#Site - Specific Play
#Urban Game
#RPG
120 min
#Urban Game
#RPG
Top-down Revision - Jian'an ApartmentCommissioned by the “A Sample Of life in Shanghai” exbition , 2023
In this interactive game, players assume opposing roles:
long-time residents of Jian’an Apartment
& agents from the city’s Housing Authority.
As the game unfolds, they negotiate conflicting desires—
preservation versus intervention—and in doing so,
uncover how this iconic building came to be.
The experience opens a window into modern Shanghai’s layered history
and the struggles over who truly holds the right to reshape urban life.
long-time residents of Jian’an Apartment
& agents from the city’s Housing Authority.
As the game unfolds, they negotiate conflicting desires—
preservation versus intervention—and in doing so,
uncover how this iconic building came to be.
The experience opens a window into modern Shanghai’s layered history
and the struggles over who truly holds the right to reshape urban life.
GameRules
Yuan Shui uses a participatory game to question authorship: Who holds the right to redesign a residential building
- the original architect, the current authorities, or those who live within it?We have documented these changes using digital models, tracing the apartment’s metamorphosis: how additions by residents altered its form, how top-down governmental enforcement temporarily restored it, only for bottom-up adaptations to resume again—a recurring cycle of resistance and redesign.
The original Jian’an Apartment, designed by a renowned architect active in Shanghai’s former French Concession, now survives only as a black-and-white photograph. In homage to this fragmented “revision history,” a site-specific board game will generate a new, top-down archival record after the exhibition concludes—offering a renewed temporal axis for the building’s evolving story.
This project is grounded in on-site research conducted by architectural curatorial team Norma Studio, which identifies the apartment as spanning Buildings 1–3 at Lane 78, Gaolan Road, and Nos. 641–645 on Jianguo West Road.
The exhibition is housed inside the apartment residence of one of the curators.
Many of Shanghai’s historic buildings have had two architects: the original professional designer, and the residents who later inhabited and transformed the space. Over time, the architect’s formal blueprint becomes a backdrop to daily life—often unable to meet contemporary needs. Residents thus enact bottom-up renovations, reshaping their homes in a long, slow dialogue with the structure.
Today, Jian’an Apartment bears the marks of this ongoing transformation. The former garage and maid’s quarters have become retail storefronts and rental flats. Courtyards have been converted into open-air bathing areas. Grand floor-through units have been carved into multiple subdivided apartments.
“Apartment Problems” is not just an exhibition—it is a participatory ritual about urban living, co-authored by the building itself, its residents, artists, curators, and visitors. Set entirely within Jian’an Apartment (and more precisely, within the home of one curator), the building serves both as subject and site. Five artist groups were invited to respond to real issues such as additions, storefronts, vegetation, neighbors, and infrastructure—each using their own lens to build intertextual works around lived architecture.
The exhibition bridges contemporary art with lived space, telling grounded stories about daily life while opening space for public dialogue. Discussions expand into core tensions that haunt modern society: past versus present, system versus individual, material reality versus personal perception, development versus justice.
All visits are conducted through guided interaction, and audience participation completes the experience—sometimes even shaping the artworks themselves. This exhibition bypasses institutional formats, blurs the lines between architecture and art, public and private, life and production.
Above all, it is an experiment in using personal narrative to express collective memory.
Why hold an exhibition about Jian’an Apartment?
Is it because it represents “Old Shanghai flair”?
Because it is one of architect László Hudec’s lesser-known works?
Because it once housed—and witnessed the death of—a historical figure?
Perhaps none of these reasons are enough.
Or perhaps we hope not to reduce it so easily.
To speak to the multiplicity of lived meanings within this residential building, we invited five groups of artists to observe, interpret, and respond. Their works, while distinct, form a shared chorus—revealing how one building can hold vastly divergent life experiences. Through these interwoven perspectives, we witness the irreconcilable contradictions of modern life: history and present, system and self, objectivity and feeling, efficiency and equity.
These frictions coexist within the same walls, staging a microcosm of social reality.