Shanghai Daily # 1: Laundry

From "Shanghai, Daily," an artist's book project that occupied me from Dec 2004 to April 2005.
12 thin school notebooks, variously lined as per subject matter (the pictured one for the practice of vocabulary/chinese characters) bound together; pages collaged with clippings from the English language newspaper, the Shanghai Daily.

Here, in a nod to today's sunny day, an article taking the city's citizens to task for hanging their bedding in the middle of the sidewalk..."in violation of a regulation adopted on April 1, 2002. Such a situation greatly affected the whole image of the city as an international metropolis, said Ge Fuping, an official with the [Shanghai Public Sanitation] bureau."

Which is funny because the oddly tender moment (oh, the trust, to hang your wedding comforter out in the street!) of encountering private laundry while traversing public space is one of the things that we foreigners find endearing about Shanghai...