Adelaide artist David Reid has been visiting Shanghai regularly since 2005. Initially invited by Austrade to participate in the Shanghai Art Fair, he now negotiates his own way through the city, increasing his contacts and local knowledge with each journey with his hand-drawn business cards circulating on their own, writes Anne Warr.

Each visit sees a new depth emerge in his work. As David begins to understand the many layers of the city, so this is expressed in a deeper complexity in his own work. His first works were impressions of the famous British Bund, executed with Chinese ink on Chinese paper. His brush strokes touched paper in the manner of a calligrapher, resulting in the ordered hieroglyphs of a Chinese scroll. His works tell the age-old story of foreigners arriving in the ancient trading city and falling into its thrall.

As he moved west from the Bund, deeper into the former foreign concession areas, he began to absorb the details of the city and express them on paper. Wandering trough the semi-private laneways of Shanghai’s crowded Lilongs , Reid experienced the subtle transitions from public to private space; - the guarded archways leading into the laneways, the black wooden doors set into the carved stone shikumen gateways, the small windows in the doors, each decorated with a different Chinese or art-deco design. The Chinese Window series shows the excitement of discovering the multiple types of screened spaces and the variety of geometric patterns used within them. His works have their own layers, built up over weeks of working on one piece – often using both sides of the paper, revealing layer upon layer. The transparency of the ink and the paper helps carry his idea through its many layered evolution.

Then suddenly from the relative peace of the residential laneways, Reid crashes into contemporary Shanghai. Forgetting the details of a former era, he’s immersed in the racy, edgy, all-night life of cosmopolitan Shanghai. Lantern Dance and Saturday Night Huai Hai Lu evoke the vibrancy of the city which never sleeps. The overhead expressways, such as Yan’an Lu, express the driven energy of the city and its desire to go places, quickly. Reid’s work absorbs this pulse, capturing the abstracted energy in vibrant, vigorous brush strokes. 

The Abacus series sees the soul of the trading city laid bare. It’s all about money in the end.

Reid can be seen about town, negotiating the purchase of art supplies in Fuzhou Lu, an ancient market place for paper, or holding a weekend painting workshop in a friend’s architectural office. Like Inspector Chen, in the Qiu Xiaolong series, Reid wanders Shanghai in his trench coat seeking the truth about the city.

* Anne Warr is an architect who has lived in Shanghai since 2003. A graduate from the University of New South Wales and the University of York, UK, where she earned a Master of Arts in Heritage Conservation, Anne worked for a number of years in Sydney Australia in the field of heritage conservation. Since living in Shanghai, Anne has written articles for local and international magazines about Shanghai, been commissioned by Watermark Press to write “Shanghai Architecture” (pub Dec 2007), taught Western Architecture at Tongji University and started a tour guiding business, www.walkshanghai.com. Anne and her partner, Tim Schwager, run the Shanghai Office of the Australian Architectural firm “AJ+C” (Allen Jack + Cottier) (www.architectsajc.com.cn). Anne is also a member of the International Committee of AIA.