A Bend at the River by Karen Tong Wang

I would take any excuse to walk along the Suzhou River. On New Year’s Eve, I met a friend at her office for a short walk to check out the SUHE HAUS. A new art and design non-profit, inside a 8,000 square meter former bank warehouse, built in 1930s during the river’s industrial boom.

Before modern roads and rail, waterways were the most efficient means for transporting bulk goods. The Suzhou River cut across inland of Shanghai flows directly into the international ports on the Huangpu River. Factories and warehouses were built along the banks for easy access to transportation. Along with it were also worker’s housing and informal markets that sustained the flow for decades. Industrial waste and raw sewage were all flushed down the Suzhou River, symbolic of the environmental cost of rapid industrialization.

It was the same river that gave name to Lou Ye’s film in 2000. The opening montage was a fragmented time capsule, shot with a shaky camera, down the murky river among barges, and makeshift boat homes, drifting pass by the decaying factories The narrator’s gave voice to the sequence that had stuck with me since:

There’s a century worth of stories here and rubbish, which makes it the filthiest river. Many people live here making a living on the river. They spend their whole lives here.

Lou, Ye, director. Suzhou River. Dream Factory, 2000.

25 years later, the waterfront felt new and under-developed in a luxurious way. Among the high-end residential towers were preserved cultural and historical sites, a few boarded up demolished lots, and  storefronts with tasteful interiors. We passed by Fotografiska which opened in 2024. The ground floor gift shop and cafe were populated with last minute holiday shoppers.

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Post on @radii_media China’s social media is experiencing a massive nostalgia wave for “boom time glam” (经济上行时期的美) with over 10 billion views.

SUHE HAUS is free and open to the public. The building was warm and unguarded. A total of 11 exhibitions were on view; some opened in November during Shanghai Art week with joint events. The ground floor has SUHE’s own vinyl listening bar, preparing to open in a week. What came to my mind as I wandered around was “the Beauty of Economy Upswing”（经济上行的美）, a popular phrase in China to describe a nostalgia for the decades between 2001 to late 2010s. The current precarious economy drives us to romanticize this period when each year was marked by dramatic GDP growth. Across the globe, the millennial era and 2016 are trending on TikTok. Now we genuinely want to be cringe but free.

Longlati was one of the most established tenants, taking over the whole fourth floor at SUHE HAUS. Its elevator lobby was covered in solid wood paneling and flooring, a red marble block reception desk in the center. We browsed through the rooms of paintings and were led to a smaller room in the deep corner, where Gao Lei’s Space 6EQUJ5 was on view.

View of “Gao Lei: Space 6EQUJ5,” 2025, Longlati, Shanghai. Image courtesy of ShanghART

The name originated from the extraterrestrial radio signal detected in 1977—a 72-second burst of radio waves that was never resolved. A room of disorienting mix of time and place: from the surgical syringes to the Wunderkammer-like wooden display structures setting on top of a tatami mat, familiar but also forbidding. The painting hanging on the side wall has fable-y titles of symbols, everyday objects injected with ambiguous meanings. I was told that Guo painted with syringes and people wait in line to purchase his paintings.

The delicacy of the sculptures resembles measuring devices, speaking to a detached desire to decipher and inspect what’s beyond our realities. They are also an elaborate fantasy, the idea that precision and measurement can be an aesthetic and performance when confronting the unknown.

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Downstairs, on a shared floor with exposed concrete, Jiaqi Lyu’s solo show was on view at SOOFA Gallery.

Portraits of zoomed in faces were painted tactfully in faded yellow tone like old photos of relatives you couldn’t name. The gallerist explained to us that each portrait was drawn from historical archives and personal ephemerals, in a way relating to Manchukuo, a puppet state (between 1932 to 1945) of the Empire of Japan in Northeast China, also where Lyu was born.

In one portrait, Lyu enlarged the face of an anonymous man seen at the bottom right corner among the crowd in a photograph. I learned from the accompanying text : Days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, on August 9th 1945, the Soviet Union subsequently launched the “August Storm Operation” against the puppet state of Manchukuo Following the Soviet military operation, Northeast China entered a brief period of Soviet occupation. This image is a visual record of Soviet troops entering Harbin during that time.

It’s an expression of someone disengaged from the headline historical event, even at the scene of happenings. To me, Lyu points to a collective detachment and uneasiness towards society scale change, we are uncertain of its influence, trauma or legacy, that we are all merely caught in the flow.

Lou, Ye, director. Suzhou River. Dream Factory, 2000.

I thought of the workers caught staring into Lou Ye’s camera, or they were looking beyond the lens, into the person behind, into us. The unknowable gaze forever kept in loop under someone else’s monologue. The rising towers were only a bend of the river away, a distant backdrop compared to the stench of the river.

Lyu told me about the idea of ghost as a framework: As she paints each layer and giving presence to the forgotten faces, she summons the ghosts to the audience, disrupting the present gallery space. Lyu invites people to go beyond nostalgia, endure and create with her through the feeling of being haunted softly by the past; to subvert the certainty and violence of a master narrative. It’s gentle but cruel, for the ghost cannot be comforted, but in them I feel a strength and courage. Like a bounding among the anonymous across time.

Lou, Ye, director. Suzhou River. Dream Factory, 2000.