Yuz Museum, Shanghai

Saturday, 25 October 2014

▲ Take the nose and tail of three private jets past their use-by date, join them together with long twisting tubes and turn them into three snakes writhing across the gallery floor. It’s Telle mère tel fils by Adel Abdessemed.

Art galleries are all the go in China and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai is definitely worth a visit. The creation of Budi Tek, he’s Chinese-Indonesian and has another Yuz Museum in Jakarta, it’s housed in a converted aircraft hangar. The museum is about 7km from the centre of Shanghai and you can get there by taxi or on the metro. Check the Yuz Museum website for more information on transport and for opening hours.

My favourites – apart from the snake-aircraft – included Calm by Madeln Company. At first it just looks like a pile of rubble, broken bricks. Look closer and you’ll see the bricks are gently undulating up and down, the bricks are piled on a water mattress with some sort of pump to make it rise and fall.

Or Freedom by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, a big metal room you look into through large portholes. Every hour the fire hose in the centre of the room turns on and lashes frantically around for 45 seconds, the water spraying dramatically across the room, as if the hose is hunting for freedom.

◄ Xu Bing’s Tobacco Invention is part of his Tobacco Project: Shanghai series.

Just take 660,000 cigarettes and arrange them filter up or tobacco end up to make a giant tiger skin rug. There’s a distinct tobacco smell in the air.

▲ A good use for 660,000 cigarettes.