Shanghai’s ubiquitous renovations inspire a range of innovative art works commissioned especially for OV Gallery’s latest exhibition. Works will include such oddities as bags of goldfish hanging from the ceiling and a real cake whose decay defies its icing slogan, that ‘The Future Will Be Better’.

For the past three or four months the block of shikumen houses where I live has been under relentless attack. At dawn every morning a militia of migrant workers clambers up a network of scaffolding and, camouflaged behind green netting, chisels away at seemingly perfectly adequate brick walls. New, centimetre-thick bricks are being pasted on. My neighbour calls all this activity a “make work scheme,” and in anticipation of this year’s Expo similar work is being ‘made’ all over Shanghai. It’s this process that artists address in OV Gallery’s Make-Over exhibition.

Over a dozen artists living in Shanghai, both local and foreign, are participating in the show, and the works being prepared for it are as eclectic as the artists’ takes on the changes.

Song Tao and Ji Weiyu, together known as the Birdhead Collective, will tip the process of city rejuvenation on its head by mixing up a Tang Dynasty-style poem from chopped up photos of street sign characters. Change, they suggest, isn’t always progress.

“Gao Mingyan will take the gallery’s façade, its ‘face,’ and turn it into a military barricade, with camouflage cloth, barbed wire and sandbags.” 

Jin Feng will carve fake and real news headlines onto drywall he is installing inside the gallery. “We live in an information age,” he says, “yet sometimes we confuse what’s true with what’s false. We may even prefer to regard fake news as something real.” And when it comes to renovations, Jin wants his audience to be aware of the smokescreen of publicity hanging over what we do and don't believe.

Qiu Anxiong also sees smoke in the promotion of a “better city, better life.” He’ll be setting off a real smoke signal outside an apartment building in Shanghai. It’s a plea for help, although it’s not clear whether the renovations are the answer to or the inspiration for the SOS. “Smoke will temporarily cover the people's view and catch people's attention,” Qiu says, “but it will quickly dissipate, as usual.”

Like Qiu, Jin Gao Mingyan is taking his art to the streets. Rebecca Catching, Director of OV Gallery and the show’s curator, says, “Gao Mingyan will take the gallery’s façade, its ‘face,’ and turn it into a military barricade, with camouflage cloth, barbed wire and sandbags.” His work seeks to question the social message implicit in Shanghai's renovated face that life in the city is safe and orderly.

In some respects, the process of renovation is more like aggressive, avant garde art: it’s one of destructive creation. “When we renovate, what are we covering up?” Catching asks. “How many layers of paint are there on Shanghai’s walls? It just reminded me of how China is this country which is constantly being painted-over, as one idea or way of thinking replaces another.”

The artworks in Make-Over are diverse, but all engage its main theme, something OV Gallery hopes to continue in future shows. “I used to work as an art critic myself and my biggest complaint was that few people were curating interesting thematic shows which explore a contemporary issue relevant to what’s happening now in China,” Catching says. “Often shows are curated as ‘let’s get a bunch of works together and then slap a theme on it after the fact.’ This kind of show is a lot more work, but also a lot more fun.”

And potentially a lot more engaging. Although few of us have a say in how they are carried out, all of us are affected by the ongoing renovations, including OV Gallery itself.

“When the sidewalk on Shaoxing Lu got ripped up we had a massive pile of sand in front of the gallery for several weeks and much of it found its way into the gallery,” Catching says. “Then the workers splashed cement on our façade, which they of course neglected to clean up, and we had to have it sanded off ourselves. But when they finally finished and the paving stones were laid down it looked really nice.”

23 January to 13 March. OV Gallery, 19 C, Shaoxing Lu, near Shanxi Nan Lu. Web: www.ovgallery.com