SHANGHAI is an odd place to simulate a desolate ghost town. Nevertheless, French artist Laurent Mulot's "They Come Out At Night", which does just this, opened June 14 at the Duolun Museum of Modern Art.

The multimedia installation is an attempt to recreate an Australian town in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a bustling metropolis.

"Middle of nowhere is a project that is very strange for Chinese people," Mulot said, in a thick French accent. "Because even the term 'nowhere' doesn't really exist in Chinese."

Cook is in the heart of Australia's Nullarbor Plain, a small stop on the East-West railway line between Perth and Adelaide. Its only inhabitants are Janet and Ivor Holberton. The town owed its survival to the trains that pass through it, Mulot said.

"All the life at Cook is run by the train," he said. "The train brings water, it brings food, it brings everything."If there is no train, there is no life, people die."

Mulot said the third stage of his four-part project is an attempt to bring "a little bit of Cook to Shanghai". The other installations were held in Adelaide, Perth, and Lyon, France.

Near the installation's entrance, Polaroid portraits were projected onto the floor on an island of sand. These were images of the Holbertons, train staff and passengers, and any visitors from previous installations who consented to the Polaroid portraits.

Tiny black frames formed a line from one wall to another - again, all willingly captured members of Mulot's Cook Ghost Contemporary Art Centre. Mulot said CGCAC members can also take up a "fictional artist's residence" through the project's website.

Mulot said the project's inclusiveness and the people's will to participate is a way to criticize the media, which he said often exploited ordinary people's images without permission.

A mouse, illuminated by candlelight, rests atop a portrait plastered black box. From there, visitors to the exhibition can access Mulot's website, which is projected onto the far wall of the installation's first floor. The website formed a large part of the installation, Mulot said, which allowed visitors to scroll through photographs and Mulot's biography. On the opposite wall, a video projected a member list on the canvas door that leads to the installation's second floor.

Visitors must put on shoe-coverings before they head upstairs. This symbolized Cook's separation from the earth around it, Mulot said. He called the town a white man's "industrial dream" - a place where Australia's aboriginal population never settled because of the area's barren environment. The theme of detachment was repeated throughout the installation.

"My very first impression was that Cook is really a fictional place," said Mulot. "Unnatural, something totally artificial."

The train's stop in Cook is only 90 minutes. Mulot said this reinforced Cook's fictional feeling because 90 minutes is the standard running time for most films.

A soundtrack plays in the background, consisting of metallic clicks and distorted audio from interviews Mulot conducted with the Holbertons and the train's staff and passengers. Cook, Mulot pointed out, sounds the same backward as it does forward. The word echoed occasionally throughout the installation's background.

Upstairs one truly stepped into Cook. The portraits of Ivor and Janet were pasted on one wall. On another hung two children's drawings of wombats. Mulot discovered the drawings in an abandoned school house on his first trip through Cook. A short description of the marsupial's nocturnal nature on one of them read: "They only come out at night," which Mulot took as the installation's name. After some research, Mulot located the two children - now 35 - and one of their teachers. They attended the opening in Adelaide. He said he scattered his own photography over the floor to mimic the school house.

Uprooted dead trees hung from the second floor's ceiling. This represented Cook's lack of naturally occuring trees. Roughly 400 were brought by train, Mulot said, along with the earth and water to plant them.

Mulot's installation had many different aspects: film projections, photography, furniture, Internet, lights, sound and shoe-covers.

"Each form represents something," Mulot said, explaining that he used television monitors - not the flatscreen monitors common to installations - because Janet and Ivor owned a large television.

In the second floor's centre is a large concave screen showing a looped video of a train leaving Cook.

"The projection of the train is like a clock of the exhibition," he said.

Mulot stretched the film segment to 90 minutes to simulate the train's exact stopover time in Cook.

He said there is no deliberate attempt to provoke feelings of isolation, but the looped video of a train constantly leaving the viewer stranded is a touch eerie.

Despite Cook's desolation, Mulot maintained it was not a ghost town.

"The ghosts are the train passengers, because they get down, they get off the train," he said, adding that after 90 minutes "they get in and disappear, and the majority never come back."

Through July 10

Duolun Museum of Modern Art

27 Duolun Lu

Tel: 6587-5996

10 yuan (5 yuan for students)