I started to appreciate the amazing diversity of their forms and of the symbols used. It is actually a very interesting place because religious icons are not historical relics here; they are the evidences of a living religious practice.

Statues are colourful; like most centuries-old statues were at their origin.

It is fascinating to see how the craftsmen and craftswomen produce them today.

The building is beautiful and unique. And I don’t only speak about the main ‘Seed Cathedral’, but also about the way in and the way out. The Expo counts some nice gardens but you will not see many Chinese people visiting them. The UK pavilion succeeds to make the tired Chinese visitor notice nature and question its role in the future. The fossilised seeds, the artificial plants, the grey grass interrogate the relation between nature and industry, in a universal language that breaks cultural barriers.

This is a pure product of the British establishment though, with BP among its sponsors. The conceptual approach of the pavilion is in a sense insidious because it might influence more successfully an audience than a more explicit and clearly inconsistent discourse. On the other hand, it provides more freedom for personal interpretations and feelings, which might contradict the intended message of the sponsors.

Volunteers and employees from the Expo received some training and can say key sentences in English. English is manifestly new for them and the very young employees at the entrance of the Expo were quite shy when reciting the sentences. But they were very happy to help westerners. They did much more than simply following the instructions of their trainings. It was true hospitality. Great job guys!

The queues were the most playful and most instructive part. They look at first like a nightmare; some queues can be 4 hours long with a temperature above 30 degrees. Chinese people don’t respect queues; they push constantly one another and try to get in front of you. But as unbelievable as it seems, the system works. You need to fight for your position every minute, every turn in the line is a battlefield, and you should not show any pity for old women who are by the way the worst pushers. If you follow these instructions, you will stay at a fair position in the queue. Everyone does the same. What I realised though is that the mood is playful; people are excited until the end of the queue, which would not be the case in a disciplined queue of westerners. People speak a lot and fighting for your position helps you not being bored in the very long queues. They were some fights between women at some occasions, but the crowd was very quick at separating them and laughing at them. The limit between playfulness and angriness was very subtle but strongly reinforced by the crowd. Not that I would like to be in such a queue if there was a fire or an accident, but in normal conditions, it works pretty well and is the occasion to meet verbally, or at least physically Chinese people.

Chinese people were also very well informed on the most interesting pavilions. There was no improvisation here and everyone knew exactly where he wanted to go. The weapon of mass destruction however was the fake passport that people could buy on the site. It became for most visitors the main objective of the Expo: collect the stamps of all pavilions to get their passports complete. The only opportunity left for a quieter expo was late in the evening, between 7 and 10pm, when queues are getting smaller and faster, but not for all pavilions.

Overall, I had a good time and could still manage to see around 30 pavilions in 2 days.

Christie’s had an enormous adjacent section, maybe even bigger than the fair itself. The quantity and quality of the Chinese contemporary art displayed was truly amazing. They also had ancient Chinese artefacts, watches, wine and many other things to sell, anything that is utterly expensive and related to the established idea of a cultural lifestyle.

Looking at the proportion of westerners salesmen in the art galleries, I wonder how much Chinese is the Chinese contemporary art scene. It is mainly a brand used to give an illusion of diversity in the art market, with some characteristics easy to recognize for the consumers. It works just like Stella Artois and Budweiser, they belong to the same group of people, and the rest is a question of market profiling.

With years, I appreciate more and more contemporary artworks, and I trust less and less the rationales that govern their production.

• As cultural agents, curators and artists participate in the production of cultural value. Exhibitions are, therefore, contemporary forms of rhetoric, complex expressions of persuasion, whose strategies aim to produce a prescribed set of values and social relations for their audiences. [Paul O'Neill]
• Exhibition: maximizing the shock while avoiding the risk of boredom, which would strip of its entertainment value. [Paul O'Neill]
• What is apparent is that artists, their work and practices exist and are claimed under the banner of a larger economy of culture. [Alun Rowlands]

“On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…”

It is remotely connected to a small project I did in 2007 called Intrusive Connections. I attempted to disrupt the way Google maps works by adding pictures not related to locations but to my personal connections with these locations. It was a rebellion against “collective unconscious censure of any nonoperable or inconsistent consideration”.

Both projects have in common to put some human contingency into a tool perceived as purely utilitarian. But is it really? Maps, even from Google, are cultural constructions, and only give the illusion of neutrality. See for example the debate around the treatment of historic landmarks in Google maps: Online maps ‘wiping out history’. Maps are how we see the world and Google Street View is a fantastic cultural opportunity to shape our perception. The contrast between the Google impersonal car and the people in the streets below illustrates the contrast between a dehumanized geography and one from the people living in this world.

Alexander Beach – Inspired Architecture from The VBA on Vimeo.

Here is the stuff that caught my attention this year.

“A Child’s Grove” by Neha Choksi, Project 88,2009

The way the trees reflect nature and people’s activity around them.

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“Your Fade to Light”, Random International, Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Ok, new media art seems out of fashion this year and this work is not even at the Frieze Art Fair, just in the Pavilion of Art and Design annexe event. But the piece is brilliantly executed and the way you see yourself in the ‘pixels’ when you move is very smart.

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This installation was also presented, from Conrad Shawcross.

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The canvases by Erwin Wurm were original and lead to interesting questions. (picture from Frieze 2008, but it’s more or less the same)

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See here plenty of beautiful and poetic paintings by Aya Takano.

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Congratulations to the curators of the greengrassi and Maureen Paley galleries. They managed to make me stop walking for a while with their sensitive selection of art works.

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It should remind Week End (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) to anyone who has seen the movie. Here is a clip.

When in a millennia people will try to understand how the end of the 20th century was like, I hope they will look at these. The images of a traffic jam in the countryside represent in my opinion so well this era: lost in some chimeras, consumerist, short sighted, ‘free’ to do the same than anyone else. It seems there was much more than that in the 60s. Traffic jams were also the symbol of social progress. Public holidays were not that new and most people could afford to travel thanks to their new car. But as Jean-Luc Godard illustrates in his movie, cars didn’t mean the  end of conflicts between social classes. And most of the illusions from the 60s are now gone.

I see these images as part of history. I don’t feel much personal attachment to them. Nonetheless, they are still part of today’s world. The car culture is still contemporary. Why is it still there?