The Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Shanghai has, since 2005, coexisted in the middle of the city’s People’s Park with a now-closed weekend marriage market and ongoing site of snuggling teens and tourist tea scams. Its entrance at one of Shanghai’s busier thoroughfares bustles with tourists, beggars, office workers and peddlers—and now performance art.
MoCA has transformed its external street-side former shop, a 40 sq. m glass box into the MoCA Pavilion, which opened late March with Huang Fangling’s experimental theatre performance and video installation, The Maids in Enclave (closed 19 April).
Planning began in late 2014 to “experimentally fuse” exhibition and theatre, explains the MoCA Pavilion curator Wang Weiwei. “The theatre project is highly interactive and easily attracts audiences, so proved very suitable for a debut.”
The pavilion will “focus on communicating, discussing and exploring the relationship between contemporary art, museums, society, the city, and audience,” says Wang. MoCA will work with ten to 12 artists in 2015, for projects lasting 15 to 20 days.
MoCA plans to also work with international residency programs, starting with the highly theatrical, ornately costumed opening production, utilising Huang Fangling’s expertise as an actor and director at the prestigious Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre. Though the city has a vibrant experimental theatre scene, it rarely reaches the art world, or the street level.
“It seems that these types of collaborations between museums and theatre are on the rise. I think it is a natural fit,” says Anneliese Charek, a dancer and organiser of performance events in Shanghai. “It was great to see people’s reactions. As soon as the anything was happening in the space, anyone who was outside on the street would stop to see what was happening,” she says.