Clandestine Nude Drawing Group
Sketching nude models in Shanghai
In one of Shanghai’s unremarkable neighborhoods, in a crumbling room built without a permit on the roof of a run-down “tea city”, you can find a group of artists sketching nude models. According to the artists, this is the only one that exists in Shanghai. In U.S. towns and cities big and small I often participated in nude model sketch groups. They are quite common. After years of living in Shanghai, I had decided that this kind of activity didn’t exist, until I luckily found this group.
Tea Cities are pre-internet complexes you can find spirnkled around Shanghai. I have been to four of them. All four were quite similar; large multi-floored buildings with many small shops and hallways, half vacant and falling apart. They can be fun for tourists to visit because they give one a feeling for the glory of chinese tea culture and among the empty halls and store fronts there still a sprinkle of mostly empty shops with beautiful items.
The nude sketching location was impossible to find within the labyrinthine stairs and hallways of this five story compound. The artist running the session had to come out and escort me through the dim twisting and turning hallways, up a dirty staircase and onto a roof at the empty end of the building. This middle-aged artist from Shandong was holding these Saturday sessions to try to sustain himself as a working artist. His ramshackle studio has a big pool table in the middle where the model poses as ten or so artists sketch. The fee is $20.00 for four hours.
Artists treating the naked human body as a worthy subject is unique to the western artistic tradition dating back to the ancient greeks and definitely not a Chinese artistic tradition. Half the artists who participate in the sketch group have studied in art schools in the west. There is a young couple that studied at the Art Institute in LA, a young woman that studied studio art in France, and another one that studied in Italy. The remainder of the participants graduated from prestigious art schools in China. In terms of educational background, I am probably the least qualified among this group and I am the only one using chinese techniques and materials to draw nude models.
I think that the secretive nature of this group and the lack of interest overall in this kind of activity comes from its foreign origins and the culturally conservative norms and pressure applied by the ruling class. This is a very legitimate group of artists pursuing a time honored artistic practice but there is a bit of a feeling that society would misinterpret and/or frown upon using nude models.
The models that have been used to date, have all been young women in their twenties. In the U.S. groups there was always a concerted effort to find models of all ages, genders, shapes, and sizes. That doesn’t seem to be an option in Shanghai. Modeling is a hard way to make an hourly wage. One of the models I chatted with had studied cello at a conservatory in London. Another one mentioned that she had travelled to the U.S. several times and had a friend she liked to visit at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She said that she didn’t model for the money but rather that she wanted to contribute to the art scene in China.
