Macau’s historic center presents us a fundamental conundrum. On the one hand, it’s Qing / Republican China meets Portugal spaces charm and entice; I find these older spaces beautiful in ways that the city’s casinos and glass towers are not. On the other hand, these spaces manifest colonial legacies; the East India Company’s cemetery and crucified Jesuses that adorn the Portuguese churches give visceral form to the foundational violence of the contemporary world system. Impressions of world heritage, below:
Tag Archives: photography
afternoon sun, tianjin
what is luxury living?
I’ve been thinking about luxury because it permeates Shenzhen advertising, especially that for new housing estates. The definition of luxury that appears in these advertisements invariably links high-end consumption, images of happy elites, and the idea of homecoming. The strip of reclaimed land that stretches from Shekou Gongye 8 Road to Dongjiaotou, for example, is thick with malls and advertising, as well as littered with evidence that such lives don’t come cheap.
The characters for luxury 奢侈 reveal the extent to which inequality threads through and often sustains our desire for these objects. 奢 deconstructs to the characters 大者, or “big one”. Likewise, 侈 becomes 人多, or many people. Thus, the literal definition of shechi is big one many people, leaving the question of the verb that links big ones and the many open to interpretation. Is a luxury item something that all want but belongs to the big one? Or perhaps, it takes many to produce a big one? Continue reading
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.
nitty gritty shenzhen – the photography of Sarah Li Cain
Sarah Li Cain does what I want to do; she takes consistently real photographs of Shenzhen gritty, but with an eye to how we live despite our situation. Her subjects include migrant children, sleeping old men, and straggly, germy kittens, which (as in the picture above) nevertheless shimmer through surrounding grime. I wax Oscar Wildesque – gutter, stars, and what not.
Sarah’s work is currently on display at The Kitchen Futian. If you find yourself in Cocopark over the next few weeks, step in and see Shenzhen through her eyes.
浪心：surging hearts
grandma sou from langxin village
The characters for 浪心村, Langxin Village literally translate as “wave heart” village. However, I’ve chosen to title this entry “surging hearts” because of the four people I met there.
This weekend, Yan Ling invited me to go with her to langxin to interview Grandma Sou, a 90 year-old woman who was still living in her old home; indeed she had been in the same home for over seventy years, since the day she married into Langxin. Her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren have all moved out of the village. Some are in the United States, others live in new village housing located next to the old village, which is now home to migrant workers.
Because neither Yan Ling nor I speak enough Cantonese to actually interview anyone, we asked A Jun to go with us. Once we arrived, however, A Jun suggested that we find someone from the village to introduce us to Grandma Sou. In old village housing next to the yuan surname ancestoral hall, we asked who had a key to the ancestoral hall so we could see it. A woman from Hunan brought us to Uncle Chen’s house. Born in Langxin, Uncle Chen retired to langxin in 1992. Before that he had been in Beijing and for a time in Hong Kong.
Uncle Chen told us that the Yuan ancestoral hall was one of three important buildings in the village. The other two were a family temple and the old school. All three were in various statges of disrepair, although money was spent to keep the ancestral hall and village clean and incense burning. In order to earn the roughly 5,000 rmb necessary to keep the ancestral hall clean, Uncle chen had rented out space behind the hall to migrants. the rental money was used for the upkeep and an annual dinner for all the villagers.
“How many villagers are there?” I asked.
“Roughly 20 males in the village,” Uncle Chen replied.
“Not many.”
“No,” he agreed. “They’ve all left.”
Not quite it turns out.
We asked uncle chen to introduce us to Grandma Sou. He agreed to ask if she would see us. And she did, with the caveat that she was partially deaf and couldn’t understand most of what was said to her. So we went to her home, where she smiled at us, and we smiled back, as Uncle Chen occasionaly screamed our questions at her.
WHY DON’T YOU LEAVE?
Because its quiet here.
DO YOU COOK FOR YOURSELF?
Yes.
WHO DOES YOUR SHOPPING?
My children.
After a few photos, we left. I was struck by her graciousness and also her independence. We could come or go; this was her life and it certainly needed no explanation or documentation. At the door, we met two of her friends, who have also lived in the village for almost seventy years. They come to visit everyday, even though they know Grandma Sou can’t hear them speak.
“How many old women are in the village?” we asked.
Over ten was the answer.
They asked me where I was from and laughed when I insisted that they were beautiful, one of the few phrases I can manage in Cantonese. They allowed me to take their pictures and then went in to sit with Grandma Sou.
the overlooked ubiquity of bicycles in shenzhen
I have been collecting discarded objects and then photographing them in different sections of Shenzhen, the oldest and largest of China’s special economic zones. This process has (as yet) denied me photo-ops with a Guanyin statue, but helped me see things so common that they hadn’t previously registered as “Shenzhenese”. This bike tire examplifies how what gets overlooked is often the all-too-common (even by folks who define themselves through acts of documentation).
In the early eighties, just after the PRC had opened to the capitalist West, bicycles symbolized the differences between urban China and urban “us”. I remember magazine articles on Beijing and Shanghai that featured images of hundreds of Chinese citizens biking to (or from) work, school, the market. At the time, Shenzhen had just been established and rarely featured in these articles, except as an example of the extent to which China was changing. From its establishment, however, Shenzhen pursued modernization with an eye to non-Chinese cities. Accordingly, the Shenzhen urban plan deliberately excluded bicycle lanes; Shenzhen’s modernity would be defined by car ownership. I’ve heard that by the mid-1990s, per capita car ownership in Shenzhen had surpassed that of Hong Kong. Certainly, the total number of vehicles cruising Shenzhen streets has surpassed the number in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, bicycles remain a common mode of transportation in the city. Many workers still bike and many business depend upon bicycle delivery. Indeed, throughout the city, usually nestled under an overpass, individuals set up bicycle repair shops. For one or two renminbi, a tire puncture can be repaired, breaks tightened, or chains oiled.
Given their exclusion from the urban plan, bikers often compete with pedestrians for passageways through the city. I have often bumped into bikes or been bumped as bikers rush to their next destination. Nevertheless, I didn’t associate bikes with the city. If I’m any example of how folks have come to inhabit Shenzhen, then the municipality’s urban planners have successfully banished bikes and bikers from mental maps of the city. Or rather, bikes and bikers crash into our consciousness only to the extent that they interrupt normal traffic. All this to say that I have been in Shenzhen for ten years, and am just starting to realize how vast the overlooked landscape might be and how misleading these pictures probably are. Consider them evidence of an emerging awarenss of, rather than reliable data about Shenzhen. Pictures, here.
Shenzhen Noted 