Didn’t We Just? The Making of… “The Fun We Had”

Let’s slip past the heavy front door of island6’s main gallery at the collective’s M50 headquarters in Shanghai. Join me and our cast of directors, choreographers and performing artists as we go behind the scenes of one of the photo-shoots for the making of “The Fun We Had,” a hybrid Liu Dao artwork that incorporates film and painting.

It’s after closing time on a balmy Shanghai evening in early summer. All the visitors to M50 have long since vanished back to their air-conditioned hotels to escape the heat. Slowly, the gallery is transformed. A green-screen is unfurled from the ceiling. A fixed camera, booms, ladders, and a flock of lights obscure the beautiful artwork and the clean white walls. If you’ve never been to our space in Shanghai’s art district, the main gallery is less of a white box and more of a disassembled Rubik’s cube. Tonight it looks more like a CG film set. Art director/choreographer Anto Lau and island6 director Thomas Charveriat are setting up.

A clothes rack bulges with every costume you can buy on Taobao, carefully curated by our gallery manager Guan Yan – French maid’s outfits, silk shifts, bikinis, workman’s gear, floppy brightly colored sun hats, glasses, shoes, and wigs. A key member of the Liu Dao collective, Yeung Sin Chingis on hand to apply the make-up. I’m there too, in the background. The performing artists do a quick change from the previous shoot where they raged through imaginary streets wailing into megaphones and brandishing placards. Out of those bright overalls. They slip into something much more comfortable on a Shanghai evening under the glaring camera lights.

One of our models goes stir crazy during the long photo-shoot for “The Fun We Had”.

The next scene is a world away from the mock outrage of the imaginary street protest. Instead, the performers have to imagine they are cavorting on the oak-panelled deck of a vintage speed boat somewhere in the Mediterranean. It doesn’t have to be the Mediterranean of course, any body of water would do for our purposes. Quiet on the set.

It might seem straightforward, but to create a video like this we need continuous action in uninterrupted four-minute sequences. Luckily for us the performers get straight into the role, laughing, making their own fun, and clinking imaginary glasses. So, they must imagine they are luxuriating on a gently-bobbing pleasure craft in the Mediterranean when they probably couldn’t be further from those azure blue waters. The deck of the boat, painted meticulously in our M50 workshop from a toy model by Liu Dao’s classically trained expert painter Xu Yi Han, is actually a hard concrete floor overlaid with green-screen.

The model of the boat the three merrymakers will frolic in in the final version.

The action, such as it is, is shot from a fixed camera high above. Anto Lau films every giggle, every move, as the models interpret the sometimes imprecise instructions from the set. Except, they go even further. A bottle of lotion might seem utterly out of place on a film set in the evening but the performers daub the cream and lather up, laughing all the way. The music is blaring, from Daft Punk to Rammstein. Seasoned as they are, the performers play up to the camera. Enter stage right their casting agent who doubles as a performing artist himself. He’s been here before! Mark Mehanni is a key collaborator with Liu Dao. A straw hat and a pair of long board-shorts is all it takes and he’s already in character. It takes a lot to stay focused on the shoot when you’re being touched by some glamorously beautiful models – hats off to him. The lotion even comes out.

Mark Mehanni and the models on the set of “The Fun We Had” at the main gallery of island6′s Shanghai headquarters.

The sequence is filmed over a few hours and then edited on site at island6 by Lau. Once finished the sequence is looped and programmed into a small LCD display screen, which is then fitted behind the painting of the speed boat inside a beautiful teakwood frame. A motion sensor is fitted into the frame, so that when you move in front of the artwork, the scene changes. “The Fun We Had” was one of the new artworks produced for our latest exhibition, “The Artist Always Gets Paid Last” at our gallery on The Bund.

“The Fun We Had” was installed during ‘The Artist Always Gets Paid Last’ at island6 Bund.

In a playful text I wrote to accompany the artwork I interpreted the scene in this way:

Just look at them. That carefree highflying billionaire and his beautiful flawless playthings. Let’s call him Saverio. Sipping champagne from crystal flutes as the light wind caresses their hair. They laugh and cavort in their superbly-appointed oak-panelled pleasure craft in every harbour from Hong Kong to Sardinia. This particular fish, when he’s out of water, is a modern horse trader who buys and sells art like blue-chip stocks. Not for the love of it, you see – on his part it is pure untrammelled speculation, a legitimate way to maximise profits. The artist never gets a cut. Saverio’s business might be shady but his tones and monogrammed lounge suits are pure velvet. He doesn’t look like a thief, does he? He makes a million every time he sells a piece, from unprovenanced etchings by Dutch Old Masters to life-size Qing vases. He is an artist, I’ll give him that: a con artist. His artfulness is that he never gets his hands dirty and his polished act is so rehearsed that that no one, not even me, knows they’re being played.

There you have it: “The Fun We Had.”