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Transport: Homemade Vehicles
September 6
An inventors gallery show at Hong Miao Art Gallery Shanghai shows the craft behind some of China's most unusual modes of transport
- Text by Karchun Leung
Through photographic reportage, illustration, video, and the original vehicles themselves, this exhibition in the beautiful Hong Miao Gallery – a converted Taoist temple – takes the visitor on a quirky tour of unusual transport from around the world.
Inventors such as Wu Yulu, a Chinese farmer from near Beijing, who built a customised vehicle to take him and his wife to the market. Comfortably seated in his rickshaw, he lets Wu Lao 32 ferry him around. Wu Lao 32 is a humanoid robot powered by an electric motor who can walk for six hours at a rate of 30-40 steps per minute. Elsewhere in China, in Jiangjiang, inspired by photovoltaic street lamps, inventor Chen Shengui decided to find his own solution to his country's transport problems. So Chen build up a prototype of a solar-powered car. He hopes that sooner or later the government will give financial support to his project. And Wang Qiang, 35, from China's Sichuan province, is a self-taught pilot who sold his barber’s shop to pursue his dreams of flight. He is the inventor of Wang Qiang2, an imaginative aircraft built from metal scraps and assembled by hand using homemade tools.
Transport runs from September 6 to 18 at Hong Miao Art Gallery @
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