China Environmental Law

After the raucous birthday celebrations last night we’re feeling a little cloudy headed today.  Fortunately, we won’t have to spend much brainpower finding the gents in the Luwan District now that it’s mapped its public toilets.  Aimed primarily at taxi drivers, the maps (with a first edition run of 50,000) will, it is hoped, “reduce environment pollution.” 

Unfortunately “Toilets Mapped” (from February 16) has already been moved to the subscription portion of the Shanghai Daily. If you act quickly, however, you will be able to catch “It’s high anxiety over naked art” about 15 “naked plastic men with wings on their backs” that have been placed on several buildings in Shanghai as part artist Liu Jin’s “The Hurt Angel” installation. The plastic angels have met with adverse, indeed, tragic reactions. A restaurant located near one of the installations called police to complain that the figures were “frightening their customers away”, and “one elderly woman, surnamed Wang, suffered a heart attack after she saw ‘a naked man’ hanging off the building.” It is unclear whether it was the nudity, the wings, or the precarious positioning of the angels that caused consternation to the restaurant patrons and prompted Ms. Wang’s cardiac arrest.  Judging from the picture, I’d put my money on the wings.