We’re installing Accounting at Handshake 302! The opening happens October 20 15:00 to 17:00 come and enjoy an afternoon of public art in the village. Later, at 19:00 Peter Moser brings his community music project to the Baishizhou Culture Square. Impressions and map to Handshake 302 as well as the Culture Square, below.
Jenny Chan documents the Foxconn suicides from the point of view of a survivor. Worth reading, A Suicide Survivor: the Life of a Chinese Migrant Worker at Foxconn.
CZC特工队 (tègōngduì) organized in 2012 in order to discuss, plan and support creative engagement with Shenzhen’s urban villages. Three questions have inspired us.
1. What can be learned and gained from returning to the urban villages?
2. How can handshake efficiency apartments, densely crowded streets, and bustling small plazas be repurposed as cultural spaces?
3. How can creative interventions motivate Shenzhen residents to cross cultural and economic difference and discuss our common urban condition?
Our decision to locate our art space and the performance series, Handshake 302 in Baishizhou, one of Shenzhen’s most (in)famous villages, constitute concrete answers to these questions. We hope that each visitor to our art space and every audience of a performance will use these diverse works to discuss and formulate their own answers to these questions, stimulating a rediscovery and re-evaluation of Baishizhou – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
In order to integrate art exhibitions, performances and research with the residents of Baishizhou, we are collaborating with the Shenzhen Baishizhou Investment & Development Company. We also attempt to purchase supplies from Baishizhou shops and vendors.
We welcome collaboration with artists, performers, and scholars from Shenzhen and the rest of the world. Please contact us if you have a project to realize in Baishizhou or another urban village.
Handshake 302 has been selected as a collateral exhibition of the 2013 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture.
I aspire to a life of early to bed and early to rise. When I do rise early, I find my cellphone blinking with weixin alerts — throughout the night, friends have been pinging bursts of characters at each other, usually concluding with some clear indication that they are going to sleep. Weixin goes quiet until someone asks, “Who else has insomnia?”
According to Wikipedia, there are there kinds of insomnia — transient, acute, and chronic, which are defined in temporal terms. Transient insomnia lasts less than a week, acute lasts longer than a week but less than a month; chronic insomnia stretches beyond the limits of monthly endurance — “maybe I’ll go to work in a bit,” another blurts, “who wants to sleep anyway?”
I have read literary insomniacs most of my life and enjoyed the hardboiled insomnia of noir films — will there ever be a morning? But I have understood Emily Dickinson’s lament as metaphor for a more general human condition, rather than an explicit 3:24 a.m. call for help. Even Sylvia Plath seems — on printed page — to have come to a tentative understanding with sleeplessness:
She married the prince
and all went well
except for the fear —
the fear of sleep.Briar Rose
was an insomniac…
She could not nap
or lie in sleep
without the court chemist
mixing her some knock-out drops
and never in the prince’s presence.
Nevertheless, weixin insomnia haunts me because I am unsure of the etiquette surrounding these direct glimpses into someone else’s pain. Do I acknowledge the call when I wake up? Do I ask how they’ve been sleeping next time we meet? Or do I just ignore the messages, as if I never saw them, and let the sarcasm and loneliness linger?
Yesterday, Cai Qing hosted an afternoon of performance pieces in his OCAT studio. I’m sure others have commented on this, but performance art and weixin seem a match made in virtual heaven. Below, impressions of Fang Fang’s piece, “An Individual” in which she first proved her existence and then had others eulogize her. The response to her claims that she was a living human being was that no one doubted her existence, but they had no way of verifying the legality of her documents — hee! Meanwhile, the entire event was variously documented by over 1/2 the audience.
The relentless occupation of the ocean continues. These images of Houhai Road (the former coastline) show the development that has engulfed Yuehaimen Village, subject of my last post. Clicking the houhai tag will bring up a decade of transformation.
When I first arrived at Shenzhen University, Yuehaimen was the urban village where I rented a conveniency apartment for 600 rmb a month. Located at the southeastern border of the SZU campus, there was an open gate between the village and the campus. However, by the time of SARS (2003) the gate was sealed off and students took to clambering over the wall between the village and campus in order to get to school. The university built dormitories at its southwestern border in Guimiao campus. That small, backdoor gate was the easiest to slip through during the SARS quarantine.
Piece by piece, urbanization near the SZU campus isolated Yuehaimen from the city. On its eastern border, Yuehaimen abuts the southern section of the Shenzhen Science and technology park. During construction of the park (from mid to late 1990s), another wall was built between the village and the white-collar work and residential area. The village’s southern border was the coastline that is now Houhai Road, and yes, a wall was built to separate the village from land reclamation, and has remained in place to cordon off ongoing construction of SZU’s southern campus.
These successive construction projects (SZU campus, Science and Technology Park, and reclamation of Houhai Bay) meant that Yuehaimen was an important home for construction workers, SZU students, and office staff. Having limited land resources, villagers built early and tall; these 6-8 story buildings are not prototypically “handshake” buildings, which emerged in the mid-1980s. Instead, Yuehaimen buildings resemble early 1990s work unit housing. More importantly, given land constraints and building styles, villagers did not own individual property, but units within jointly held buildings.
Yuehaimen is scheduled for razing by the end of the calendar year, or early next year. Most of the residents have been evacuated. What remains is an urban ghost village, where a few stragglers wait until the very last-minute before slipping into another urban enclave. In turn, Yangguang Real Estate developers promise to build another gated community on the footprint of Yuehaimen — this one shiny, modern, and meant to house Shenzhen’s technocratic managers and leaders.
Impressions, below.
Only eleven houses remain occupied in Baishizhou’s Tangtou row houses.
Nanshan District tacitly condemned these houses several years ago, but did not become serious about evictions until the Universidade (Summer 2011). As inhabitants were evicted, the District padlocked the doors, so that the buildings could not be reoccupied. However, as the saying goes, “Those on top have policies, those on the bottom have countermeasures (上有政策,下有对策)”. When houses weren’t immediately padlocked, another family or worker or group of friends moved in. The owners continued to collect rent. When enforcers from the Urban Management Bureau (城管) came by either the inhabitants moved, or made friends with them and stayed, waiting for the final eviction.
This wait and see attitude has been much more successful for inhabitants of houses where the landlord is either in Hong Kong or further abroad. As a 4-year resident said, “Property managers don’t care what we do because the absent landlords are legally responsible. All they have to do is collect rents and their paychecks. I’m polite to urban management and they leave me alone. We’re all human, and when it’s time to move, they’ll tell me.”
Nanshan District has decided to close down the area completely because the summer rains further weakened the structures. These buildings from rural collectivism are no longer simply considered an eyesore, but also dangerously unsound. The vanishing of Maoist economic legacies was, of course, one of Shenzhen’s raison d’etre. However, Maoism lingered in the nooks and crannies of previously built spaces, such as Tangtou. Indeed, the Tangtou row houses are one of the few remaining examples of Maoist architecture in Shenzhen’s inner districts and once they have been razed, Maoism will become more of a spectre than it already is.
Thought du jour: in Shenzhen, even crumbling, Maoist dormitories can no longer safely shelter the city’s poorest workers and their families. Wither the left, indeed.
Impressions of Tangtou wet and sunny, and still occupied interior.
We speak glibly of Shenzhen as a “global city” and of the importance of “globalization”, drawing attention to “economic forces” and “Chinese politics”. Indeed, these simple phrases help us manage the alienating and dissonant fallout of truly thinking about what it means that our everyday lives stretch out across networks we do not fully see and dependent upon processes we cannot predict, let alone control.
Yesterday, for example, I walked from the Shenzhen Bay Checkpoint to my house on Shekou Industry #8 Street. I passed several hundred cross-border pre-schoolers and elementary students on their way home, another Shenzhen Bay development project (north on Dongbin Road), and a clean collection plastic container to collect clothing donations for poor and/or destitute areas of the interior (neidi). Globalized footsteps indeed. Each of these events represented individual and/or collective attempts to navigate and use international and domestic borders. We can speculate on why parents might send their young children on hour-long treks from Shenzhen to Hong Kong. We can provide Marxist analysis for land reclamation and real estate development in Shenzhen Bay. We can note the rise of philanthropy as Shenzhen’s middle class solidifies its self-identity as caring for neidi communities. But at every twist of thought, the totality of what the city might or might not be, slips away and we resort to chasing the next idea that bumps awareness.
The earth feels solid. The concrete reflects south Chinese heat. The tacky red heart symbolizes an actual desire to improve the world. There is a here and now that seems reliable, until we start thinking. And then, once again, a massive, unwieldy mess of global cogitation distorts the all too ordinary edges of everyday life and we suddenly suspect that life really might be elsewhere.
Impressions, below:
Wonderful walking tour of Shekou with Huang Weiwen, Director of the Shenzhen Center for Design. Of particular note (in no particular order):
Nanhai Road was the primary artery and all industrial parks and housing were built along that road. This road has pride of place on the original China Merchants plan for Shekou. However, on the same map, the village areas were blank. Moreover, road and infrastructure construction served to isolate, rather than integrate the villages into Shekou society. Nevertheless, public facilities such as hospitals, post offices and schools were built in the border zones between the village and China Merchant settlements.
The craze for creating material traces of a history for Shenzhen continues. Next to the Shekou wet market — which has been externally renovated with LED screens — a strip of village holdings / former factories is being converted into “Fishing Street”, where there will be restaurants and other places of consumption. The design for Fishing Street juxtaposes three different Chinese traditions: Guizhou style houses, bas relief murals of Dan or Tan people fishing history, and palm trees. The Guizhou houses were first seen in the Meillen hotel and apartments, but the style has clearly trickled down. The Dan, of course, were the people who lived on fishing boats, only coming online with land reform during the early Mao era. Before they were used as ornamental topiary, the palm trees were used locally as cash crops to make fans. This new development further deepens other murals and village museums in the area.
The most distressing change? The almost complete privatization of the coastline. The new marina includes a private road to that last stretch of leasure coastline. Indeed, residents may now access the coastline either through the Shenzhen Bay Park or window views from a highrise.
ALso, as we walked from the village areas toward China Merchants developments, I couldn’t help but notice the abandoned telephone booths — they litter the older sections of the city. Moreover, it is only when actually noticing these empty stalls that I realize there are no public phones throughout the newer sections of the city. Instead, we all carry phones (of varying degrees of intelligence.)
Impressions, below.
Shenzhen Noted 