Check out what happens when Handshake 302 curates an exhibition that brings community together through history and art. A brief introduction to the “Migrations: Home and Elsewhere” exhibition that was up at the Longheu P+V Gallery from Dec. 22, 2017 through Feb. 4, 2018. More videos on our FB page; written documentation of our practice here.
coming home to roost
all the tea in shenzhen…
In Shenzhen, the tea industry is worth over 1.5 billion USD and is deeply embedded in the local culture. Here tea can be thought of like how wine or fine whiskey is thought of in western countries. The whole process – from purchasing the leaves, to brewing, to drinking – is meant to be savored. Check out Shenzhen Book of Changes:
were we ever here?
I’ve been thinking about memory and how narrative turns what we think happened into something we can use to change what we think might happen, which in turn had me remembering bits and pieces of Four Quartets, TS Eliot’s wonderful meditation on time and its meaning, time as a fundamental yearning to be complete despite transience, impermanence, this movement, this quickening which is also movement toward death:
Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die.
on the shenzhen farm…
As in the United States, the environmental movement in Shenzhen is a call to a different way of living. Big Tree Farm supports this call to integrate vanguard science and Chinese ideas about food and identity. Come along with Shenzhen Book of Changes for a visit to the Big Tree farm:
demolition anxieties…
Today, I walked the village named Baishizhou, which is located south of Shennan Road and is not scheduled for demolition. This other, lesser known Baishizhou is tucked away behind Window of the World, middling housing estates, and the KK Banna Mall. Unlike the Baishizhou that is scheduled for demolition, this other, less expensive Baishizhou does not hum and pop, does not buzz with entrepreneurialism and the rush of young office workers, but rather transports us back to Shenzhen 2.0; at the turn of the millennium, most Shenzhen neighborhoods were like this: straight-forwardly residential in the middle with an outer ring of functional shops and fast food, and hardware stores that spilled into the street because the sidewalk had not yet been laid down. Continue reading
thinking through old maps…
I’ve been thinking about unexpected outcomes, specifically how mapping practices shape geopolitical imaginaries. So, I’m uploading four maps to make a highly speculative point: The Sino-British buffer zone has been a long time coming and like many contemporary boundaries it is an artifact of colonial institutions, including mapping practices. The way the British mapped Hong Kong included the area that today we think of as the Shenzhen inner districts (Luohu, Futian, and Nanshan) and was once known as “the Special Economic Zone.” For a more detailed development of this argument check out the article I wrote with Viola WAN Yan, “Shen Kong: Cui_Bono.” Continue reading
