more cellphone messages

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yesterday was 端午节　or dragon boat race festival, which commemorates the death of the poet qu yuan. for origin stories, zongzi recipes, and related poetry go here. in the meantime, the text messages have been flying, some about happy thoughts for each other on a fesitival day, others about stock market trials and tribulations. but whatever the inspiration, the spirit of these jokes points to difficult and strained relationships. to paraphrase an american colloquialism: in shenzhen, we’re taking the lemons of globalization and making lemonade.

for the festival:
武功再高，也怕菜刀
智力再好，一砖撂倒
走自己的路，让别人打车去吧
穿别人的鞋，让他们找去吧
我现在就送给你端午节快乐的祝福，让别人羡慕吧

no matter how skilled, one still fears a knife,
no matter how brilliant, one could be knocked out by a brick.
walk your own path, let others take a car.
wear someone else’s shoes, let them search in vain.
i’m sending you festival greetings, let the others envy you.

from the market a pithy take on four generations of leadership:

老毛一挥手：下乡！
老邓一挥手：下海！
老江一挥手：下岗！
老胡一挥手：下跌！还得意洋洋地说：我叫胡紧套，还怕套不死你！

old mao directed us: go down to the countryside!
old deng directed us: go down [jump] into the ocean! (a reference to the country becoming capitalist)
old jiang directed us: go down [leave] from your post! (a reference to rising unemployment)
old hu directed us: go down! (a reference to plummiting stock prices) what’s more, he arrogantly said, “i’m just afraid that you won’t be taken in!”

吉田园：the spectre of modernized death

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high density real estate

today, some notes on human death and the spirit of capitalism with chinese characteristics.

last week some shenzhen university architecture grad students and i visited 深圳市吉田永久墓园 (shenzhen lucky fields eternal cemetary) (official translation: jitian permanent cemetary shenzhen) the translation difference is instructive. eternal resonates with my sense of death, but permanent speaks to the anxieties of the living: will the graves be moved? in shenzhen, land appropriation for development has meant that village graves have been moved; many have been reinterred at lucky fields. moreover, razing extant sites for new and improved development is a skill shenzheners have cultivated. so it’s not completely for sure that lucky fields won’t become obsolete.

lucky fields is a large scale cemetary located in buji, about twenty minutes (depending on traffic) from dafen village. like all buji real estate it abuts factories, which for me intensified the feeling of being packaged and slotted. in class, we’re thinking about modernization and the reorganization of traditional spaces, with an eye toward contributing an installation to the shenzhen architectural biennial, which takes place at the end of this year. (i’m beginning to think a cultural career might be made out of these biennials!) so, in addition to reading and discussing related materials, we’ve been going on field trips. going through the lucky fields’ literature, i was struck by the rhetorical similarity to all land related projects in shenzhen, namely the emphasis on planning and management, but also the promise to develop lucky fields as a namebrand (品牌). excerpts:

the shenzhen lucky fields eternal cemetary was established in 1994. it was approved by the guangdong provincial goverment department of civil affairs, and managed by the shenzhen municipal government. lucky fields covers an area of 448 mu and currently employs 30 people. after ten years of effort [paper was written in 2004] lucky fields has gradually transformed from a cementary conceptualized on paper into a new form of cememtary which exhibits modern culture and boasts beautiful scenes. throughout the construction of the cemetary, we have paid attention to planning and management. experience has taught us that planning is the basis of a company’s development and management the key to success. neither can be lacking. accordingly, at lucky fields we ceaselessly work to keep these two…[魂 also “soul” in some translations], it is also a company’s spirit/soul. in the intense competition of today’s market, if a company has a brand, it has a market, which is to have a future. this brand will promote a company’s growth and development at every moment…

(5) branding strategy a brand is a product’s spirit

now what’s fascinating is that as part of the promotion of the lucky fields brand, the company has joined the (apparently) first virtual memorial webside, 无尽的爱纪念网. online, people can post pictures of departed loved ones, write messages, and send condolences. there are also sites for beloved teachers, famous people, blogs, dreams, tradition, and marriages and births.

eelove compliments online marriages and gaming as a way of connecting to the world through electronic webs. it also seems to be important among diasporic chinese, who are unable to visit graves on important days.

interestingly (but not unexpectedly in the era of branding) eelove holds (non-traditional) memorial events (some free, some having fees) to go along with other holidays. but, then again, holidays are when we remember those who have left us. many of us (not just diasporic communities) aren’t living in the neighborhoods where we were born because we pursue jobs and dreams in a global world. we not only live far away from family, but also die and are buried in places that relatives can’t visit regularly, if at all. how do we speak to that alienation?

personally, i have been more moved/disturbed/confounded by the capitalization of death rituals than life rituals (such as marriage or birthdays). at death, the fact that we’re making money off each other just sits there, uncovered by the hopes that accompany life rituals. even if in formal terms the commodification of marriage and death is the same, viscerally i feel that wedding planners aren’t the only ones benefitting from marriages; somehow an expenditure of capital at a wedding seems to thrust the couple into the future. but where do commodified burials–whether actual or virtual–launch us? sentimental values indeed.

take a virtual (!) walk through lucky fields.

dafen museum

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dafen village museum

went to dafen village the other day. the museum building is finished and staff are now finishing the interior, including choosing pictures and designing galleries. the idea of a dafen museum is itself stunning, especially as the museum is a 5 minute walk from the dafen louvre, one of the largest art malls associated with the village. (unlike the museum, the louvre is located accross the street from actual village borders.) so pictures of what seemed incredibly like a critical performance piece but was in fact business as usual–pictures of workers transporting oil paintings from the yet unopened museum to waiting trucks, the same small, blue trucks that are used throughout shenzhen’s industrial villages…

画须添龙： photos

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hamming it up at rehearsal

rehearsals for draw whiskers, add dragon proceed. cast photos, here.

houhai, lay of new land

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new roadwork, houhai

this week shenzhen hosts a conference on sustainable, urban development. yesterday, at the flag raising ceremony we were told the new limit for air-conditioning is 26 degrees centigrade. houhai marches on. now that the roads have been layed, the next step is partitioning the land and putting in infrastructure for new residential and commercial areas. another houhai walk.

that was then

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i have written earlier about the central axis. today i went walking, two years later, along the portion south of shennan road. i will update the ongoing creation of shenzhen as a city of sustainable development (unquote recent official exhortions) in another entry. the new park space is stunning and has left me searching, again, for words to describe the disconnect between the beauty of trees, blue sky, and radiant buildings and the monotony of low-paid jobs to maintain such places. for them moment, however, i’m thinking more about the unseen, unheard leap toward new states of being that occur in shenzhen. if a building or seven go up and noone notices, did the landscape change or was it always like this?


august 2005


june 2007

houhai land reclamation area, may 27, 2007

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western corridor houhai land reclamation district

houhai, again. another encounter with that which became obsolete in less than ten years. another walk through the determined construction of an alternative world. several views of the same stretch of new road.

there’s a chinese proverb 沧海桑田 (the oceans become mulberry fields) that is used to describe largescale transformation. perhaps, 沧海楼盘 could be used to describe shenzhen’s development, or at least the policy of 移山填海　(move mountains, fill in the ocean), but it wouldn’t mean only massive change. something about the necessary scale of transformation to compete economically. something in keeping with another updated proverb i’ve heard: 谈金论股 (discuss money and debate the market)–a puny take on “discuss today and debate the past (谈今论古). or the rewrite of the national anthem:
起来还没有进股市的人们
把你们的资金全部变成神奇的股票
中国人民族到了最疯狂的时刻
每个人都激情发出震颠的吼声
涨停涨停涨停
怀着暴富的梦想
钱进钱进钱进进。　what other new proverbs have you heard?

设计之都： graffiti art, shenzhen

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the new look of tianmian–city of design

it’s the third annual industrial arts fair in shenzhen. last year this time, fat bird did a series of improvised performances at the fair. this year, the fair came to tianmian! specifically, city of design, the ongoing project to upgrade old urban village shenzhen hosted the first three-city (guangzhou, hong kong, shenzhen) graffiti competition. a few pics, here.

now, i don’t know where or how these artists actually applied to compete; i haven’t seen any of the shenzhen artists’ work around the city. not that means anything in and of itself, much happens that i miss because i’m busy elsewhere. but. i’ve taken pictures of graffiti in the past. i’ve taken pictures of overpainting. but in over five years of walking and photographing the shenzhen, i haven’t seen any graffiti approaching the quality on display. interesting questions: where do these graffiti artists actually work? where are their other projects? will the city actually heed shenzhen t.v.’s call for more graffiti art throughout the city?

all this to call attention to the ways in which shenzhen continues its pursuit of culture in government approved forms. more specifically, its pursuit of culture as a viable economic investment. the industrial arts fair is the most obvious example. government regulation, promotion, and investment is also making dafencun into something of a brandname. this year, in tianmian graffiti art is being promoted as a happy alternative to industrial manufacturing as the livelihood of urban villages.

that said, fat bird’s most “successful” projects have been in collaboration with government entities. indeed, our next performance installation is also made possible by a government agency. we’re just paid less.

画须添龙: Fat Bird at the Guan Shanyue Museum of Fine Arts

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draw whiskers, add dragon

The organizing committee of the tenth anniversary celebration of the founding of the Guan Shanyue Museum of Fine Arts commissioned Fat Bird to create an original performance installation for the event, “Open Water Colors: An Exhibition of Contemporary Works”. Fat Bird has created “Draw Whiskers, Add Dragon”, which will be performed on June 22, and on display from June 22 through July 22, 2007. An intro to the piece is online, here.

the sweetness and the people

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royal jelly and fresh honey, straight ahead

yesterday walking in the lychee orchard section of shenzhen’s central park, yang qian and i stumbled upon bee farmers. they do the guangdong bee circuit–shenzhen, pingyuan, nanhai–following the pollen. they are from pingyuan and have been coming to the central park these past eight years. the honey is amazing. for those of you in shenzhen who happen on this entry they’ll be here for another week or so, before heading north. more bees, here.

at dinner, i was telling a friend about the 蜂民, i even tried 蜜民, before folks understood that i meant 蜂农，a phrase which (unlike 蜂民) shows up automatically in pinyin word-processing. yang qian laughed and said it sounded like i was talking about “crazy people (疯民)”.

then qingfeng joked, nobody wants to be 民　because that character has a negative connotation in chinese.

i said what about 人民?

no, not good. better to be an official.

who aren’t part of the people?

chuckle, chuckle.

i persisted, what about citizen (公民)?

that can’t be helped (无奈)!

everbody at the table laughed, reaffirming the unquestioned truth that as an american 公民 i couldn’t understand what it means to be a chinese citizen. we then started talking about the medicinal benefits of lychee honey, which helps develop anti-bodies to local strains of flu. it was a polite segue that suddenly seemed a portentious metaphor. now i’m wondering about social honey and culturally born strains of flu: what keeps the people healthy?