The immersive installations of Hu Xiangcheng (born in 1950) are constructed of windows and doors salvaged from dismantled houses from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) eras. Scouring Shanghai and two nearby provinces for discarded architectural elements, Hu uses these materials to erect shelves, rooms, and even sequences of building-size structures that invite visitors to wander through them as they might wander through a neighborhood. But these structures are not habitable, nor do they seem solid or permanent.

In fact, Hu often later disassembles them and reuses the components. Natural light passing through their hand-carved wooden frames and lattice interiors accentuates their ephemerality, and in some works the addition of harsh artificial lights calls to mind an active construction site. These installations’ vacillations between enduring and unstable states bring to mind the ways in which life in Shanghai continues to be transformed by urban development.

Born and raised in Shanghai, he returned to live there in 2000, after several decades of traveling and living abroad in Japan, Africa and Tibet. The urban landscape he encountered after these journeys had dramatically changed. A vast amount of new construction had been enabled by an ambitious government demolition program announced in 1992 that was designed to fuel urban development (the 365 plan in which 365 hectares of land were to be cleared by 2000). Hu found that many bits and pieces had survived from the dismantled buildings. These wooden fragments, useless to much of modern Chinese society, become reinvested with value in his installations. He reestablishes their link to human labor and lives as he incorporates them into new structures. In this way, Hu communicates a belief that underlies all of his work: that material things need not only be meaningful by fulfilling material desires but can also have spiritual, emotional and poetic power. Claiming the discarded wood and making it into something new thus crafts an alternative future for a city under strain, in recognition of his conviction that “the material and spiritual must not break in our hands.”

This view is, to a limited extent, in alignment with a new effort in Shanghai to direct urban development efforts increasingly toward the cultural arena. In 2001 the city government officially announced plans to support “cultural industries”, and in 2001 it issued a five-year plan to accelerate cultural development. By 2014, ten museums of contemporary art had opened in Shanghai. This new emphasis on culture has also spurred Shanghai toward preservation for the first time, and in 2003 the city government announced the establishment of twelve “Historical and Cultural Heritage Areas”. Preservation is seen as another type of urban development, and the increased tourism and real estate prices that it stimulates are welcomed.

Hu’s installations push us to confront the attitudes toward traditional culture that underpin these new trends in urban preservation. For his solo exhibition This Is Not a Zero at the Shanghai Himalayas Museum in 2014-15, he installed a number of works outside the Himalayas center, a high-end shopping complex, which, as is common in recent urbanization strategies also houses a hotel, a museum and apartments. One of these installations, Maze (2014-15), is an immense wooden structure made from salvaged doors and windows combined to resemble the Chinese character chai ( 拆 “to dismantle” ) when seen from above. The resemblance of the character’s sound to that of “China” is not lost on Hu, who is keenly aware that China’s treatment of its cultural heritage—from the preservation of ancient monuments to the cultural displays staged at the Olympics—affects how it is seen around the world. Chai is written on buildings slated for demolition in urban spaces, but it does not only suggest imminent loss. For people whose memories of the Cultural Revolution are still strong, it also evokes an ideology in which destruction was seen as a necessary step toward progress. In that context, chai becomes a symbol of both the destruction of tradition and the construction of something new.

As visitors walk through Maze, they come into close proximity to its woodwork components. relics of an earlier age, which might prompt admiration of the diversity and beauty of handmade materials and objects. Eschewing anything mass-produced and preferring local materials and forms that appear in nature, Hu creates environments that contrast sharply with the flashy new buildings being erected around the city. Experiencing the maze’s twists and turns can also bring a sense of disorientation, which is exacerbated by its juxtaposition with Shanghai’s vertiginous architecture. On the grounds of the Himalayas Center in the Pudong District, Shanghai’s ultimate icon of urban development, Maze demands that visitors acknowledge the losses that are the flip side of urban development and renewal.

Salvaged doors and windows also appear in Hu’s installation Doors Away from Home——Doors Back Home (2016), though here the structure forms the character meaning “wood” ( mu, 木 ). Four walls surround the character, creating a rectangular enclosure that transforms it into another character ( kun, 困 ), meaning “ to be trapped” or “ to be surrounded”. For Hu, kun evokes a sense of frustration and uncertainty about the future. Walking through the structure and passing through doors hung with reclaimed curtains emphasizes how doors function to welcome people and act as portals through which they can depart or return home. Separated from the houses of which they were once integral parts, the doors’ social meaning is lost. The idea of home is present only in the form of its remnants, potentially provoking but not satisfying innate longings for security, continuity, and reassurance.

Rather than succumb to the difficulties of preserving traditional material and spiritual heritage in the face of urban development‘s destabilizing effects, Hu has spent a decade engaged in the reconstruction of villages in Shanghai’s suburbs, working with local inhabitants to rebuild everything from streets and buildings to cultural traditions. In Jinze Town, a suburb to the west of central Shanghai, Hu and his collaborators have constructed guest rooms for artists and scholars, a dormitory for art students visiting from Shanghai, and a public hall, as well as an organic farm. In contrast to the famed but largely deserted towns in Shanghai’s suburbs that have been built by government order since 2000 to mimic the cities of Germany, Britain, Holland, and other European locales, Jinze Town is thriving. Like them, however, Hu’s village renewal projects have also become new tourist attractions, contributing, unintentionally in his case, to twenty-first-century Shanghai’s effort to market itself as a cultural capital of China and to harness cultural preservation to propel economic growth.