TMY 1
Version 1
What
In the view of people who believe in modern management and are accustomed to a neat and clean style, the high vitality and strong motivation shown by the urban villages, with no control but a high degree of autonomy within the community, is more or less suspicious. Its whole as a complex functional complex, although there is a vibrant small commodity economy and individual economy, it cannot form industries and categorize them into single functional zones, which fully demonstrates the typical primitive and low-level market characteristics. However, when I was strolling along the road in the urban-rural area of Chengdu, this primitiveness and roughness brought me back to the warmth of the pre-commodity era after feeling depressed because of living in the commodified urban space for too long.
In addition to the small goods stores, I noticed a two Yuan store that I hadn't seen in a long time but looked to be on the verge of closing down. After talking to the owner and other customers, I realized that the explosive expansion of affordable supermarkets, people's increased awareness of the product's quality, the popularity of e-commerce, and the high rent of the location ...... have together forced the two yuan stores into a crevice. These low-cost "cheap goods" gradually exit the big city, buried and rooted in the third or fourth line of an unknown town.
How
I have been fascinated with watching people pass by and guess their life stories. How are their lives? Their suffers? Dreams? Observing people's behavior conveys a lot of information about their insights. It was then that I thought about the story behind my thoughts, emotions, fears, and personality and started to narrate my journey of self-discovery I use found objects to recover my memory of the living condition of the people.
After taking photographs, interviewing locals and purchasers of the merchandise, and collecting materials and objects, I brought the merchandise back to the studio. When these commodities lose their purpose and reason for existence, their use is considered over. However, they still retain the halo-like tension of life. I always observe these objects with a childlike gaze. I tried to use rough, simple, and low-tech means such as winding, collage, balancing, and stacking to transform the commodities that I can use as materials to a meager extent, constructing them with the coordinates of practical objects, decorations, and beliefs, and making their appearance in the form of still lives and sculptures. I tried to infuse a sweet and sad esthetic into them, thus expressing a certain tenderness for these remaining objects and communities.
I chose the colors that appear most often in urban-rural fringe as the background: unconfident and neutral which contrast with the vibrant colors of the merchandise. I also used PVC frames to display them, along with the bright and plastic colors, to show an ambivalent quality, holding within it the jubilant effects of play, accumulation, and consumption, all the while marking an uncertain, uncanny future of destruction, transmutation, and extinction.
Why
Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou-Shenzhen - there is already too much material for the imagination of the futurity of China. 'China is the future, is actually a way of postponing China's participation in the contemporary. But what exactly is contemporary in China?
Lawrence Lek summarizes it well in his video essay: ‘Sinofuturism does not care about a dramatically better future as long as it survives.' Survival is the true fundamental 'hard-lined principle.'
Two-yuan stores, like most Chinese people, don't care about an exciting and better future, as long as it survives. It is a crude aggregation of all styles of goods in one shop, providing some material needs for such a 'semi-permanent settlement'
I am presenting daily life, but more importantly, I am trying to learn "how to live". As a creator, it is very similar to this situation in the urban-rural area. When we feel comfortable and relieved that we can participate in a ready-made development model to achieve "guaranteed happiness", or proud to be part of a shaped path of success, we must realize that this is a joining and obedience to the capital system, a homogenized coexistence, but not a symbiosis. It is not poverty or goodness that limits our imagination, but our fear of failure and backwardness.
Version 2
What
I noticed a two Yuan store (Everything is about €0.30, covering all daily items, mostly from Yiwu and the quality is very poor) that I hadn't seen in a long time but looked to be on the verge of closing down. However, this primitiveness and roughness brought me back to the warmth of the pre-commodity era after feeling depressed because of living in the commodified urban space for too long.
I use found objects to recover my memory of the living condition of the people in the urban-rural fringe. I used film cameras and strong flashes to decontextualize and defamiliarize the objects, allowing people to re-examine their existence of these objects. These stray objects can be a temporary shelter for residents, while also facing the risk of being cleaned up at any time.
How
After taking photographs, interviewing locals and purchasers of the merchandise, and collecting materials and objects, I brought the merchandise back to the studio. When these commodities lose their purpose and reason for existence, their use is considered over. However, they still retain the halo-like tension of life. I always observe these objects with a childlike gaze. I tried to use rough, simple, and low-tech means such as winding, collage, balancing, and stacking to transform the commodities that I can use as materials to a meager extent, constructing them with the coordinates of practical objects, decorations, and beliefs, and making their appearance in the form of still lives and sculptures. I tried to infuse a sweet and sad esthetic into them, thus expressing a certain tenderness for these remaining objects and communities.
I chose the colors that appear most often in urban-rural fringe as the background: unconfident and neutral which contrast with the vibrant colors of the merchandise. I also used PVC frames to display them, along with the bright and plastic colors, to show an ambivalent quality, holding within it the jubilant effects of play, accumulation, and consumption, all the while marking an uncertain, uncanny future of destruction, transmutation, and extinction.
Why
Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou-Shenzhen - there is already too much material for the imagination of the futurity of China. 'China is the future, is actually a way of postponing China's participation in the contemporary. But what exactly is contemporaneity in China?
Lawrence Lek summarizes it well in his video essay: ‘Sinofuturism does not care about a dramatically better future as long as it survives.' Survival is the true fundamental 'hard-lined principle.'
Two-yuan stores, like most Chinese people, don't care about an exciting and better future, as long as it survives. It is a crude aggregation of all styles of goods in one shop, providing some material needs for such a 'semi-permanent settlement'.
I am presenting daily life, but more importantly, I am trying to learn "how to live". As a creator, it is very similar to this situation in the urban-rural area. When we feel comfortable and relieved that we can participate in a ready-made development model to achieve "guaranteed happiness", or proud to be part of a shaped path of success, we must realize that this is a joining and obedience to the capital system, a homogenized coexistence, but not a symbiosis. It is not poverty or goodness that limits our imagination, but our fear of failure and backwardness.