Grand old dame of Pudong gets a modern makeover
Once a screening room with a capacity of more than 1,000, the UNart Center made the cinema a venue for screening, e-sport gaming and immersive cultural experiences.
After 15 years of standing vacant, the Dongchang Cinema, the first cinema in the Pudong New Area and built in 1954, made its return on August 23 as the UNart Center, a cultural exhibition center for technology, art and education.
An exhibition called “the Kind Stranger” was the opening show of the center on Saturday. With 44 contemporary artworks from 39 artists who work and live in Shanghai, the exhibition aimed to provoke people’s reflection on how technology, science and art have imperceptibly changed the way human beings exist.
Located at 150 Nanquan Road N. in Lujiazui, the cinema is a collective memory of a generation. Many people who live around the cinema now are elderly.
“We used to call it the Pudong version of the Grand Theater,” said Zhang Xiaowen who once lived in a worker’s village near the cinema. “During its best times, the cinema opened from dawn to midnight.”
The cinema had only one screening hall which could handle audiences of more than 1,000. Before Pudong started its rapid growth in the 1990s, it was long the first choice for residents in Pudong to hang out during leisure times.
In 1998, the cinema had its final glory when the great hit Titanic was screened. “Everyone was asking friends and family if they have a spare ticket for the Dongchang Cinema,” Zhang recalled.
Yet after all the cinema had only one screening room. After 2000, it started to fall short of people’s expectations.
It was closed in 2004 and remained vacant for 10 years. In 2014, Pudong Culture and Media Group started the remodelling of the cinema. In order to maintain the traces of its history, all architecture materials were preserved.
It wasn’t easy to remould the cinema, said Lin Wei, deputy director of Pudong culture and media.
“The old glory reflected how important a cinema is to people’s lives,” Lin said. “But when we started the project in 2014, there are already a good number of cinemas around. After all, it is the Lujiazui Financial Zone we are talking about.”
The company finally decided to turn the cinema into a cultural space associated with e-sports and immersive experiences.
It was a bold move to open a contemporary art space near communities where the majority of residents are elderly.
“We once invited some of the residents to an artistic program a year ago when the center was still under construction,” said an officer who worked at the center. The project was led by German artist Christina Kubisch who would ask people to put on a special headphone and wander on the streets in Pudong with her. “When we asked many old residents to put on headphones, they thought we were selling them the headphones.”
But when the residents were asked in a survey whether they wanted their community to become more culturally oriented, 80 percent of them said yes.
In the future, the UNart Center, or Dongchang Cinema, as many people still prefer to call it, will also become the community’s art gallery. Seminars and lectures will be organized for free for the residents.
