Shanghai 1920–1945: Pipe, Turpentine and Fugue
Goethe Open Space, Shanghai · 24–26 October 2024
Shanghai 1920–1945: Pipe, Turpentine and Fugue brings together two family histories whose paths converged in Shanghai during the first half of the twentieth century. Through an exhibition, a lecture and a public conversation, artist Silvia Y. Tam and sociologist Prof. Shingo Shimada return to the city in which their respective Chinese-German and Japanese family histories took shape, approaching Shanghai as a site where personal memory and larger historical forces intersect.
Taking microhistory as both a research method and a narrative strategy, the project shifts attention from grand historical narratives towards individual lives, family archives, photographs, objects and remembered places. It asks how histories of migration, war and cultural encounter are experienced on an intimate scale—and how fragments preserved within families can complicate, supplement and reimagine established accounts of the past.
At the centre of Tam’s contribution is Pipe, Turpentine and Fugue, an ongoing artistic investigation into her Chinese-German family history beginning in the 1920s. Working across photography, archival material, collage, painting and text, Tam approaches the family archive not simply as historical evidence, but as a space in which memory, absence and imagination continually reshape one another. The project traces a history of movement between China and Germany while examining how personal and inherited memories persist across generations.
In his lecture “Shanghai 1921–1945: History of a Japanese Family,” Shingo Shimada reconstructs the history of his maternal family through photographs, memories and historical records. His grandfather Matsuo Maeda arrived in Shanghai in 1921 and worked for the Dōkōbōseki cotton spinning mill; his grandmother Sada followed several years later, and their daughter Toyoko—Shimada’s mother—was born in Shanghai in 1929. Their everyday lives unfolded within the Japanese community of the International Settlement and were progressively transformed by nationalism, military conflict and war.
The family remained connected to Shanghai through the upheavals of the 1930s and early 1940s, before leaving the city in July 1945 and returning to Japan via Korea. Through this family trajectory, Shimada considers how geopolitical history enters ordinary life—through a workplace, a home, a school, a family photograph or the memory of a place.
Placed alongside one another, these two family narratives create a dialogue across China, Germany and Japan. Rather than presenting history as a single continuous account, the project approaches Shanghai as a constellation of intersecting lives and memories. Personal archives become points of departure for examining migration, belonging, cultural encounter and the transmission of memory across generations.
Nearly a century after their ancestors lived in Shanghai, Tam and Shimada return to the city with their respective family archives. This return does not seek to reconstruct a complete past. Instead, Shanghai 1920–1945 asks what becomes visible when history is approached through its fragments—and how private memory can open alternative ways of reading the entangled histories of individuals, families and cities.
Exhibition · Lecture · Artist Talk
Curated by Lico Fang (Riko Teramae) and Zhang Ting
With Silvia Y. Tam and Prof. Shingo Shimada
Goethe Open Space, Shanghai, 2024