chairs lined up against the walls instead of in conversational groupings, so you have to twist your seated body in order to face the person to whom you're talking.

The museum, she said, was actually founded in 1952, in the wake of the communist revolution, when collectors were forced to sell their holdings to the government at government-dictated prices. The museum's former headquarters were in a converted bank that it had long since outgrown.

The museum owns 120,000 objects, but, like all such world-class institutions, can only show a small percentage of its holdings at once: 10,000 works, in Shanghai's case. All the works are historical, but there is a space for temporary exhibitions of modern art. There's even space for Western work, a real breakthrough for a museum in China, where artistic isolationism has prevailed. So, recent visitors to the Shanghai Museum saw, in addition to exquisite Chinese art, European masterworks from the holdings of a former Miss Spain, Carmen Cervara, who married one of the world's greatest art collectors, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, and developed a taste for fine paintings herself.

The Shanghai Museum shop is also as au courant as any in the West. While not as big as the Friendship Stores where foreign shoppers are channeled in China, it boasts a higher quality range of ceramics, jade, cloisonne, catalogs, and other goods. You do not bargain here, and you can pay in plastic.

For all the similarity between the Shanghai Museum and modern museums in the West, there is at least one striking difference: You see people touching and leaning on the priceless works and taking each other's pictures with flash cameras, behavior that would get you thrown out of Western museums.

But, then, my behavior in the Shanghai Museum's ladies room was nothing to write home about. The quality and cleanliness of public restrooms in China varies tremendously, so it was a relief to find those in the museum immaculate and marble clad. It was not a relief to find myself locked into one of the stalls. No matter how much I jiggled the lock, I couldn't slide it sideways to get out. Nor could I slide under the narrow slit of space under the door. Standing on the toilet and hoisting myself over the top seemed the only escape, and that's exactly what I was doing when my foot hit the door and somehow kicked it open. The Shanghai ladies washing their hands and combing their hair in front of the mirror saw a reflection of me dangling a couple of feet off the floor -- and pretended not to notice.

This was my first trip to China, and I wasn't sure what to expect in terms of food and accommodations. Both proved gratifying surprises, from the fluffy bathrobes waiting in every bathroom to the great Italian -- yes, Italian -- food in the more sophisticated hotel restaurants.

The tour I was on, ``Dynasties and Discovery,'' run by Abercrombie & Kent International, is a perfect introduction to China, a two-week tour starting in Hong Kong and winding up in Beijing, with stops in Guilin, Shanghai and Xian. The price is $4,490 a person, double occupancy, and is impressively all-inclusive. My guide, Matt Hanna, a young American, was also ideal -- fluent in Chinese, a fine facilitator, unflappable in the face of small crises. The phone for Abercrombie & Kent is (800) 323-7308.

I flew on British Airways through London. I sacrificed 200,000 frequent-flier miles to enjoy the luxury of BA's recently revamped Club Class, which has new cradle seats that can be adjusted in a number of different ways to increase comfort, especially on long-haul flights.