Tag Archives: history

historic preservation

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i have been reading about ideas and efforts to renovate shenzhen, and have discovered an intense interest in historic preservation. there are several obvious examples–the chiwan tianhou temple (museum), the renovated dongmen commercial area (west of dongmen road), nantou old city, the hakka compounds in longgang, pengcheng garrison–and several more recent “discoveries”–any of the early 1980s light industry parks, remnants of older villages, a ming dynasty temple in baoan, older ancestral halls, dongmen commerce before historic renovation (east of dongmen road), 4 and 5 star hotels from the late 80s and early 90s, including the eastern pearl luxury cruise ship landlocked behind a golf practice range in seaworld. in various ways and with various degrees of success, all of these areas have been integrated into the new shenzhen.

of course, at stake is the question: what counts as history? the current effort to renovate inner city villages acknowledges that shenzhen’s only living cradles of pre-urban history are the villages, but on the other hand, what makes shenzhen “special” has been its urbanization. this contradiction means that even when village histories are chronicled and preserved, they do not resonate with shenzhen’s migrant communities. nor have i heard (note: what follows is highly anecdotal) that historic preservation in one village means anything to folks from other villages, except to encourage them to write their own histories. these histories re-write village history in terms of urbanization and what shenzhen has done for them.

so one telos, with history becoming the search for one origin. perhaps this is where the difficulty lies in writing shenzhen history. there isn’t one origin, nor one telos for that matter. even bracketing multiple development trajectories at any one time, there is still the fact that shenzhen’s official goals for urbanization have changed with every urban plan. this means that the editorial choice for one origin becomes deng xiaoping’s decision to establish sezs, and the telos becomes whatever has been built to date. so writing shenzhen’s history becomes tracking the history of changing teloses…and this is invisible. we lurch from one state of being to another, but can’t remember what was here before, or are compelled to forget what was here, even yesterday… we are busy explaining the link between deng xiaoping and shenzhen today.

the difficulty of trying to make shenzhen’s multiple teloses visible became clear to me several weeks ago. i met with a friend to show him several years of pictures of houhai and he said, “i thought the change would be more obvious. i can’t tell which pictures were taken first.” image quality told part of the story–i’ve used better cameras over time, so the better the resolution, the more recent the picture. its true. houhai has changed, but the way its changed–reclaim land, build tall buildings–hasn’t. so signs of change include building style, height, materials, distance from original coastline, which is marked by the oldest buildings, green space (as shenzhen has become richer, landscaping has increasing relied on imported, rather than local plants). but who has this kind of knowledge, which might form the basis of some kind of historic recognition? this knowledge is excruciatingly site specific. and people like my friend who haven’t repeatedly walked the coastline, don’t see the change. they see, instead, more of the same and when i visit places in shenzhen, i often find myself relying on knowledge of other places to read the extent of urbanization…

i am tempted to compare this feeling of eternally recreated present to the scene in the matrix, where the keanu reeves character (who’s name i’ve confused with nemo the fish) figures out he’s in a computer program because of a glitch; the same woman in the same dress walks by the same building twice, and only that experience, that moment of awareness reveals change. so history writing becomes looking for these glitches that otherwise go unnoticed.

npr interview

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it’s true. if you build it, npr eventually comes. mary kay magistad reports on shenzhen here.

morning walk 6 july: 鹿丹村

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ludan village wall

Pleasantly chilled inside Shenzhen’s upscale malls and glass towers, one forgets that outside mold relentlessly creeps across older surfaces, unmaking walls that once upon a time boasted distinct edges and sharp, modernist lines. Mold flourishes in Shenzhen. There was a time, an earlier, less refined time, when Shenzhen pioneers built in concrete, as if they were still living in northern climes, where winter snows deter topiary from swelling to monstrous sizes and arid lands hold in check uncontrolled growth. In visible contrast, glazed tiles valiantly slow fungal expansion on the high risen walls of post-millennial Shenzhen’s inner city villages and well-serviced business apartments. Indeed, so pernicious are southern spores that less than thirty years after Deng Xiaoping initiated economic reform and social opening, Old Shenzhen walls crumble, held in tenuous place through ad hoc measures, while unhinged doors slouch carelessly, indifferent to neoliberal respectability; razing these buildings is–like building them was–merely a question of time. Pictures of Ludan Village, July 6, 2008.

大鹏所城: on cultural history

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dapeng suocheng inner garden

Once or twice a decade, I want material proof–as opposed to theoretical reconstruction and anthropological speculation–that Shenzhen has more than 30 years of culture. Usually, I go about asserting long term cultural occupation of the area as if it were a self-evident truth. Even if the landscape isn’t what it was or the buildings are less than ten years old, I say, there are deep histories histories here: listen. However, as I just mentioned, once or twice a decade, my resolve falters and I wonder: is it possible that what my informants and friends say is true? That Shenzhen doesn’t have any culture?

Now 文化 (wenhua) seems to me tricky to translate because its tied up in understandings about history and accomplishment in ways different from the english word, culture. For example, a maid explains that she hasn’t culture (我没有文化) because she didn’t go to high school. Or when I say I like hakka food, a friend agrees that Hakka culture is rich (客家文化很丰富). Or again, when someone asserts that unlike Beijing, Shenzhen doesn’t have any culture (深圳没有文化) because it is a young city. In hese three examples, the meaning of culture ranges from education through culinary traditions to imperial history.

Located in Longgang District on Daya bay,大鹏所城 or Dapeng Garrison is an anomaly in the Shenzhen landscape–by all counts it is culture of the highest kind. The garrison, which gives Shenzhen its nickname “roc city (鹏城)” is one of only 2,351 national important cultural relics (全国重点文物保护单位). Throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties, soldiers stationed at Dapeng protected the area from pirates and colonial forces. Architecturally, was a walled garrison city, including housing for roughly 1,000 people, at least five temples, a school, and several large family compounds, which belonged to the resident general. Socially, it represented one of the military innovations of the ming. the soldiers stationed at dapeng were also farmers; the garrison was economically self-sufficient.

So yes, Shenzhen has culture. Why, then does it go unrecognized? And not only unrecognized, unvisited. Many of my acquaintances have never heard of Dapeng and most have never visited the garrison (even as part of their patriotic education). Unsurprisingly, all the parts and tourist attractions within the garrison are closed for want of visitors.

In part, I suspect that Shenzhen’s so-called lack of culture is a product of the city’s unfettered drive to modernize; no one actually notices historic relics as such. In part, I also think that Shenzhen’s lack of culture has been a rhetorical devise to produce the area as a tabula rasa; if there was nothing here, then the space is clear for all kinds of development. I’d also argue that by claiming that Shenzhen lacks of culture, urban immigrants assert their superiority to local rural residents. But in the end, I sometimes think the answer to the question, why doesn’t Shenzhen have culture is simply practical — most inhabitants lack of the time to be curious about where we are and how we got here. Most in Shenzhen are too busy making ends meet to think beyond their immediate concerns. So we’re stuck here in a present that keeps repeating itself–build, raze, build taller, faster, bigger, raze.

Culture, it seems to me, like education, good food, and history, grows in, through, and over good time, and that is precisely what Shenzhen lacks.

Pictures of Dapeng Garrison.

仙湖植物园: Fairylake

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yesterday, seema and i went to the hongfa temple (弘法寺) in honor of grave sweeping day (清明节). the temple is in the eastern part of the fairylake botanical garden.

during the early eighties, anthropologists noticed that there was a religious revival in china, with many temples being restored. however, in 1985, when construction began, hongfa was the first new temple built since 1949. another shenzhen first. indeed, construction work began five years before china’s first macdonald’s opened in dongmen.

i was struck by the bright orange glazed tile roofs and took a lot of pictures. during imperial times, glazed tiles were used exclusively on the buildings of the imperial palace or the homes of nobles and high ranking officials. chinese architects used yellow (orange), green, blue, and black tiles. each color had symbolic meaning. the yellow (orange) tiles signified the emperor and were only used on the roofs of royal palaces, mausoleums, gardens, and temples.

during the 1980s in shenzhen, architects used glazed tiles to adorn homes, walls, arches, hotels, museums, and restaurants. these remnants of an earlier aesthetic, which is often dismissed today as being “provincial (土)” encourage speculation about how early shenzhen residents borrowed from the past in order to imagine and create the future. on the one hand, the use of glazed tiles speaks to a democratic impulse–what’s good for the emperor is good for the common person. on the other hand, they also speak to totalitarian ambitions–i want to be king. indeed, the experience of freedom and release from convention that early shenzhen residents once described to me as that “shenzhen spirit” seems rooted in this contradiction.

an example from fieldwork, many years ago. in 1996, my mother visited and we went to beijing. we wanted to visit the beijing university campus, however, it was early july and so there were active restrictions on who could and could not enter. that same year, same month, i walked into the shenzhen municipal government without signing in. the guards knew me and waved me through. i then went to my friend’s office to continue interviews about population and urban planning.

this, of course, remains shenzhen’s central contradiction. on the one hand, many of china’s earliest critical magazines and journals were published here. on the other, shenzhen continues to produce some of the most dogmatic propaganda. on the one hand, there is a great deal of choice because everything here can be bought and sold. on the other hand, because choice is reduced to market choice, the political significance of many items is effectively blunted.

most visitors to shenzhen see either the limitless possibility that markets promise or the lack of social movements. in this way, shenzhen is either praised as an examplar of the benefits of capitalism or condemned as lacking any kind of public culture, depending on whether the visitor’s point of view. it seems to me more helpful to think about how this contradiction has been lived in the everyday life.

people who have come to shenzhen do experience a loosening of the conventions that govern behavior inland. however, this loosening has produced many individual efforts to bring about new possibilities for themselves and their families, rather than collective change. what remains to be seen is how this might open itself to a more egalitarian society, rather than remaining an egalitarianism defined by the idea that everyone has a chance to get rich.

五湖四海：shenzhen’s symbolic geography

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As Shenzhen continues to raze its past, investing more and more in the symbols of global urbanism, it become increasingly difficult to remember that the city was planned and built within the the symbolic world of Maoism. The manifest logic of building Shenzhen was that of the model city (on the order of Daqing), while the actual practice was that of rustification–shipping young people out of cities to the countryside in order to realize socialism.

The symbolic geography of Maoism included the natural world. During the 1980s, Shenzhen was famous for its “五湖四海 (five lakes and four oceans)”. The referent was a quotation from Mao Zedong, “我们都是来自五湖四海，为了一个共同的革命目标，走到一起来了 (we have come from everywhere [literally: from the five lakes and four oceans] to achieve a shared revolutionary goal.” Early shenzhen leaders mapped these five lakes and four oceans onto Shenzhen’s extant geography. The five lakes were: East Lake, Silver Lake, Xili Lake, Xiangmi Lake, and Shiyan Lake. The four oceans were the Big and Little Meisha Beaches, Shekou, Daya Bay, and Shenzhen Bay.

The thing about blunt interpretations of Maoism is that it opens the door to all sorts of ideological speculation. What does it mean, that Shekou and Shenzhen Bay have been completely reshaped through land reclamation? That the Meisha beaches are now high end real estate? That Daya Bay is the site of Shenzhen’s six nuclear power plants?

The transformation of Shenzhen’s coastline, notwithstanding, traces of Maoism remain more visible near the five lakes, perhaps because they were early on designated important sites and therefore more difficult to raze. Maoist traces in Shenzhen take several forms. First, scale. Maoist Shenzhen architecture is small scale, built for imagined city of half to one million people. Two, technology. Maoist Shenzhen architecture was built out of cement and required little technology to erect a building. these low buildings were framed by the environment. Indeed, Maoist shenzhen had an almost southeast Asian feel.Three, roads. Maoist Shenzhen roads were one to two lanes wide. Four, walking paths. Maoist Shenzhen walking paths meandered through gardens, reproducing original walking paths. Moreover, there were few if no borders within sites. Today, barbed wire and new walls. Five, landscaping. Maoist Shenzhen greenification was based on native plants that thrived even in the absence of aggressive gardening. In short, the Maoist aesthetic was also high modernist.

Yesterday, I visited one of the five lakes, East Lake Park. Established in 1961 as “reservoir park (水库公园),” in 1984, the Shenzhen municipal government changed the park’s name to “East Lake”. East Lake retains much that is Maoist and beautifully high modernist. Indeed, in an explicit reference to the establishment of the SEZ, the Shenzhen Art Museum was celebrating its 30th anniversary. Pictures of the museum give a sense of another aesthetic, which now reads as inscribed history.

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dongmen fading

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street market, hubei village

yesterday, i walked through hubei old village (湖贝旧村) and luoling (螺岭), both of which are under the administration of dongmen administrative neighborhood　（东门街道办事处）. hubei and luoling are located on the eastern, not yet renovated part of dongmen. the western side, of course, boasts china’s first macdonald’s and one of shenzhen’s first attempts at historic preservation for re-use, transforming old commercial buildings into modern commercial buildings. back on the eastern side, where property values far out pace the quality of the buildings, baoan ruins abut old shenzhen dreams, circa early 1980. like the neighborhoods in western shenzhen, hubei and luoling suffer from neglect. one of the more telling signs of change in the area: workers can no longer afford to rent housing. instead they are renting bedspace.

bright spots amidst gray concrete: religious items and plastic goods. as friends remind me, only waitresses wear qipao; only the ignorant believe in traditional gods. nor are there high quality goods for sale, instead household items–ranging from stools to buckets and mops–are all made of the same flimsy plastic, which comes in neon shades of green and pink, sometimes easter egg blue. such are the aesthetics of class formation. dongmen’s bright spots don’t really shine in the same in the rest of the city, where glass and imported plants suggest homeowners’ well-cultivated taste. moreover, in comparison to nearby highrises, the village buildings appear stunted at best, but more likely defective, somehow lacking. certainly, these buildings lack the WOW factor that has put the shenzhen skyline on lists that rank such things.

once upon a time, dongmen was the center of thriving cross border commerce. indeed, when deng xiaoping first came in 1984, he went to the top of shenzhen’s trade center, which overlooked dongmen. in that flourishing hub, he saw china’s post-mao future. today, dongmen seems abandoned, and even the renovated parts of the area seem tacky. for those looking to see fifty years of history condensed into a thirty minute radius, you could do worse than visit dongmen, where in addition to old village remnants and early 80s leftovers, some of shenzhen’s glitziest buildings are located.

guankou (关口)

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who’d’ve thunk it? stalin in shenzhen

silo has gone. floating lives went off better than expected, primarily because mutual goodwill enable a lot of cultural and aesthetic difference to be used creatively, rather than becoming an obstacle. that in itself was a lesson. so, i am back taking pictures of shenzhen’s odd corners, which are actually multiplying even as they are increasingly hidden in the black holes between highrise developments. the other day, i went to guankou, the remnant village located just west of the western gate into nine streets (once upon a time the entrance into the nantou yamen and hence the name “gate entrance village”).

in a parallel china, guankou was located just north of daxin brigade　（大新大队）, which had been the administrative center of the nantou commune (南头公社) and subsequently became the base for the nantou administrative （南头管理区）area (before shenzhen had districts, it had administrative areas, which were basically communes redeployed. in 1990, shenzhen rezoned itself into city districts–nantou became a street (街道办事处) in nanshan district). ever at the edge of western (shenzhen) wealth, guankou was one of the first industrial areas in the shenzhen special economic zone. (today is a day of using discarded language–“special economic zone” has gone the way of “brigade” and “commune”; a historic remnant visible in the landscape but no longer used in everyday conversation. i knew if i procastinated long enough, shenzhen would change enough for me to attain historical perspective! so another promissary note: an entry on “what happened to the sez?”) consequently, guankou was one of the first areas in shenzhen to be industrialized and circa 1982, guankou had factories. these factories lined “nantou old street”, that (before nanyou road became nanhai road) once linked the nantou yamen to shekou.

the architecture of these factories interests me. as does shenzhen’s limitless ability to manifest the ironies of history. at the same time that my old friend, rao xiaojun (shenzhen university college of architecture) had organized an exhibit of photographs of china’s disappearing mega-industrial structures (massive concrete and steel factories), and at the same time that shenzhen is vigorously converting laterday shenzhen factories into cultural centers, guankou still has functioning factories that look like mini concrete leaps forward.

fortunately, because shenzhen is still south china, there are twists on the concrete industrial theme: one-story houses, a central market area, and pink-tiled houses from the mid 1990s. for those, who like me are fascinated by the ongoing shenzhen explosion visit 关口 (a final aside: i’m starting to think of urbanization in shenzhen as somesthing akin to a prolonged volcano eruption. the lava just keeps oozing out, over and in between extant topography, constantly reshaping the landscape.)

thoughts from kunming

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artist area, kunming

Yesterday, I arrived in Kunming to spend some time with my old friend, Sasha. We are staying in a factory area that is being converted into an art area, with studios, restaurants, and cheap overnight housing. Just around the corner is an art center set up by a group of Scandinavians.

When the cab driver dropped me off here he sighed and asked, “What are the workers going to do?”

And that’s part of the question that’s posed by the abrupt transformation of Shenzhen factories into upgraded productive areas, like the creative technologies in Xiasha, design offices in Tianmian, and bohemian art facilities in OCT loft: even if it isn’t the artists’ fault that factories are closing and moving to new areas, what are the workers going to do?

I find this question, along with questions about the salience of a workers’ revolution muted in Shenzhen. Or perhaps its more accurate to say, the questions seemed forced because there’s little (left) in the environment that directly references what gentrification has meant for workers’ quality of life or how the Shenzhen experiment grew out of issues raised by the revolution.

Historical forms of silencing or glossing over the question of working class politics in Shenzhen include:

1. Shenzhen workers are defined by their exclusion from the city. This exclusion is an overdetermined effect of hukou policies, urban design, and Shenzhen social protocols. First, migrant workers do not have Shenzhen hukou and are therefore technically not “Shenzheners”. Second, factories workers either live in dormitories or new villages. This means that they are either unseen (in the case of dormitories) or subsumed under the category of local villager (in the case of new villages). Third, if a migrant worker has earned enough money to move into white collar neighborhoods, that person is considered a Shenzhener. The key here is that, except for local villagers, everyone living in Shenzhen migrated to work. The class distinction between office and factory work is the pivot on which rights to belonging in the city hinge.

2. Shenzhen’s traditional “workers” were Baoan farmers, who have yet to embody either the revolution or reform. For most Chinese and foreigners the classic Chinese worker was defined by socialist industrialization during the 50s and 60s in cities like Harbin, Shenyang, and Dalian; the forms of industrialization that have taken place since 1980, do not fall under the same rubric and therefore have also produced a different understanding of workers. Indeed, post Mao urbanization has entailed transforming rural areas and rural people into cities and urban residents. In this process, the actual class relations defining industrial production get recast as “cultural”.

Specifically, after Liberation, Baoan County was designated for rural production. This meant that during the Mao years, villagers were not factory workers, who represented the socialist vanguard. Under Deng, Baoan county was elevated to the status of Shenzhen Municipality. As such, the ideal Shenzhener has been an urban, white collar worker. In other cities, like Kunming, the shift in social importance from factory to office workers represents a re-valuation of class relations internal to the city itself. Rural migrant workers and traditional factory workers embody different forms of lower class urban possibility. However, in Shenzhen, this contradiction has not actualized as such because there were never factory workers here. Instead, Shenzhen actualizes an intensification of the relative ranking of rural and urban lives. In this sense, Shenzhen’s recent history has been consistent with Maoism in ways that prevent urban residents from reflecting on the injustices that have come along with reform.

3. Shenzhen buildings have a half-life of seven years. It takes active searching to find, photograph, and categorize traces of history, both socialist and local. During the eighties and nineties Shenzhen produced electronics and textiles and toys and shoes and what-not, those factories have since been razed or transformed. In the SEZ itself, the few factories that remain are being upgraded into cultural industries centers like the design center in Tianmian or commercial areas like in Huaqiangbei.

A visit to a city like Kunming where it is still possible to find Stalinist architecture on a main street or still functional factories downtown highlights the Shenzhen impulse to erase all traces of manufacturing, instead projecting an image of already actualized upper middle class city that was never build on production. A city of two classes–white collar workers and their servants and servers. With manufacturing located offsite out of sight and their for out of mind.

The ironies and the difficulties that entangle workers and artists (even before complete capitalization of the Chinese economy) are perhaps represented by “The Materialist (唯物主义者),” a statue by Wang Guangyi (王广义) that stands in front of the Gingko Elite (翠湖会) shopping center. Want Guangyi’s work was once banned in the PRC because it combined socialist and pop cultural symbols. His resistance to the socialist state increased his marketability among Western collectors. That his work is now public culture in Kunming suggests both the extent to which China has changed as well as the need for reminders of why the revolution was and continues to be necessary.

The commodification of culture defines contemporary gentrification in Shenzhen. The difference I am noting is how the process remains built into Kunming’s urban space, while in Shenzhen this process is a glorified municipal policy to create a city in keeping with global standards. Although I could be wrong. However, the presence of the Scandanavians suggests a different kind of reliance on government funding for art.

In addition to manifesting socialist history through remnant buildings, Kunming also has monuments to the revolution. We visited the Yunnan Army Training School, just near Lake Cui. The large compound seems a popular tourist site, and I saw two brides posing for pictures within the compound space. Inside was an installation that wrote Yunnan’s Double Nine (重九) uprising into national history, indeed, an installation that positioned Yunnan at the forefront of the revolution. When I later asked some Chinese friends, they said they new about the War to Save the Nation (护国战), but not the Double Nine, which even had its own flag.

So points of comparison with Shenzhen.

移民与海： oh that shenzhen cultural industry

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yesterday at 派意馆,　the shenzhen sculpture institute (深圳市雕塑院) hosted the opening ceremony/press conference for its multi-cultural documentary “immigrants and sea (official translation of 移民与海). paiyiguan is an exhibition space located in the oct loft area, right near the art center. the documentary explores the question of (in word for word translation of the chinese) “coast cities immigrant culture way of life (滨海城市移民文化生态).” a string of descriptions that force grammatical impositions in english. safest translation, perhaps: the immigrant culture of coastal cities.

the entire project has three parts: a documentary film about cultural life in latin american coastal cities; a public culture project in shenzhen; and an exhibition in the shenzhen architecture biennial. the documentary recounts cultural moments in various south american countries and cities. in havana, the shenzhen photographer xiao quan (肖全) takes the audience on a tour of havana’s charms. “he passes through cuba’s big streets and small alleys, searching for and recording cuban smiles and happy faces, ceasely uncovering the native warmth of cuba’s powerful culture and integrative force.”

in chile, liang erping retraces the footsteps of pablo neruda, citizen of a country of only 15 million people that nevertheless produced a nobel laureate. in brazil, shenzheners are less interested in rio than they are in brazilia, itself a famed overnight city. our guide in brazilia is shenzhen television personality, hong hai. the documentary pays special attention to carnival. in buenos aires, a shenzhen designer han jiaying explores the richness of argentine tango, soccer, and architecture.

that brief sysnopsis helps define what the film makers mean by “culture”; it is not only high culture, but also culture as giving a city definitive international identity. what kind of culture would shenzhen’s immigrants have to create in order to attain similar recognition?

historical alleys like havana? the attempt to package the ming and qing dynasty county seat at nantou has not succeeded.

noble prize worthy literature? one of shenzhen’s most famous author is an ze, a woman who broke out of being a laboring daughter (打工妹) by exposing the gritty and sexualized underside of shenzhen’s development. unlike the protagonist in wei hui’s better known book, shanghai baby who attempts to realize herself through writing and sex, the protagonist’s of an ze’s (also banned) books use sex to get ahead. sex in shenzhen, the story goes, is not liberatory, but cohersed and mercenary.

municipal festivals like carnaval? at windows of the world themepark, shenzheners already participate in carnival, oktoberfest, and water festival. there is, however, no city wide festival, in part, because most native festivals are village based. indeed, going with a local festival would entail shenzhen’s urban elite recognizing the contributions of local villagers to urban culture, something that hasn’t happened as of yet.

architecture like in buenos aires and brazilia? this seems the most likely, and shenzheners continue their pursuit of architectural excellence. it is telling that this project is entering shenzhen’s public culture through the architectural biennial.

fat bird enters this picture in part three, the sculpture exhibition. the sculpture instute is the same organization that sponsored fat bird’s inclusion at the guanshanyue museum’s tenth anniversary celebration. they have also invited us to participate in the biennial. we are currently working on a project about remembering nanshan’s now banned oyster farming as our contribution to shenzhen’s coastal culture. in fact, remnant beaches (in yantian district) of oyster cultivation could become an important and unique marker of shenzhen cultural identity. the catch is that oyster farmers immigrated generations ago, and shenzhen’s cultural elite are interested in creating high culture out of their immigrant experience.

yang qian and i left the press conference with a purble paper bag stuffed with gifts: a neckless, advertising materials, and purple immigrant & sea shirts. unfortunately, my camera was uncharged, so i didn’t photograph the event. so i have included a picture of yang qian modelling the purple shirt. he is standing on the balcony of our houhai apartment. faintly visible in the background is the land reclamation project, which is perhaps shenzhen’s most concrete contribution to coastal ways of life.


the purple shirt, the balcony, the reclaimed coastline