Over the course of a year, we live so many lives it seems simultaneously naive and cynical to claim that we are always the same, demanding constancy of ourselves and others. In terms of knowledge production, those lives intersect and abut and transform each other despite housekeeping efforts to maintain distinctions between private and public, rational and sentimental, emic and etic, the known and everything else. So, rather than end 2011 by reviewing other people’s lives and events of global importance, instead I’m offering a facebookish mash-up my 2011. Glimpses of the sharing that has made my year possible and thus created conditions of possibility for writing Noted, situating knowledge, below.
Author Archives: Mary Ann O'Donnell
Photographing transformation
For those interested in the transformation of Shenzhen, the city has a wonderful assortment of documentary photographers, six of whom have been featured in the China Insights Exhibition. The impulse to document the city’s transformation is shared by many and seems, along with design, one of the primary forms of art in the city. Indeed, the popularity of documentary representation often seems a symptom of the velocity at which the city changes, as if, by documenting we might make sense of the change. Certainly, I document obsessively. Sites worth a visit:
Jia Yuchuan (贾玉川) made his name photographing Shenzhen’s transvestite culture.
Yu Haibo (余海波) has been photographing the city and its residents since 1989.
Zhang Xinmin (张新民) has been photographing migrant workers since 1988.
suddenly smog…
Yesterday, blue skies, today notably grey, so I asked a cabbie what he thought was the reason. Many cars. More than yesterday? Well, he said, in the north they call it mist, but here we call it smog. He nodded. That’s why visibility is so poor today. Too many cars.
临摹：When is a copy not a copy?
This November, I was an assistant for the OCAT international art residency program, through which I met artists Frank Haermans and Thomas Adebahr, the artist collective of Nika Oblak and Primoz Novak, as well as curator Paula Orrell. Together, they put up the show Future Relevance, or as we translated it “明天，谁说了算？”
Interacting with the artists and curators was interesting because it inspired me to think differently about my own forays into creative ethnography and forms of representation that engage different (and frankly) wider audiences. In particular, Thomas Adebahr’s earlier work, The Benjamin Project (shown at Gallery Diet) had me thinking about contemporary art conventions that value some forms of copying and reduce other forms to “labor” albeit “skilled”. The question, of course is: how do we move across and between these social structures to create meaningful dialogue about human creativity? Continue reading
Christmas thoughts
This Christmas, while wandering through spaces decorated for Christmas parties and romance, I realized that in Shenzhen, Christmas is a night of countdowns and parties because folks here think about Christmas as “western new year”. My Chinese friends and many others use associated festivities as means of making new intimacies, rather than confirming old intimacies, which is what they do at Chinese New Year’s. So last night, there were Christmas parties, romantic dinners, and declared intentions; today, I will go to a spa with friends and then have dinner at another friend’s house.
I’m not sure how many圣诞节s I have now spent in Shenzhen, however, I remain both dazed by interpretations of how Christmas might be celebrated in the total absence of religiosity and also overwhelmed by the kindness people have shown me because they know how hard it is to be away from family on days when we remember and assert intimate belonging. Alas, it is far too easy to reduce Chinese Christmas celebrations to another excuse to sell decorations and presents that didn’t get shipped to western markets, especially, when less than ten years ago people were still asking me which was more important, Christmas or Halloween? Nevertheless, today, I’m remembering that any shared holiday potentially exceeds our cynicism and yes, offers the chance of mutual redemption precisely because we gather.
Happy holidays.
happy happy
Walk about pictures and bus, Dec 24.
life seasonings…
Yesterday had lunch with friend and his son, a member of generation 90. The conversation turned to memories of life as an early 80’s college student in Beijing, while son politely played games on his phone.
Me: What interests me about your generation is that although today y’all are friends with your classmates, your children might not necessarily be friends because they are from different classes.
Old Zhang: That’s true. The country (国家) paid for us to go to college so once we were in, everybody was the same [economic] class. Now these young people have a hard time of it. I really feel sorry for them. [laughs] For example, falling in love. When we were in college we were all the same, so all you had to do was find someone you liked and then figure out how to open your mouth. But kids today [son looks up from cell phone], they have to match up everything – the right car and clothes and job and house. Love is just like salt, it’s the seasoning you add for flavor, not the dish itself.
[Old Zhang notices son looking up and continues in another vein]
This is why I’m encouraging him to get religious belief. It doesn’t really matter what. The point is that all our beliefs – in a better society, in the four modernizations, we achieved. There’s nothing left to do. Or, we don’t know what to do. That’s why belief is important.
Me: Or salt?
Old Zhang laughs, son goes back to game.
BOOM! Shenzhen
Gu Yun (she of the lovely biennale impressions) has taken photos of Boom! Shenzhen. Below are images from the show.
Boom! Shenzhen
In 1979, Shenzhen was a rural area, organized into collective fishing villages, lychee orchards, and oyster farms. From 1979 through 2010, the Municipality’s estimated population grew from 300,000 to over 13 million people, its GDP exploded from $US 308 million to over $US 149 billion, and agricultural land vanished, being replaced by international ports, industrial parks, residential areas, shopping malls, and green space. Indeed, Shenzhen’s boom redefined the scale and intensity of rural urbanization within China and set new standards for developing nations looking to modernize.
Boom! Shenzhen has five elements, which implode the idea of a timeline to contextualize the lived, environmental, and philosophical meanings of the SEZ’s short, yet volatile history. Continue reading
…and then it became a city workshops (the third window)
I have had the pleasure of participating in the “…and then it became a city“ workshops (活动照片), bringing the film series curated by David van der Leer to Shenzhen’s general public. The film series provides six answers to the question, “When do planned towns stop being new and turn into actual cities?” as filmmakers explore urban tipping points in Chandigarh, Brasilia, Gabarone, Las Vegas, Almere, and Shenzhen.
The workshops have a simple format. A screen has been installed in a city bus, creating a “third window”. As the bus travels through Shenzhen, visitors simultaneously view Shenzhen (outside the bus windows) and the city onscreen(through a “third window”). The juxtaposition of two new towns creates useful dissonance. Suddenly, the shared peculiarities of new towns become salient and cities that within their home context are decidedly atypical, abruptly make sense within the context of global modernization. For example, like folks in Shenzhen, people in Chandigarh live in large-scale concrete housing complexes, people in Botswana need to call ahead to be picked up because no one is familiar with new addresses, and people in Brasilia have found new ways to inhabit massive plazas and ongoing roads. Then, having viewed the films, we bring biennale visitors to a location in Shenzhen to discuss the question with the general public.
For those in Shenzhen, workshops will run through December 28, so come and think about when planned cities become living cities (报名). Impressions of workshop events, below.
2011 sz-hk biennale thoughts
Shenzhen photographer, Gu Yun (谷韵) has taken lovingly poetic images of Biennale exhibits. I appreciate these images for their intimacy. The biennale has presented massive projects at a scale that seems analytic and abstract; in contrast, Gu Yun’s images reveal her steps to engage individual works close up and personal, as we sometimes say. Indeed, Gu Yun has me thinking about the revealingly personal work of viewing, digesting, and appropriating objects. Enjoy.
Shenzhen Noted 