The Pink Tour of Shanghai

I wanted to take a tour of Shanghai and all the conventional ones seemed a bit boring so I decided to make my own: The Pink Tour of Shanghai.

It is quite a simple exercise, which I sometimes give my students. Choose a colour and then follow it from point to point, wherever it leads you.

I took a picture of each of the pink colored entities that was pulling me towards it.

I discovered something as I was doing this. The colour pink is mostly used in women's clothing and relatively little elsewhere.

This therefore lead me sort of by default onto the middle aged ladies of Shanghai tour. This group were queuing to try and catch a glimpse of a celebrity.

Elsewhere pink lead me to objects used by women.

One thing particular about it then was that most of the pink was mobile. Grey stays put whereas pink is on the move. I had never really thought about how mobile various colors are before.

I followed an energetic older lady but she went into building so I left her. I looked around and found a new pink target.

The delivery bike was too fast for me to catch it but it did take me a distance whereas most other pinks just took me a short way.

Sometimes the distance was quite great but as long as I remained focussed on the pink target I was good.

I finally got taken to a building but it was a building for fashion and it was closed for renovation.

I was starting to wonder if this pattern of following middle-aged ladies was going to ever break and when the right moment to stop would be.

I then got taken to another building, this time an open one.

It was a mall. I stepped inside and saw a lady with a light pink bag and followed her.

It was a bit tricky deciding what is and isn't pink; some pinks are on the edge of pink: they are too pale or are mixed with oranges and reds, not pure pink but still pink enough for me.

These flowers are one such example.

That's when I realized that the mall as a whole was pink by design.

The woman who I had followed had just walked clean through the mall without stopping, for her it was an air conditioned street. For me it was a pink paradise.

Strawberries are not red they are pink!  

 

And then the LED lighting changed colour and dropped the pink illuminating the space with a colder white light. I was left in a corner of the mall with no pink in view. It was time to stop, I had had my pink tour. This changing of colour was disconcerting and reminded me of another mall I had been in the day before which had put all the signage onto LED screens which also carried ads. If you needed to find the exit or the toilets you had to stare at ads for thirty seconds first. 

Doing this colour themed tour with a different colour would result in a very different sort of experience and lead me through a distinct set of spaces. I remember, for example, once doing this with red in China. The difficulty is really in maintaining concentration and allowing the experience to unfold rather than directing it too deliberately. It's more difficult than it looks.