Shanghai Holy Fever!

CHINA’S religious communities are flourishing under the shroud of communism, with women at the heart of the movement. Liz Hingley, a British photographer and anthropologist, spent three years looking intimately at the booming of religious rituals performed by Shanghai’s residents. EVOCATIVE OF PAINTINGS, her images provide a surprising portrait of the city, while raising questions about the place of rituals in our lives.

- Katie Breen

Liz Hingley worked as a sort of detective in Shanghai, unearthing sacred spaces and practices. The daughter of two protestant priests, she was raised in the heart of Birmingham, a city with 95 nationalities. This gave her a solid background for developing a visual narrative of rituals in their startling diversity. In a conversation with her, we learned that churches can be matchmakers, that women are feeding religions, and we encountered some weird rituals along the way.

MARIE CLAIRE: What was the most surprising ritual that you came upon?

LIZ HINGLEY: Definitely, the liberation of captive animals. One Saturday morning at 6am at the Shanghai Ferry Port, I joined a group of mainly female Buddhists, whom I had met on Chinese social media. By 10am, four hundred of them had gathered to liberate hundreds of fish, bought from local fishermen that morning. 3000€ (about RM14,430) worth of fish were enthusiastically thrown back into the Huangpu River, sanctifying Shanghai’s main waterway. This very ancient Buddhist tradition, known as fang sheng, has been reborn thanks to 21st century technology: a pop-up social media event, supported by online donations. Birds can also be liberated: bought at a market place, they are propelled into the sky to enjoy a free life.

MC: In a country where, 50 years ago during the Cultural Revolution, religious practices were forbidden and some churches burned down, documenting religions could not have been an easy task.