Backstreet photographer closes the shutters and moves on
Wang Gangfeng shows photos to an expat family after shooting.
Shanghai-born photographer Wang Gangfeng calls himself a duxingxia, or knight-errant.
He calls his camera gear his lance and sword. Wang works in the alleyways around his studio in Zhangyuan, or Zhang’s Garden, capturing precious moments of expats in Shanghai.
But duxingxia is to lose his field.
Zhangyuan, a shikumen (stone-gated) residential compound in the heart of Jing’an District, is next up for the makeover of the Nanjing Road W. area. Residents are moving out — happy in the main to be relocated to modern apartments with previously undreamed of luxuries like toilets and kitchens — and the once vibrant hive of traditional lifestyles will become a complex of hotels, museums and commercial property.
The great move-out started on Friday. After more than 1,200 families move out by March 8, an overall restoration will begin. As part of full-scale renovations, almost all of the 170 historic buildings in Zhangyuan will be retained.
As residents drift off to pastures new in the suburbs, abandoned furniture, outdated household appliances and other rubbish of yesteryear is heaped up in the alleyways, forcing Wang to close his business and draw down the shutters on his 8-year-old Gang of One photography studio.
He will move out by the end of this month, but he doesn’t have much to pack. “I will take nothing but my photos,” he said.
“Zhangyuan used to be my studio. But it is already gone,” he said. “I will not reopen somewhere else. The age of ‘alleyway photography’ with an authentic Shanghai flavor is over.”
Wang said his landlady burst into tears when she heard about the commercial makeover. She lived in Zhangyuan for nearly 30 years, and though she moved out earlier, she often returned to walk in the alleyways and chat with old friends.
“It is hard for her to say goodbye to the place filled with her memories,” Wang said. For himself, he doesn’t want to leave, either.
Wang Gangfeng visits a family in Zhangyuan who will move out soon and takes a photo outside their home, carrying one of his works in which a foreigner poses in the same place.
Wang poses in a shuttered window, one of his favorite photo-shooting destinations.
Wang poses in a rarely seen oval-shaped window of former residence of Zhou Qingyun, one shareholder of the operator of the sinking steamer Taiping.
Wang grew up in a similar shikumen house nearby. His schools from kindergarten to middle school were either near or in Zhangyuan. Over the years, he has witnessed the disappearance of many shikumen areas.
“Our roots are gone. For us natives, no matter how good the renovation is and how much money the new properties bring in, our connections with old alleyways are priceless,” he said.
According to Wang, there is nowhere in Shanghai to compare with Zhangyuan.
“It is one of the most elegant shikumen with so many different styles of architecture. I can feel its quality,” he said.
Bounded by Weihai Road to the south and Wujiang Road to the north, Zhangyuan is a mixture of different styles, from shikumen to garden villas with Western elements like Art Deco lines and traditional Chinese interior layouts, all seen in one house.
Wang’s studio is a 40-square-meter room on the first floor at No. 41, 590 Weihai Road, one of the grandest buildings in Zhangyuan. The Western-style garden villa was built about a century ago as home to one rich family but was later partitioned into smaller flats occupied by 46 families.
Wang rented one room and cleaned, repaired and restored the original floors, ceilings and windows. Over years, he crammed his studio with memorabilia collected from neighbors or bought online.
He uses his accumulated knickknacks as props in photo shoots echoing with the bygone days of Zhangyuan. His subjects, expats mainly, wear traditional Chinese clothing like cheongsam, and are usually pictured “riding” on a rusty tricylce, or carrying a basket of vegetables and posing in front of shikumen buildings. The photos are not meant to be anything other than fun but often leave lasting memories of Shanghai.
To date, Wang has taken photos in Zhangyuan of about 500 families.
A photo Wang has taken for an expat family in Zhangyuan
But his memories of Zhangyuan are somewhat mixed.
“I take my photos alone and have had to conquer many difficulties with residents who were opposed to my bringing foreigners here to photograph. I often feel like that I am really a duxingxia,” he said. Local people felt mocked and humiliated and wondered why anyone would want to be pictured in such modest circumstances, rather than outside the Astor House Hotel, or promenading on the Bund.
Wang began taking photos in 1980, and two years later his work was in People’s Daily. In 1989, he went to Montreal, Canada, for a photo exhibition and settled down there.
In 1995, he returned to Shanghai, and to his surprise, found he was an acclaimed photographer, so he decided to stay.
“I had planned to seek the American Dream in New York, but instead I found the Chinese Dream in my hometown,” he said.
Zhangyuan dates back to 1872 when a British merchant bought a plot of farmland and built garden villas. In 1882, it came under the ownership of entrepreneur Zhang Shuhe, who expanded it and made it into a modern public gathering spot. It was where Shanghai’s first electric light bulb shone and the first entertainment park opened, offering Chinese opera, magic shows, gambling and dining.
It lost popularity as indoor entertainment venues such as cinemas sprang up. In 1919, the property was turned into private residences, and much of it was replaced by lines of shikumen buildings.
Each unit was partitioned into smaller flats occupied by several families, and living conditions became squalid.
Wang Gangfeng displays his works at his studio in Zhangyuan.
