Point of view haunts me. A frightening thought, that. Yet the specter of junior high English class has followed me to Shenzhen, and my feet stumble, wondering: where to stand? From what point of view do 30-story pink buildings make sense?
First person, street corner.
Second person, homecoming.
Third person, omnipotent?
I have published one postcard at: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000hqe3
I’ve been thinking about the possibility of creating “experimental art” on Shenzhen’s streets. About a year ago, two Dutch artists led a two-day workshop here. They asked us to think about art as something that highlights the nature of everyday life. They suggested that by contrasting “unnatural” or “not normal” activities with quotidian routines, we could explore naturalized (but not natural) social forms and spaces. For example, a group of us sat on the steps of a building, playing with our cell phones. Normal activity for this space. However, every two minutes, we all looked up from our phones, stared straight ahead, and then turned our heads to the right. After a minute, we returned to playing with our cell phones. This kind of collective, planned activity constituted abnormal behavior for this space, highlighting the nature of “hanging out on steps” (among other things.)
At the time, I found this way of thinking quite useful, and have even used a version of it for my Found Objects series. However, the more I think about it, the more I wonder how much this strategy depends on the collective maintenance of social norms in order to be effective. What happens, for example, when the artist’s experiments can’t exceed extant uses of space? For example, walking from my apartment to a friend’s office in downtown Shenzhen the other day, I passed a woman eating out of a garbage can. She scooped handfuls of rice from a styrofoam container into her mouth. A child slept on her lap, his legs dangling near her left hip. Today, as I walked through the park, I noticed a man sitting on a park bench, legs spread, a limp penis in his right hand. Clearly, he intended to be seen because he was sitting next to sidewalk, rather than behind a bush. I’m not sure if he had just finished masturbating or urinating, but hand and organ both glistened in the afternoon sun. What kind of street art could say more about Shenzhen than these two performances? Or perhaps the question is, how might street art respond to these two performances?
Now, I’ve thought about photographing these and similar scenes, but part of me (and thus far the dominant part of me) resists. I don’t want to invade their privacy. This is the sentiment that prevents me from looking more closely and keeps me from snapping that picture. Clearly, they’re not worried about privacy in the way I’m used to thinking of it (behaviors that remain unseen, taking place behind closed doors). But I can’t convince myself that they would therefore welcome a photo shoot opportunity. At this moment, is turning one’s head away correct? Or would a more interesting form of art-response be to sit down and eat with the woman? Offer her food. Is the point to acknowledge the very specific reality at hand (so to speak), making street art a more explicit form of interactive improvisation? I’m as repelled by the idea of sitting down to eat from the garbage can as I am by taking pictures. Certainly, I had no desire to approach that man. What is it in me that turns away? Doesn’t want to look and yet wants to document this world?
It’s not even that these two performances are isolated events. I regularly see “abnormal” use of public spaces in Shenzhen. At construction sites and under park trees, workers take afternoon naps on woven bamboo mats. Beggars arrange themselves on most of the pedestrian overpasses throughout the city, while barbers set up shop underneath, placing a fold-up chair in front of a mirror that they have hung on the cement wall. At mealtime, many bring their rice bowls outside, squatting next to the road and people-watching. And I gaze, but out of the corner of my eyes, unable to bring myself to look directly at all this. It occurs to me that the reason they may have brought their lives to the street is that they can’t afford closed doors. So perhaps I am ashamed to look at poverty? But there may be other reasons they have brought their lives outdoors, just as there are other reasons I keep mine inside. If so, what then pre-empts a conversation? Or the possibility understanding? Is it that by looking away I am offering an exchange—don’t look too closely at me, and I won’t look too closely at you?
In Mandarin one of the words for “shameful” is “not fit to be seen by people (见不得人)”. What does that expression actually refer to? Is it the woman and her child? Is it the conditions that have forced her to eat out of a garbage can? Is it an American woman turning away? Is it how during public events police officers push her and others like her out of sight? Or is the question not what we look at, but how we go about looking? At that moment, is some kind of connection possible?
Yesterday, I took my camera for a walk. Although I had a new object to photograph—a well-used pot for brewing Chinese medicine—I didn’t want to carry it. Instead, I walked around the Baihua area, which is bordered by Huaqiangbei in the south and the Shenzhen Stadium in the north. East and West, I meandered between Baihua Road numbers 4 and 2, respectively. This is primarily a residential area, with housing from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Shenzhen School of the Arts is located here, as is a Wallmart.
Greenspace constitutes one of the pleasures of older developments. Unlike newer developments, which have enclosed park-like areas for their exclusive residents, older areas sometimes have large strips of greenspace that stretch between the development wall and the sidewalk. Lovely banyan trees and lush bamboo clumps shade passage through these strips, which were planned when land was plentiful and funding for elaborate and imported topiary not easily had. Then, planners planted native species and left them to their own devices. Today, grass and palm trees, cultivated flowerbeds and exotic bushes define both public and privatized greenspaces.
One might measure the historical distance between new and old greenspaces in terms of an all-too-visceral ethics of efficiency. As factories, developments, and streets have colonized most of Shenzhen’s land, the older greenspaces, with their cool shade, unkempt paths, and rustling leaves seem vaguely decadent, indeed wasteful. In contrast, the newer greenspaces fit within the lines of an efficient urban planning. They boast denser vegetation and more varieties of plants per square meter, as well as park benches, concrete paths, and small pavillions.
The relative decadence of the older greenspaces is a strange phenomenon. It’s clearly not a question of ecological efficiency. The older greenspaces require no care, except for the occasional sweeping of leaves and picking up trash that accumulates in the network of banyan tree roots. The new greenspaces demand constant attention. Accordingly, teams of gardeners cultivate them from about 6 a.m. until 5 a.m. (with a lunch break and nap time). The decadence of the older greenspaces isn’t even a question of occupied space; the legislated proportion of greenspace to built space hasn’t changed over the past two decades. Instead, I think this relative decadence might arise from the plants themselves, or rather, the growing.
Plants thrive in semi-tropical Shenzhen. Grasses and vines quickly overtake any bit of untended land, climbing walls and bridges, weaving themselves into mesh wire fences. The vitality of Shenzhen’s weeds is particularly evident at abandoned-soon-to-be-razed sites, which support thick walls of shimmering vines and purple flowers. Hence, the city must hire so many gardeners in the newer greenspaces, which like botanical gardens have precise borders between different species; no room for creeping vines, even less for natives. In the older spaces, however, the banyan trees’ roots hold back the onslaught of vines, which cling to the development walls, their lush often translucent green setting off the mottled brown roots. Patterned, yes, but not clipped back, and therein, I think, is the difference that makes a difference.
The sharp lines of the newer greenspaces materialize an efficiency made possible by shearing back growth. I can imagine the gardeners’ irritation at their charges yearning to grow outside the plan. One comes, in the newer greenspaces, to know one’s place and how to occupy it. In contrast, the decadence of the older greenspaces feels like a deep, satisfying stretch, creating one’s place through the process of occupation. This might be one definition of freedom—having the space to grow according to one’s nature, even as we respect the conditions that allow others to flourish, co-evolving. That said, the efficiency with which vines overtake an abandoned factory or deserted village reminds us that others will thrive on our graves; we too are an environment.
A post-script. After I began writing this entry, I took a walk in the northern section of the city’s Central Park. This is older greenspace, older even then the so-called “older greenspaces” described above. Those spaces came into being with the city, 20-odd years ago. Instead, the land on which Central Park was zoned was formerly a leechee orchard. In the northern section, far off the main strip, the park remains a leechee orchard. Indeed, the city still harvests leechees here every June and July. Here, the clipping and weeding and cultivation feel like homecoming. Native, if you will. At any rate, I was reminded that there are gardens and there are gardens. Simply outgrowing the plan isn’t necessarily the point either, it’s just a tickle, a whisper: there are other ecologies possible.
To view some of Shenzhen’s greenspace—old and new, inadvertent and leftover from socialist agriculture—please visit: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000aw3w. I have also photographed the found objects in central park. Those pictures are at: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/000093f8.
A few days ago, I went to the Buji crossing, one of seven border crossings internal to the Shenzhen municipality. This border is called the 2nd line (二线), and divides Shenzhen into the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and Baoan and Longgang Districts. Buji is one of Shenzhen’s major manufacturing areas. It is also a center of migrant laborers, who either work in Buji, or enter the SEZ at Buji. So it is an area filled with semis and buses, as goods and people are hauled from one place to another.
Buji is one of those places where I viscerally feel the contradiction between vague research commitments to, if not the truth, then at least some version of the whole story and my bodily aesthetics. Here, goods and people clog the area, pressing into my skin and I inhale carbon monoxide and sweat. I walk quickly past numerous terminals where thin, sun-darkened men load and unload semis, while rural migrants get off long-distance buses carrying bulging plastic bags and dragging wheeled suitcases. Some stare back at me and my camera remains dormant; I am embarrassed to be seen observing what many would rather hide, or failing that, disavow. Along these streets, women hawk fruit, prepared foods, and bottled drinks. Venders and homeless migrants have variously occupied the areas under pedestrian overpasses; these spaces stink of rotting foods and urine and I find myself wondering if there are any public bathrooms nearby. Is it possible to bathe or defecate in private? I notice children working beside adults and am reminded that many of my students are in summer school, already preparing for next semester’s tests. I have come to take photos, but find it difficult to stop and pose my objects because I want to be already beyond the crowded heat and stench. Instead, I snap a photo here and there, refusing to meet anyone’s gaze, moving determinedly forward. I am reduced from methodological exposition to shamed confession. Such are the lessons of the Buji crossing. Continue reading
This afternoon I walked along Huanggang Road, which runs along a north-south axis, from the Hong Kong border (at Huanggang) to Shenzhen’s North Loop road. The North Loop connects up with Buji (one of Shenzhen’s manufacturing centers, located just beyond the SEZ’s border in Longgang District) and then on to Guangzhou by way of Dongguan. Although less well known than Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Dongguan is a major manufacturing center.
The point is that everyday, hundreds of semis pass back and forth along Huanggang Road, hauling containers full of goods from Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Guangzhou and then returning from Hong Kong for another load. I’m told that with turn around time at the border, its possible for drivers to make two trips a day. These containers are then loaded on to ships in Hong Kong and shipped throughout the world. (Just last week, I led a group of Shenzhen students on a study trip to England, where they amused themselves looking for souvenirs “made in China”.)
The drivers are licensed in both Hong Kong and Shenzhen, although the trucks are designed to drive on the left side of the road, British style. They rumble past housing developments from about 6 a.m. to midnight. At rush hour, they make Shenzhen’s already clogged streets even more impassible, squeezing traffic into the safety lanes and causing more impatient drivers into mid-stream k-turns to get off Huanggang Road. Bikers continue to weave fearlessly through the mess.
I have had difficulty representing these semis because they stretch beyond my line of sight, precluding a total image. Yet up close, they seem formless, sheets of metal that are themselves the reason the horizon stops just off the sidewalk. When not forming an inadvertent convoy, they growl past pedestrians, shaking the earth and burping up carbon monoxide. Commuters, waiting at Huanggang bus stops, cover their noses and mouths with their sleeves or handkerchiefs; some wear surgical masks, which they remove once on the bus.
It is at this level, that “global flows of production” have become tangible to me. I have been to the ports, where containers pile one on top of another, and have read reports about so much tonnage a year passing from China to the world by way of Hong Kong, but those figures remain too abstract. Crossing the street, inhaling carbon monoxide for several blocks, listening to the engines rev—these have made visceral the feel of mass production, the ways in which manufacturing, importing, and exporting goods are not simply a matter of economy, but also choices about the kind of world in which we want to live. The containers moving along Huanggang Road constitute my backyard.
These images of claypot on Huanggang Road remain awkward, out of balance, and I think its because my claypot and even three semis do not belong to the same representational scale. Reason enough to re-consider the world being made in China; my life plays out at claypot scale (in a manner of speaking) and yet I am trying to imagine, understand, and evaluate a world in which thousands of containers, semis, and ships pass by daily. If I can’t make this imaginative leap from where I am, what can I know about this world? More to the point, to what extent does the irritating lack of balance in these images actualize more than a cognitive inability to grasp where I am, but rather the impossibility of making semis part of a human world?
We are in the midst of an unseasonable rainy season, which has pleasantly cooled the city, but also taught me the desirability of an indoor studio. Yesterday, I played with my found objects on the balcony, deliberately arranging them instead of posing them in different parts of the city. I’m not pleased with the images and (in a moment of irrepresible personification) suspect that the objects themselves felt awkward.
To date, I have gleaned the following objects from rubbish heaps (in chronological order): Teapot, Claypot, Bicycle Tire, Umbrella, and The Gloves. I was given Bench. I found Teapot while wandering around the Houhai land reclamation area. Claypot had been left behind an old (and soon to be razed) village. I found Bicycle Tire next to a bridge and Umbrella had been stuffed into an advertising billboard in Dongmen. The Gloves had been abandoned on granite rocks at the subway construction site, just next to Diwang. Bench came from Zhuhai, the Special Economic Zone on the western banks of the Pearl River Delta, just north of Macau.
Until I began collecting discarded objects and photographing them throughout the city, I had contented myself with photographing the city. Photographing the city was both a moral-aesthetic and documentary practice. On the one hand, I have enjoyed reframing the city; Shenzhen is not a conventionally beautiful city (no elegantly classic ruins, no early modern architecture, and a penchant for razing mountains and filling in coastline). Consequently, it has taken me time to learn how to see it, without immediately turning from its more obvious problems. This aesthetic repugnance embodied (and continues to embody) a moral position; my refusal to look, to recognize how the city materializes the daily lives of its inhabitants has constituted a refusal to witness those lives. A refusal, in other words, to acknowledge the value of those lives simply because I don’t like the way the city looks.
(It would be fascinating to track forms of disdain for Shenzhen to specify how refusing to witness Shenzhen enables folks—anthropologists, businessmen, migrant workers—to variously use but not inhabit the city, increasing the levels of alienation that most seem to feel here. The most common refusals to acknowledge Shenzhen that I have heard are “Shenzhen isn’t China” or “Shenzhen doesn’t have any history/culture”. However, it also takes the form of apologetics for “the cost of progress”, or a reduction of this history to theoretical abstractions. I am fluent in all of these dialects, but in my scholarly work have demonstrated a preference to use theoretical abstractions to obscure unacknowledged disdain.)
On the other hand, the speed of transformation has eluded my attempts to write this history and photography has provided a form of documentary shorthand. There is a saying in Shenzhen, “Plans don’t keep up with change (计划跟不上变化)”. Various interpretations of this phrase are possible. Things got built here before the city plan was approved (so plans come into being already obsolete); positioning for short-term economic advantage, rather than consideration for long-term growth have fueled these changes (so ad-hoc improvisation, rather than deliberate follow-through tends to characterize decision-making); intensifying production (low pay, long working days, and keeping things running 24-hours a day by maintaining multiple shifts) has continuously increased the speed of economic growth (so the city has to handle increasing amounts of objects); migration to the city has exceeded efforts to build the city (so there is constant adaptation of places and things for unplanned uses).
The phrase “plans don’t keep up with change” points to Shenzhen’s ephemeral nature; this really isn’t the same city it was twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or even six months ago, for that matter. As Marx warned us, all that is solid melts into air. After ten years of attempting to write an ethnography about Shenzhen, I have instead started to examine the process of my own intellectual obsolescence. Photographs provide a means of grappling with these changes; I return to a site, retrace my steps, and click. (This is not the same as saying that photographs resolve the problem of representing change. I’m grappling, remember.)
The process of photographing these Found Objects (and scanning an area for interesting rubbish) has rearticulated my moral-aesthetic and documentary concerns. Suddenly, I have been able to engage simultaneously both fragments of everyday life and the changing landscape. Moreover, these common objects have helped me to witness Shenzhen, and I am often surprised by how beautiful the city can look, if only momentarily. Placing an object requires me to engage what I have learned to overlook. I have also found that placing an object makes details more apparent. When photographing the city, I have tended to look at representative architecture and the organization of space. In contrast, the Found Objects set off details, activating the spaces between as much as the elements of the built environment. In future posts, I will take up each of the objects in turn. I’m still wondering if I should highlight the object (a series of photographs of Teapot, for example, throughout the city), or the place (a series of different objects photographed at one place, like the Houhai land reclamation area).
Perhaps skies will clear in the afternoon and I will be able to take The Gloves out on a shoot. The Gloves suit both ethical and methodological considerations. In addition to directly representing those who have built and maintained the city as inhabitable spaces, the gloves don’t weigh all that much. This characteristic opens all sorts of possibilities; I can take out The Gloves with any other object without considering getting on and off the bus (no added bulk), organizing my backpack (no danger of cracking a porcelain object), or putting them safely away after each shoot (can be stuffed into jeans pockets).
The Gloves’ charms become apparent in comparison to Bench. This past week, when not dodging raindrops, I have been telling myself that Bench really isn’t heavy, and that carrying him on a two-hour walk under a brutal sun will result in satisfying images. I expect I shall succumb to these exhortations sometime after I return from England, where I will be leading a two-week study trip. In the meantime, however, I have enjoyed whipping Gloves out of my packback and not fearing that I shall harm them in any irreparable way. Teapot fell off a pedestrian overpass about ten days ago, and I still miss her.
Found Object portraits online.
Shenzhen Noted 