大芬村: when is a copy not a forgery?

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located in buji town, dafen village is (in)famous for the assembly line production of copies of famous works of art, usually western masters. dafen artists pride themselves on making authentic copies, giving attention brush struck, style, and feeling. all for as little as US$ 10.

i have visited dafen village several times this summer and have yet to persuade myself to buy a souvenir painting. not that i need to. i already have a dafen souvenir, which a friend gave me after her hong kong shop went under. (she tried to cash in on the hong kong passion for interior make-overs by selling dafen copies in hong kong.) as it stands, my reluctance to purchase a dafen painting intrigues me. after all, living in shenzhen i regularly buy pirated dvds and cds; i also buy “improved upon” copies at luohu mall at the hong kong-shenzhen border. my l.v. billfold, for example, has giant flower smiley faces, which i haven’t seen on any authentic l.v. i wear knock-offs when i can’t find what i’m looking for in outlets. moreover, i live in a housing development that looks like housing developments all over the city; my apartment is itself a reproducible unit in a mass produced building. and even on superficial reflection, i remember buying posters of great works of art to hang on my college dorm wall.

the only other area of my life as a consumer, where i seem as resolutely committed to originality seems culinary. yet here again, the question is not so much one of whether or not a dish can be reproduced (after all the sign of a top chef is the ability to reproduce the same taste day in and out), but rather one of freshness; i enjoy fresh vegetables, unfrozen meets, and innovative tastes. i want the same on my walls. or so i tell myself as i look at the mass produced spring festival couplet i have hung on my door (年年如意新春乐；岁岁平安合家欢) with glittered chicken.

my reluctance to purchase a copy found its counterpart in the pictures i took while there; i again found myself looking sideways at what was happening. i ended up photographing an unintentional street performance. however, yu haibo of the shenzhen economic daily won at the 2006 world press press photo of the year contest for his photos of dafen village. eastsouthwestnorth provides a translation of 天方乱谭‘s analysis of yu’s photos and how representative they are of china.

those interested in purchasing a dafen oil painting can order directly from various websites (dafen village dot com and dafen dot net).　the people’s daily provides a brief history of dafen.

开平碉楼: fortified homes

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the other day, i went to zili village (自立村), li yuan (立园), and chikan town (赤坎镇) in kaiping city (开平市), one of guangdong’s famous 侨乡 (overseas chinese homeland). as a tourist destination, kaiping is famous for its towers, known as 碉楼, which were fortified structures designed to protect families from local bandits. according to anthropologist zhang guoxiong (张国雄):

“Before the Ming Dynasty, presentday Kaiping lay at the administrative intersection of three
counties, Enping, Xinhui and Xinxing. This situation enabled local bandits (土匪) to flourish
and hide out there. Public security was a mess. Liangjin Mountain in Kaiping was just such a
nest for local bandits, whose activities reached the towns of Chikan and Tangkou. Kaiping’s
predecessor was Kaiping Dun. During the Ming, the character “dun” refered to a military
installation. We can imagine that the central government had dispatched a garrison to Kaiping to
manage the problem of public security. They hoped this would be a place of unhindered traffic,
and that peace would be restored. Kaiping became a county during the first year of the Shunzhi
reign (1643). It was precisely to counter these social problems that the are was called Kaiping
(开平), which meant “restore peace (开同敉平)”. From this we can see, public
security problems were endemic to the area (loose translation from his book 开平碉楼)”.

these problems continued through the late qing and into the nationalist period. local architecture reflected the need to build for safety from bandits. however, the infusion of money from overseas chinese changed and intensified this kind of protective building. from the mid nineteenth century on, men from kaiping began immigrating to the united states and canada. significantly, because exclusion acts prevented them from bringing their families with them, they sent remittances home, often with the specific intent to build a safe tower, where their families could live. it is estimated that from the mid-nineteenth century over 3,000 towers were built, with intensive construction happening from 1912 until 1937, when nearly half the towers were built (1,490).

in fact, the remittances themselves became the cause of increased piracy. from 1912 until 1930, roughly the same period as the most intensive episode of tower building, there were 71 reported instances of bandit attacks in kaiping, including three attacks on the county seat and kidnapping the county magistrate.

early chinese immigrants to the united states worked for low wages in dehumanizing conditions. indeed, chinese migration satisfied american needs for low wage workers without attempting to give workers the benefits of american citizenship; in chinese, the remitances were called “血汗钱 (blood and sweat money)”. all this to say, kaiping people found themselves quite literally in a global crossfire between local bandits and north american immigration policy; there was no safe place for them and their families, together.

indeed, global politics continued to shape the possibilities of kaiping family life. the cold war brought with it u.s. attempts to undermine asian communist leaders, especially mao zedong. beginning in the early 1950s immigration restraints loosened, culminating with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. these changes allowed for the migration of kaiping family members, most of whom abandoned their towers for chinatowns and suburbs overseas, despite the fact that the communist party had actually succeeded in pacifying local bandits.

today, kaiping’s fortified homes seem disconcerting monuments. to departure. to social unrest. to history’s ironies. to ostensive luxury. the towers, the tiled floors, the defensive infrastructure, including weapons, the intricate wood carvings, the marble tables, the obvious wealth boarded up and hidden behind concrete walls and rusting metal shutters distressed me; a fortress can’t protect a dream.

on jan 31, 2002, the state administration of cultural heritage of the people’s republic of china (the awkward and official translation of 中华人民共和国国家文物局) nominated the kaiping towers for inclusion in UNESCO’s world heritage project. they have also uploaded a website that brings together tourist information, annecdotes, and historic analysis about the towers and the overseas chinese who built them. please visit.

objectified space

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two questions have prompted me to specify what i want to achieve through the found objects project.

lesley sanderson posed the first question at the cruel/loving bodies exhibition, “look at you work critically and decide what you are trying to do.”

sasha welland then asked me, “why do you pick up the objects and photograph them elsewhere? why not just photograph them in place?”

a preliminary answer to these questions. in the found objects series, i map shenzhen from the perspective of the object. in constrast, i have tended to photograph large objects in place, calling attention to the construction of shenzhen through specific objects. how might this latter project be different from simply photographing places, which i’ve done all along?

while trying to get onto the houhai land reclamation project in shekou, i took pictures of discarded objects on that walk. i also photographed baskets left on a street.

赤湾: selective naturalizations

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relatively isolated from the rest of shekou, the geography of chiwan has recently undergone massive restructuring as outgrowths of containers replace mountains as the defining feature of the landscape.

shenzhen port consists of nine terminals: shekou, chiwan, mawan, yantian, dongjiaotou, fuyong, xiadong, shayuchong and neihe.

more houhai

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today i started exploring the houhai land reclamation project further west, walking from shekou industrial road #8 toward dongjiaotou port.

at first, i had no specific goal other than getting onto reclaimed land and snapping a few photos. however, at the end of i.r. #8, i was stopped by a soldier, whose youth distressed me. i would say he was no older than 16, but when asked, he claimed to be 18 and meet all the requirements for joining the army and carrying a gun, which rested prominantly on his boney hip. he told me that access to the area was restricted because it was the new national border (边界). suddenly, i needed a reason to be on the reclaimed land. i pointed to the western corridor suspension bridge and said that i wanted to take some pictures of the bridge. he politely asked me to leave. i stared pointedly at the people walking on and off the area and he finally went over to a couple and asked to see their passes.

now determined to get onto the landfill, i walked to i.r. #7, where a brick wall blocked my way. i tried walking around it, but a deep gully prevented me from successfully getting on. however, neither soldiers nor security guards prevented access. at the yucai-schumann art school, which is located right at the boundary between public and filled land, i tried to talk the security guard into letting me walk to the back of their school to take a picture. he refused, but helpfully directed me back to the end of the road, when i said it was impossible to get onto the landfill, he seemed doubtful because, he saw workers (打工的) heading that way every day.

nevertheless, one of the parents from the school started talking with me and offered to take me into his new housing development to go to the top of a building to take pictures. it turns out, the gentleman from hebei works for the oil industry and had just completed overseeing the construction of a refinery in zhuhai. he mentioned that he had taken photographs of the entire construction process, “from nothing to a beautiful refinery.” he agreed that it was important to document this process, otherwise we would forget where we had come from. “where are the pictures now?” i asked. in zhuhai.

i then walked to the street immediately west of i.r. #7 and there was direct access onto the reclaimed area. i stepped onto the landfill and headed toward the bridge, my confidence growing with every step; no one here would stop me. i inhaled the fishy smell of rotting shells and stepped through air thick with flies. as i headed further out, i stumbled upon a shantytown and watched several children playing. i watched the dust a pair of once-red flip flops kicked up as a woman pushed an old bike past me. i looked again toward the bridge, but decided i had accomplished my task. i believe an old man watched me leave.

the tour ends with a view of new coastal real estate.

莲花山：lianhua mountain park

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with friends, i climbed to the top of lianhua mountain park, where deng xiaoping strides purposely into the future.

well, perhaps not toward the future. he is afterall standing in place. nevertheless it is fair to say that because the land beneath him continues to shift, he’s no longer where he started. deng now both overlooks and synthesizes the meaning of the environmentally conscious central axis, as well as the ever more expensive real estate of futian, including huaqiangbei, the rainbow glass buildings of the financial district, the huanggang checkpoint, and numerous gated communities.

it’s hard to know if this exactly is what he intendend when he approved the construction of shenzhen. it’s pretty obvious, however, that this is what current leaders say he meant. accordingly, lianhua park commermorates deng’s 1984 southern tour, when he proclaimed that shenzhen demonstrated the correctness of reform and opening. the next political step, of course, was not toward city hall, but toward the fourteen coastal cities, which began learning from shenzhen. importantly, the practices associated with learning (学习) in china include emulation. so that “learning from shenzhen (学习深圳)”　directed leaders in other chinese cities to do what shenzhen had done: dismantle work units, bring in foreign capital, set up labor and housing markets, and build an international city.

sweating in the heat and humidity, we climbed past a kite flying field through the remnants of a lychee orchard and into a palm tree grove to arrive at deng’s monument. there, banyan trees and unbrellas protected most visitors from the sun, while a few others posed in front of deng and the engraved mural of deng xiaoping’s words, “the development and experiences of Shenzhen have proved the correctness of our policy on the establishment of special economic zones (深圳的发展和经验证明，我们建立经济特区的政策是正确的).” deng wrote and presented this inscription on January 26, 1984. at the pinnacle, the decision feels correct. it saturates my senses and suddenly the park, the views, and the easy pleasures of kite flying justify deepening reform. “everyone should have a nice park,” i think unreflexively.

as an early reform joke had it: deng xiaoping comes to a fork in the road. his driver asks, “what should we do.” deng answers, “signal left (toward socialism), but turn right (toward capitalism).”

and that’s the rub. i don’t know how seriously people take the deng statue and plaque, which celebrate a rather banal political message: brought to you by deng xiaoping and the ccp, reform and opening good! instead i worry that propaganda may be as sweet as an afternoon in the park. for the curious, a people’s daily article on the 1992 southern tour sketches the ideological importance of the 1984 southern tour with politically correct reverence.

沙尾村：the banality of progress

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the three r’s of a successful boomtown: raze, replace, repeat (every ten years, sooner if possible).

Cruel/Loving Bodies

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This weekend (July 8 and 9), I had the pleasure of participating in a roundtable discussion of Cruel/Loving Bodies 2 project, which is on display at the Hong Kong Arts Centre from July 8 through July 28. The Pao Gallery on the fifth floor and the Goethe Gallery on the fourteenth floor are co-presenting the exhibition. Cruel/Loving Bodies 1 was exhibited at Shanghai’s Duolun Museum of Modern Art (June 2004) and Beijing’s 798 Space (July 2004).

This was the first time I have contributed to an art discussion and, not unsurprisingly, approached it as if it were an anthropology meeting, understanding my role to be that of discussant. I came to play a familiar head game, reading textualized bodies against themselves, against each other, and if time permitted, against other texts. My jaw clenched at the responsibilities that my imaginary job description intimated; what would I say if asked, “What influences do you see in the work of Mayling TO? (杜美玲)” However, the experiences of viewing “Here We Are” with artist Lesley SANDERSON, sucking an ice pop with HE Chengyao (何成瑶), and dubbing Deep Throat as part of ZHENG Bo’s (郑波)“Watch porn, learn English” movement jolted, if only momentarily, corporeal habits. And I expectedly found myself remembering to play hide and seek.

When playing hide and seek, children want to be found. If you don’t find them within what they think is a reasonable amount of time, they will call out to you. In turn, if they can’t find you, they become frustrated, expecting a return call. After all, the point is to find and be found; the seeking is simply a means of enhancing the pleasure, not an end in itself. I think this commonplace observation points to a practical understanding of the fine line between love and cruelty. In hide and seek, love is the effort to find the person, cruelty the refusal.

Most of the time, I don’t play. Instead, my shoulders tighten, my eyes squint, and my heart makes judgments about my interlocutor based on superficial signs—skin color, hair texture, body height and mass, the smell of sweat and light perfume, the drape of a skirt, the polish of leather shoes. Together, these signs suggest how the woman if front of me has treated herself and been treated by others; I too treat her like a lady should be treated. Grimy cheeks, missing teeth, crooked fingers, swollen ankles, rheumy eyes, and sweat-stained clothing also reveal past interactions; unthinkingly, I treat the old peasant like a beggar should be treated.

In presenting bodies in unexpected ways, however, the artists of the Cruel/Loving Bodies project pre-empt habitual interactions. How does one treat, for example, the virtuous women of BAI Chongmin (白崇民) and WU Weihe (吴玮和)? The form echoes that of the Terra-cotta soldiers, but unlike the first Qin Emperor’s guard, these figures have no clear features, except for a number, which corresponds to examples taken from LIU Xiang’s 烈女传. This difference invites the reader to seek: What history brought these signs together in this particular way? Or consider, susan pui san LOK’s (骆佩珊) “Notes on Return”, which skitters across the uneven, indeed flimsy, surface of plastic strips: How can a world become so unstable?

I assume that I know how to treat a lady or a beggar because I assume that their bodies reveal the history that made them who they are. In contrast, the Cruel/Loving bodies compel the viewer to reconsider how these bodies came to be; we don’t know how to treat them because we don’t recognize the processes that formed them. That moment jolts us out of habit as we lurch toward the child’s call: come and find me. Our lady and beggar abruptly seem otherwise as well: what if I have been misrecognizing the signs all along? What if this misrecognition has been a refusal to play? And what if an ability to read the signs has merely enabled me to be cruel?

If in Hong Kong this month, please visit the Cruel/Loving Bodies 2 exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. The curious can visit the artists’ sites: Leungpo　梁宝山, Zheng Bo, Conroy and Sanderson, susan pui san LOK, and Mayling TO. I have also uploaded some images of the opening weekend.

summer fun

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the other day, yang qian and i walked from tianmian to the zhongxin plaza. we covered roughly two kilometres in slightly over one hour, stopping along the way to look at the memorial to sars heroes (lots of high-tech medical research and caring nurses), pose in front of bus stop advertisements (in this sense, irresistable), and check out what was happening curbside (an octopus floated in a tank and a man repaired a bicycle). we then stepped quickly past the women, who were using peddle sewing machines, like my grandmother used to use and my mother inherited to alter clothing, right there in the middle of our playground. and there’s the rub. shenzhen hasn’t zoned inequalityout of sight and mind, except during politically sensitive moments, when the poor are swept away. normally, the poor push back, crowding even those of us who like to think ourselves concerned. and we are concerned. just not all the time. just not that hot saturday afternoon when we wanted to play. so we put the camera away and ducked into an air-conditioned coffee shop, where our summer fun ended with a math lesson: one cup of coffee = hemming five pairs of jeans; one smoothie = six; a piece of cheesecake and one of walnut = five again. priceless.

shadow people

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i’ve been thinking about shadow people.

when the sun shines in shenzhen, it blasts through the city, and those who can take refuge in air-conditioned offices, malls, teashops, houses. those who have no air-conditioned refuge, sit in the shadows of trees and buildings. as i walk through the city, my camera searching for symbols, i often overlook them. and yet. they nevertheless people my walks through shenzhen–looking at me, looking away, resting. when our eyes meet, i turn away, ashamed to take the picture. their skin is usually deeply tanned, black, too black, as a hua, the woman who gives me a weekly facial says.

i freckle in the sun. accordingly parts of my body that don’t get regular sun time, are pale, fishbelly white, as my brothers used to tease. a hua likes my fishbelly. she sighs and says wistfully how great i would look if i could just stay out of the sun. i remind her that after forty odd years of walking outside without an umbrella, odds are most of my freckles won’t fade. she sighs again. what a waste.

the shadow people work odds and ends jobs: collecting and sorting trash, pulling carts of discarded electronic products to the second hand market. i come across older women sitting against the wall of an underground passageway, waving a hat to cool themselves. many bike to and from these odd jobs, spending the day and much of the night in the streets, unprotected from the sun except for the shaded edges of the city. even wearing hats, long-sleeved shirts, and slacks they have been roasted dark, well done. ugly, a hua says, comparing her caramel colored arm to my fishbelly.

squint and you may see them.