 EXHIBITOR @ EXPO 2010:
DAY FOUR |
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| This video shows the Olympic cauldron-inspired chandelier-like sculpture inside the Oil pavilion. The message, in case you missed it: Oil equals light equals happy bald bodiless yellow men. Or something like that. |
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| This is the borderline propagandist video shown in the Oil pavilion’s 4-D theater. No, you’re not having a stroke — it’s a 3-D presentation. So please forgive the blurry lines. All in all, it’s an extremely well produced video with some of the best 4-D effects we’ve ever seen. We just question the whole “absent oil, you’ll all be naked” and “oil makes your breasts larger” messages that are not-so-subtly introduced right around the 7:30 mark. |
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| It’s hard to capture the majesty of these pavilions at night. Here’s the exterior of the Oil pavilion, featuring an LED screen, a news-like ticker, and a mind-bending, video-enhanced façade. |
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| Speaking of impressive exteriors, the State Grid pavilion was among our favorites, offering up a psychedelic light show that’s equal parts entrancing and beautiful. |
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| Here’s the robot positioned along one corner of the Dream Cube’s open-air first floor. It selects cubes and stacks them to reveal images for the attendees waiting in line to enter the pavilion’s interior. And before you knock the robot for getting it wrong, this video was shot from the back side of the robot, and the image is being revealed on the opposite side of the wall. |
Instead of starting the day with a 21st century pavilion, we took a short break this morning and began Day 4 with a visit to Jing’an Temple, a Buddhist site whose name means “temple of peace and tranquility.” Originally built in 247 AD near Suzhou Creek and relocated to its current site on West Nanjing Road in 1216 during the Song Dynasty, the temple features the country’s largest “sitting jade Buddha,” and a rare 5-ton, 20-foot-tall female Buddha statue made of camphor wood that’s known as the “Goddess of Mercy.”
Recharged by this idyll, we headed for the Puxi side of Expo 2010 (pronounced "poo-shee," not the "poox-ee" pronunciation we barbarians have been tossing around with the confidence of UN translators) which is on the other side of the Huangpu River from the national pavilions. Here you find the corporate and industrial pavilions, like the Shanghai Corporate pavilion, aka, the Dream Cube. When you enter the open architecture of the 40,000-square-foot building, you walk under a "sky" of LED tubes that hang like smooth stalactites, and change color if you clap your hands. Later you ride an escalator to a waist-high forest of interactive fiber-optic rods, wander through a recreation of old Shanghai, then enter a 360-degree theater where your movements and sounds create the light show that blazes on the Cube's supernova-bright exterior.
One of our favorite stops on the Puxi side of Expo was the Oil Pavilion, past the giant bottle of Coke and the ginormous bottle cap in front of the Coca-Cola pavilion that draws hundreds. (Coke and Coke products own this Expo — appearing everywhere from classic Coke to a lemony-drink called “Ice Dew” that we are subsisting on in this 90-degree oven to a berry-flavored ice tea at the Czech pavilion's restaurant we thought was some quaint provincial drink and for which we demanded the recipe.) Dedicated to the fact that we still rely on fossil fuels, the oil pavilion's message reminds me of an old girlfriend calling at 3 a.m to warn, "You better not forget about me just yet."
The highlight is a 4-D theatre. While the film traces, with a dash of Indiana Jones and a touch of "Jurassic Park," the geological and exploratory history of oil, the 3- and 4-D effects show dinosaurs charging at you with such bad-acid-trip-realism, you start nervously looking for the exit sign. In the jungle scenes, you feel the pythons slithering underneath your legs, bees nipping at your ankles, and thunderstorms splashing you from above. Oil companies being oil companies, the film ends by not only showing we would revert to birthday-suit-like nakedness without fossil fuels to make our Dockers. And it literally demonstrates how oil can help you go from an A-cup to a D. Yes, really (and we have the recorded video to prove it – check it out in the video links below and watch closely at the 7:30 mark). Compared to that, the gift shop's modernist sculptures with embedded pockets of crude oil was a let-down.
If it's hard to believe how over-the-top the oil pavilion was, it's harder to understand how underwhelming the Japanese Corporate pavilion was. With a minimum wait of 30 minutes and reams of adoring press reports, it seemed like one of the must-sees. The pavilion lets a group of people in every four minutes. That method of timed entrances is called a "pulse" flow — a term we heard other pavilions use regarding line management. Once inside, the pavilion was more disappointing than the last three "Star Wars" movies combined. In the first room, "Planet of Life," a pure white enclosure with a large pearl-colored boulder sitting in the middle, we expected some kind of mondo-weirdo performance art, but instead were subjected to a commercial for the Teijin Group symbolizing "chemical technology friendly to mankind and the environment," which was as exciting as an Ambien milkshake.
In the next room, we stood between cattle stall-like metal barricades to watch a commercial for advancements in medical technology sponsored by the Terumo Corp. Our reaction: Yawn. Our hopes were raised for something unusual in the next room, where the back wall was covered by a single handmade 49-by-10-foot sheet of paper, whose sensuous gold and brown hues looked like Gustave Klimt had painted it. On this eccentric screen, the pavilion projected a gorgeous ... commercial for Unicharm, a Japanese paper-products company. It was painfully downhill after that, with a subsequent stop where you viewed a neo-Japanese garden through a wall-sized window. Sparse and elegant, with a wire sculpture mounted to an upper portion of the room's wall, the three monitors ran ads for Kikkoman soy sauce while offering no explanation for the tranquil but superfluous garden.
Instead of, for example, hiring the world's edgiest animators (like Genndy Tartakovsky, who did the first "Clone Wars" animations) to do the commercials in some outre fashion that would have matched the rooms' unconventional decors, then urge attendees to film and circulate them on the Net, the pavilion sponsors blew millions on the sort of stuff we TiVo past at home. The golden toilets the pavilion played up — self-cleaning, gold-powdered commodes — were out of order and inaccessible. The whole visit literally went down the drain at that point.
The Space Home pavilion offered a history of China's meteoric efforts to boldly go where U.S. and Russian astro- and cosmonauts have gone, with models of spaceships cruising around the ceiling. But it was the State Grid pavilion that was really spacey, offering an immersive homage to electricity. Financed by China's main power supplier, it was designed by the same person who architected the National Aquatics Center for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The pavilion's front edifice includes a roughly 50-by-75-foot LED wall that shimmered like a wall of silver water standing impossibly upright.
While you might think an ode to their equivalent of Xcel Energy would be pretty dull, the State Grid pavilion included a cube-shaped 66-foot-high theatre you crowd into that holds 250 people — imagine the mother ship of the Borg and you have an idea how large and alien this looked. Once you're all crammed in, the entire room becomes a screen — walls, floors, ceiling — as if you were standing on a glass rectangle suspended somewhere in space. Promising a "720-degree experience,” the 4-minute movie can only be described as "Tron" on crack. It's as if you're stuck inside a computer game, undergoing whatever the game's programmer wants you to: jumping off cliffs, flying in space, and more. The pavilion management, I heard, installed hand rails for people to grab on to because so many of them had wicked attacks of vertigo.
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