tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6885827022407728312024-03-14T02:17:13.160+08:00Foreigner's Cabinet of Chinese Curiosities: the marvelous inside the mundane in ShanghaiChristina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.comBlogger72125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-36187213502653007652017-05-08T15:39:00.001+08:002017-05-08T15:39:44.859+08:00Drawer #7.7: Bamboo Scaffolding<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I had this very clear vision the other day of something new I wanted to make. It was going to be beautiful, a quality that I’ve been yearning for in my work. I pictured a yards-long drawing of the bamboo construction scaffolding used here, its sheath of green screen drawn line by line onto the pages of the chunky accordion-folded albums that I'm always coveting at the Traditional Chinese Painting stores. I started some experiments with green ink pens & then, the clear vision got deeply murky.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The murkiness got me to thinking of this drawer, #7.7, and the myriad times over the past 12 years that I have addressed myself to the scaffolding. What is it about the scaffolding that in all those myriad times I have yet to capture in a such way as to put the subject to rest? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If you’ve been to Shanghai or to Hong Kong or to any Chinese city at all, then you know what it is I’m going on about. Every visitor notices it: construction scaffolding made not of steel but of tapering, not-so-straight bamboo poles, lashed together with either wire or the fibrous flat cord, really a gigantically long twisty tie, in compartment 2 of this drawer. In Shanghai, the scaffolding goes up 5 or 6 stories, mainly around existing structures, for restoration projects. But in HK, to this day, even skyscrapers get bamboo’d: in effect, an eighty-story-tall basket. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The very first thing I built in Shanghai: miniature scaffolding around all the furniture in our sitting room (not so great for He-Whom-I'm-Trailing after a long day at his first overwhelming welcome-to-China job.) The sticks were real bamboo, made by someone’s hand, split & split & split from thick bamboo poles into the thin rods used for the bars of bird cages. I bought them in large bundles, much to the bemusement of the lady at the bird and insect market, then tied them together (with the help of half a dozen art students from Shanghai University) with the ubiquitous pink string that was then & still remains a local favorite material of mine. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo credit: Qilai Shen</span></td></tr>
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The images from that install eventually became the windows/lightboxes of the pavilion in the center of the first room of an 8-room installation at <a href="http://www.laumeiersculpturepark.org/" target="_blank">Laumeier Sculpture Park</a> in St Louis. The poor curator! He’d invited me to do the show on the basis of the minimalist sculptural installations that I made pre-China & instead, he got an entire Shanghai Circus event…</div>
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Emerging from under & behind the Pavilion was a red pipe also clad in scaffolding, a miniaturization of actual building works projects I'd glimpsed on a train trip, massive pipes making crazy curves as they traversed canals & culverts…</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo credit: Britt Bailey, 2005<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: small;">And, in another room, the dismantled sitting room scaffolding, just hanging about…</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo credit: Britt Bailey, 2005</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: small;">With few opportunities for installation work in SH and the massive cost & logistics of shipping work back to the States, I resorted to a foldaway site: the pop-up book. A slightly nutty idea for me to pursue, given my preternatural inability to measure but, during a residency at the Doulun Museum, I managed to complete 6 pop-ups. Which didn’t go a long way towards filling the museum’s massive exhibition space at the end of the residency </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: small;">with a show.</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: small;"> I suddenly had a wild urge to collaborate with the scaffold builders.</span></div>
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One look at my model and the scaffolding crew leader (on the left holding the model) saw right away all the deliberate choices that I couldn't get the museum staff to explain. Through our shared experience as makers, without a common spoken language between us, the crew & I understood each other perfectly clearly. It was so exhilarating [especially as there were oh-so-many cultural misunderstandings that did not go well with that show…]</div>
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The bamboo poles were delivered to the back of the museum but since they were extremely long, the only way to get them up to the museum’s 6th floor was hand-over-hand up the outside wall:</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The crew brought shiny wire for binding but understood right away when I asked for “the other material” & then up they went…twisting the ties until the ends spiraled into pigtails…</span></div>
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To the visitor ascending the stairs into the the glass atrium, the space appeared to be under construction (like everything everywhere) but once he or she entered the structure, it slowly revealed itself to be built according to the logic of Chinese Gardens, with the meandering zig zag paths that cannot be traced by demons & the framing devices of the Gardens’ windows. The pop-ups were made of paper cut from magazines about treasured historical examples of calligraphy and were set into hinged frames within the bamboo structure. Of course, there was a pop-up scaffold.<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When I finally found a studio space of my own, miniature scaffolding continued apace, now in gridded red line structures (reed from IKEA of all places) that actually got the scaffolding "wrong". For these were dimension grids, where the scaffolding in fact surrounds either a volume (an old building) or a void (a building coming up.) A visiting sculptor/friend cleverly recognized that the grids could be built so as to collapse on to themselves, saving me from a shipping disaster…(Blessings on you, <a href="https://redballproject.com/" target="_blank">redballproject</a>.) </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Installation at<a href="http://www.brunodavidgallery.com/" target="_blank"> Bruno David Gallery</a>, St Louis, MO, 2011. Photo credit: Bruno David</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I tuned into the sheathing & its particular shade of green when <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_World" target="_blank">Great World</a> (Da Shi Jie </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">大世界</span>) was suddenly clad for restoration. A structure of telescoping tiers, the building had most recently served as a children’s entertainment palace, reformed from its earlier function, pre-revolution, as an adult entertainment palace for bawdy foreigners. The sheathing enclosed Da Shi Jie, transforming its banal faux-neo-baroque architecture into a fabulous green-glowing wedding cake tower that I took for my own…</div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--BmCpyBLJGY/WQ_2mScDTBI/AAAAAAAACGw/O7QLRXC9ePMaoDGBy5t3EDly0Zt0wGAngCLcB/s1600/P1010525.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--BmCpyBLJGY/WQ_2mScDTBI/AAAAAAAACGw/O7QLRXC9ePMaoDGBy5t3EDly0Zt0wGAngCLcB/s320/P1010525.jpg" width="212" /></a><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rmNvXUs5qJc/WQ_2stpJ0WI/AAAAAAAACG4/BUwvjZG6AAAgSjsbJWInlOvNYfcUR1eQgCLcB/s1600/christina-shmigel_62%2Bcopy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rmNvXUs5qJc/WQ_2stpJ0WI/AAAAAAAACG4/BUwvjZG6AAAgSjsbJWInlOvNYfcUR1eQgCLcB/s320/christina-shmigel_62%2Bcopy.JPG" width="162" /></a></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Installation at <a href="http://www.brunodavidgallery.com/" target="_blank">Bruno David Galler</a>y, 2011 Photo credit: Bruno David</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small; text-align: center;">And then there was stripey scaffolding: what about that! Red & white…</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Collection of M-Restaurant, Shanghai, China; currently on view at <a href="http://www.m-restaurantgroup.com/glam/" target="_blank">Glam</a></td></tr>
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And diagonal yellow & black striping:</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-S6B-I_sB4Lw/WQ_4_12nw5I/AAAAAAAACHQ/FdcqDrqAA8obVhE6Hacg8ifjV5sMMu5NgCLcB/s1600/chrstina_shmigel_72.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-S6B-I_sB4Lw/WQ_4_12nw5I/AAAAAAAACHQ/FdcqDrqAA8obVhE6Hacg8ifjV5sMMu5NgCLcB/s640/chrstina_shmigel_72.jpg" width="508" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">On view at the <a href="http://ukrainianmuseum.org/" target="_blank">Ukrainian Museum</a>, NYC until Sept 2017. Photo credit: Bruno David</td></tr>
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And eventually, in another search for an accessible/mobile site…<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Vd3rDtoi4Do/WQ_5RIQCELI/AAAAAAAACHU/WNUKvLjpEU01qIGsQrkTI9XoVv7KYm5jQCLcB/s1600/P1030355%2Bcopy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Vd3rDtoi4Do/WQ_5RIQCELI/AAAAAAAACHU/WNUKvLjpEU01qIGsQrkTI9XoVv7KYm5jQCLcB/s400/P1030355%2Bcopy.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Opening at Frontline Gallery, Shanghai, 2011</td></tr>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Phew. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As I puzzled out loud to HWIT about this ineluctably attraction of mine, he said, “Well, it’s work-in-progress, when that stuff is up.” And that got it exactly right in my head: it’s a fixed moment of flux! It’s a signifier of <i>becoming</i>, not the thing, completed, contained, that it’s going to be, or that it was, but rather a sign that something is coming into being. And it is also a thing in itself, a form & a volume, but one that is transient, ephemeral, a thing that will eventually reduce down to a pile of lines & a heap of netting. It’s a thing that contains a void that eventually itself gets voided. A form for the fleeting nature of things-coming-into-being; the mutability of reality made manifest. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span>Back to the drawing board.</div>
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(Thanks, dear reader, for your visit!)</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Drawer #7.7 From top: Compartments 1, 2 & 4: painted bamboo, pink string; 3. Green twisty tie material used to assemble full-size scaffolding. Photo credit: Bruno David</td></tr>
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<br />Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-61398311352763089792017-04-26T14:09:00.003+08:002017-04-27T08:11:56.403+08:00Native Repair #2: WheelsThere's a truism that runs something along the lines that once you've been an ex-pat for over 10 years, you can't go "home." I doubt that He-Whom-I'm-Trailing & I have acculturated here in any way that would make "home" tricky for us but I do occasionally ponder what it is from this China life that I'll some day miss. Like this situation today...<br />
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Having done a heroic job thru twelve years of hard riding & living outdoors, the foot pedal on Little Pink, my trusty bicycle, finally gave out. From anywhere that I've lived in the States - NYC, NC, StL - just finding the local bike guy would be an issue but here, he's just a 5 min ride away, over in what a Chinese Gov't friend of ours designates as a "not-so-well organized" neighborhood, adjacent to our organized (& infinitely duller) one.<br />
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I can be count on finding his little caravan cart of a repair shop parked just past the entrance gate to the "not-so-well organized" wet market. Everything he needs is all there: cart festooned with #type-in-the-wild electrical tape graphics; giant umbrella to protect him from the elements; low wooden stool, whacked together from wood scraps, for work close to the ground; sling-back lounge chair for between customers.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3Lo8BkkNE1o/WQA0hWauGnI/AAAAAAAACDI/kJq1fdBpcrEfYBWKNHlUZ481BCVbZ0CGwCLcB/s1600/IMG_1125.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3Lo8BkkNE1o/WQA0hWauGnI/AAAAAAAACDI/kJq1fdBpcrEfYBWKNHlUZ481BCVbZ0CGwCLcB/s640/IMG_1125.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Used to be, first few times he did things for me, he was kind of gruff. But today, he greets me with a big grin of familiarity & quits assembling a brand-new-outa-the-box fluro orange bike to see what it is I need. <br />
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Yup, we agree, pedal's broken. Digging around in the cart of all repair wares, uhn, there's a pedal but none to match. Do I care? I do not. Old pedal comes off, new pedal goes on. No getting him to change the other one because it's not broken [yet.] Transaction time: under 10 mins. Cost: 10 Kuai...that's maybe USD1.50. Which tells me that I now have <i>lao pengyou/</i>old friend status as the first time I came, he charged me 2 kuai just to put air in my tires.<br />
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I love doing business with the bike repair guy: I love the smallness of scale of the set-up, of the interaction, a scale you hardly find Stateside anymore. I'll definitely miss that.<br />
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And, speaking of rides, these rather rarely-seen-but-much-delighted-in strollers...<br />
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Click <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/07/things-that-dont-fit-10-little-more-pink.html" target="_blank">here</a> for earlier adventures with Little Pink...</div>
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<br />Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-51122804910610987402016-10-25T14:52:00.000+08:002016-10-25T14:52:14.355+08:00Drawer #3.1: Units of Air Conditioning<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Back in June, just before I left for the States & the blog went into radio silence, we moved out of our Shanghai lane house, where, somehow, 10 years had passed by. And we moved into an apartment in the “small” (pop 3 million) Chinese city of Kunshan. Which is to say, we moved into my idea of a nightmare: a classic Chinese tower block compound in the [empty] suburbs.</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">You may remember this from <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/08/drawer-36-white-tile-buildings-with.html" target="_blank">Drawer 3.6</a>, the one about White Tile Buildings with Blue Glass Windows: me, in my first week of Shanghai living, in a taxi on the elevated highway, with the weather a simulacra of the atmosphere of Venus, in a state of near-suicidal despair at the prospect of living amidst the dismal grimy brutalist architecture of this ugly place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">And now, the view from our new flat:</span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-etkICAzn3LY/WA3MrjPUbNI/AAAAAAAAB_0/g1SQNZ2FAyQeQaUyqm8tTWyEMSuvTNpyACLcB/s1600/IMG_0935.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-etkICAzn3LY/WA3MrjPUbNI/AAAAAAAAB_0/g1SQNZ2FAyQeQaUyqm8tTWyEMSuvTNpyACLcB/s400/IMG_0935.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">That, you may well ask, is a sports arena/indoor stadium/theater/cinema/bowling alley complex. It's where the World Badminton Championships take place. It also contains a Starbucks. F</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">or which I am deeply grateful. Tell me, why would an architect, with such a choice commission, design </span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">something in metal that so closely resembles dated & dirty white tile?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">As for today’s drawer, the companion to <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/08/drawer-36-white-tile-buildings-with.html" target="_blank">#3.6</a>, well, because if brutalist bathroom tile buildings are #1 for ugliness, a/c units helter skelter over every face & nook & cranny of brutalist buildings are #2.</span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FQc3WHTEuAw/WA7SXhkRehI/AAAAAAAACAg/oHJ6nNcoN7MOpYkFFgu9-XMk4_RV44ftgCLcB/s1600/IMG_1642.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="336" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FQc3WHTEuAw/WA7SXhkRehI/AAAAAAAACAg/oHJ6nNcoN7MOpYkFFgu9-XMk4_RV44ftgCLcB/s400/IMG_1642.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">According to a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/world/asia/india-air-conditioning.html?_r=0" target="_blank">recent article in NYTimes</a>: “<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; color: #323333;">During the 1990's, 5 percent of urban residents in China owned air-conditioners. A decade later, it was nearly 100 percent.</span>” Two decades later, even the pigeons have a/c:</span></div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3QnFfrZuOqI/WA3OIJ8W-tI/AAAAAAAACAA/LDIccrjCdegqatNCKpIxgx76t509OtHDgCLcB/s1600/P1000257.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3QnFfrZuOqI/WA3OIJ8W-tI/AAAAAAAACAA/LDIccrjCdegqatNCKpIxgx76t509OtHDgCLcB/s400/P1000257.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: xx-small;">Since</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: xx-small;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: xx-small;">the tower blocks</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: xx-small;"> hardly ever have central cooling systems, each occupant solves the question of where to put their personal a/c unit in their own inimitable way.</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-T5QtbiLMtd4/WA7a13VUxmI/AAAAAAAACA8/-u036PeyBNI6cyFdnelfxHart2c186GGACLcB/s1600/P1050818.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-T5QtbiLMtd4/WA7a13VUxmI/AAAAAAAACA8/-u036PeyBNI6cyFdnelfxHart2c186GGACLcB/s400/P1050818.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">To start,</span></span><span style="text-align: center;"> </span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">you need a hole. Right hru the concrete facade of your building. </span></span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">No safety code or building inspector need be involved; only one of the hole driller dudes. </span></span><span style="text-align: center;">They can generally be found in posses</span><span style="text-align: center;"> on busy intersections near new construction,</span><span style="text-align: center;"> </span><span style="text-align: center;">smoking Double Happiness or Zhonghua cigarettes, </span><span style="text-align: center;">hanging on electric bikes </span><span style="text-align: center;">with </span><span style="text-align: center;">a wire bin on the back full up with giganto-size</span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";"> hole saw bits. </span></span><span style="text-align: center;">I think of these guys as kin to Harry Tuttle, the guerrilla plumber in </span><span style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/" target="_blank">Brazil</a></span><span style="text-align: center;">. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="text-align: center;">Once you've got a hole thru which to run the lines between in the interior unit & the compressor outside, you call the a/c installer guy; if he's lucky, there's a ledge or even a pre-built a/c shelf...</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hFVsAOuaoos/WA7nxbvY5dI/AAAAAAAACBY/vZ_7admb60YukwjoznKUST0cV9r3EPPuACLcB/s1600/IMG_1005.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hFVsAOuaoos/WA7nxbvY5dI/AAAAAAAACBY/vZ_7admb60YukwjoznKUST0cV9r3EPPuACLcB/s400/IMG_1005.JPG" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">but often enough he’s just launching himself out over space at a terrifying angle to secure an L-bracket to the facade. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4AzJhtqH4Nc/WA7mfJpwSMI/AAAAAAAACBQ/aaZbIcAElmEt3mGrMQeNmhOUhtw4yiQtgCLcB/s1600/IMG_1644.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="398" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4AzJhtqH4Nc/WA7mfJpwSMI/AAAAAAAACBQ/aaZbIcAElmEt3mGrMQeNmhOUhtw4yiQtgCLcB/s400/IMG_1644.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: xx-small;">Once he has one bracket in, he in his</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: xx-small;"> faux-leather-soled slip-on shoes </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: xx-small;">steps out on to it, & sets in the second bracket further out of reach. No pics: I can’t even <i>watch</i> this procedure much less document it. </span></span><br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dl9LnBaViMs/WA7oVnHIttI/AAAAAAAACBc/UJ533Q6rF9sO09NmP6upwpSDrPanDP7AgCLcB/s1600/IMG_0560.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dl9LnBaViMs/WA7oVnHIttI/AAAAAAAACBc/UJ533Q6rF9sO09NmP6upwpSDrPanDP7AgCLcB/s400/IMG_0560.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Once it’s all in place, you'll have to insist that the hole, thru which you can see daylight, be filled to keep the weather out. He'll look at you like you are a real pain & then he'll go out to the corner hardware store for a can of spray foam. Which he'll squirt into the hole until foam oozes out of the wall into your bedroom. He is not interested in the aesthetics of the problem.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nssQdb_UtfE/WA7oiZzLtvI/AAAAAAAACBg/pUO8ZpfD3r0sE-z65EFIvZ4s2EBevD-vACLcB/s1600/IMG_5722.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nssQdb_UtfE/WA7oiZzLtvI/AAAAAAAACBg/pUO8ZpfD3r0sE-z65EFIvZ4s2EBevD-vACLcB/s400/IMG_5722.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">But I digress. What it means is that all those randomly installed units absolutely litter the building facades adding an amazing amount of visual chaos to the city scape.</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yL7g9dFe5jA/WA7rflEsRTI/AAAAAAAACB4/9fKAnKw6ZQYFEqXN2NTdwmseG0jFq4EEACLcB/s1600/IMG_2792_1%2B-%2BVersion%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yL7g9dFe5jA/WA7rflEsRTI/AAAAAAAACB4/9fKAnKw6ZQYFEqXN2NTdwmseG0jFq4EEACLcB/s400/IMG_2792_1%2B-%2BVersion%2B2.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">But apparently it wasn’t just my pet peeve. When the city began gearing up for the World Expo in 2010, its “Better City Better Life” campaign (apparently) decreed that all the a/cs on any building that might be in an any area that a visitor might pass through en route to the Expo needed to be hidden behind a screen. </span></div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sVlOV4_YzUs/WA3PsDVmTcI/AAAAAAAACAM/k3DUySRWqWU4PnQOyNqqpck6h483Tkn9wCLcB/s1600/IMG_1047.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="font-family: -webkit-standard; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sVlOV4_YzUs/WA3PsDVmTcI/AAAAAAAACAM/k3DUySRWqWU4PnQOyNqqpck6h483Tkn9wCLcB/s400/IMG_1047.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Think about this. In 2010, it was estimated that there were 22 million people living in SH. In the lane house across from us, there were 4 adults & plus at certain times 2 children. In 2006, they had 4 a/c units; I watched them put in at least 2 more. People to a/cs: 1:1 ratio. </span></div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WTP5c5kSyDE/WA3PXQjj-5I/AAAAAAAACAI/a5FSwCgnX5sp6ZFijlJ_b0BH39gxlIEqACLcB/s1600/IMG_2629.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WTP5c5kSyDE/WA3PXQjj-5I/AAAAAAAACAI/a5FSwCgnX5sp6ZFijlJ_b0BH39gxlIEqACLcB/s400/IMG_2629.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">But they’re middle class so let's say only 75% of the population was represented by an a/c: that’s still 16,500,000 units to cover. Even if they did only 50% of those, the logistics boggle the mind. Inventorying them all, hiring who knows how many thousands of fab shops (as ubiquitous here as hair salons & massage joints) to make and installing them all…. And what’s more they even<i> individualized</i> designs & painted them to suit the building...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And it worked! It made a HUGE difference to the city’s appearance: like a kid with brutal acne suddenly having normal skin. To say beautiful would be overstating the effect.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But back to our view. Redeemed by night:</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Drawer #3.1: From top: Box 1, 3 & 4: Cardboard, milk paint, glass, straws; Box 2: Empty tin for Traditional Chinese Medicine Photo credit for drawer: Bruno David; all others, Christina Shmigel</td></tr>
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<br />Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-36624895366911572062016-02-13T02:54:00.000+08:002016-02-13T03:11:41.027+08:00Drawer 4.3: Wish You Happy Year of the Monkey!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: white;">Well, here we go: another China year for us. We've been working our way thru the 12 year cycle of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_zodiac" style="color: #9202ff; font-family: 'times new roman', times, freeserif, serif; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #9202ff; font-family: "times new roman" , "times" , "freeserif" , serif; text-decoration: none;">Shengxiao</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #9202ff; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 20px; text-decoration: none;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #9202ff; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">(</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span lang="zh" xml:lang="zh">生肖</span></span></span></a>), the Chinese zodiac<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444242; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 20px;">.</span> Our first Chinese New Year in Shanghai we met the Rooster...which means...omg!...we arrived in a Monkey year! We thought we'd stay 2 years, maybe 3 & here we are full cycle! </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Those of you who are <a href="http://www.travelchinaguide.com/intro/social_customs/zodiac/monkey.htm" target="_blank">Monkeys</a>...born in 1932, 44, 56, 68, 80, 92, 2004<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "geneva" , sans-serif; text-align: justify;">...</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-align: justify;">might want to </span>visit <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/02/drawer-14-chinese-zodiac-animals.html" target="_blank">Drawer #1.4</a> to catch up on protecting yourself in your <em style="color: #444242; font-family: garamond, 'new york', times, serif;"><a href="http://www.yourchineseastrology.com/zodiac/benmingnian.htm" target="_blank">ben ming nian</a></em><span style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://www.yourchineseastrology.com/zodiac/benmingnian.htm" target="_blank"><span style="color: #444242; font-family: "garamond" , "new york" , "times" , serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "new york" , "times" , serif;">(</span></a><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "new york" , "times" , serif;"><a href="http://www.yourchineseastrology.com/zodiac/benmingnian.htm" target="_blank">本命年)</a>, your zodiac year. It's all about Red Underwear. Don't say I didn't warn you.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">I've been in North Carolina all of January with my head happily down at a <a href="http://penland.org/programs/special_programs.html" target="_blank">Winter Residency</a> at the <a href="http://penland.org/" target="_blank">Penland School of Crafts.</a> I was there, at the invitation of Kathryn Gremley, Penland's Gallery Director, (super big thanks, Kathryn!) to work on an installation for an interesting wedge of outdoor space created by the addition of a new gallery building. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">But I also had fun with the yards & yards of the red fabric called Dong Bei Large Flower Cloth I laid it out as part of my April installation at the <a href="http://hillyer art center" target="_blank">Hillyer Art Space</a> in D.C. Dong Bei is a province in Northwest China (though in Chinese that's Westnorth.) but the fabric is favored all over China. By color - red is for happiness - & imagery - the cloth is associated with domesticity & marriage; it's traditionally used for marriage bed duvets (and to decorate Dong Bei restaurants in Shanghai.) Older Chinese women have a way of putting patterns together that we'd consider mismatched but utterly sings out to me (though I'm too shy to shoot the pics...) I gave it a try, mixing four different versions of the Dong Bei cloth - some vintage, some contemporary. I learned a lot about pattern and color values but whether it's going to be an audacious addition to the show or an over-the-top failure is yet to be seen...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">A few weeks ago He-Whom-I'm-Trailing came home to a pink notice on our front door. Once we got it translated, it forbid the use of fireworks inside the city limits. We were skeptical that this would dampen the show but, indeed, word on the street from Shanghai is that this year there really were no fireworks inside the city limits. I guess that's the safe & prudent way to go but I'm sure glad we were there for the glory days as it gobsmacked us every time...click<a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/02/things-that-dont-fit-in-drawer-4-big.html" target="_blank"> here</a> for a minute's worth of video of what used to go on for hours & hours...So, this drawer, with its images taken from the spent firework castings that would land on our balcony, is in honor of all that thrilling firepower. Thank you for looking thru the Cabinet with me & Wish You a Happy Year of the Monkey!</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Drawer #4.3: from the top </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">1. The Chinese Character for Firecracker & a snarl of dragony-looking green tape </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">2. A dragon, the highest animal in Chinese mythology, symbolic of males; with a sticker offering services to those migrants in need of a residency permit </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">3. A <i>fenghuang</i> a mythological bird, part phoenix, part peacock, part other things, symbolic of the females; w/ "happy clouds." </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">4. Another <i>fenghuang,</i> more happy clouds, all images taken from the decorative wrappers of firecrackers. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Photo credits: Full drawer, Bruno David; all others, Christina Shmigel</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #eeeeee;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: small;">For more Chinese New Year items, check out </span><span style="color: #444242; font-family: "times new roman" , "times" , "freeserif" , serif; font-size: small; text-align: start;"><a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/02/drawer-14-chinese-zodiac-animals.html" target="_blank">Drawer #1.4: Chinese Zodiac Animals</a>;</span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;"> <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2014/03/drawer-22-slowly-trotting-in-with-year.html" target="_blank">Drawer #2.2</a>, <span style="color: #444242; font-family: "times new roman" , "times" , "freeserif" , serif; text-align: start;"><a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/02/things-that-dont-fit-in-drawer-4-big.html" target="_blank">Things That Don't Fit in a Drawer #4</a>, </span></span><span style="color: #444242; font-family: "times new roman" , "times" , "freeserif" , serif; text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/02/things-that-dont-fit-in-drawer-3-sounds.html" target="_blank">Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer #3</a></span></span></span></span></td></tr>
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Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-69579439611280495642015-12-08T13:53:00.000+08:002015-12-09T17:17:53.777+08:00Drawer # 6.6 : Auspicious Phone Numbers <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">These days we pre-pay minutes by plugging our phone numbers into a credit card processing type of widget at our local convenience store. </span>But it used to be that we needed to buy phone cards and so we’d head to the shops festooned with hand-painted lists of phone numbers. My preferred shop was not much more than a hole in the wall, its assortment of local & international (IP) <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2015/10/things-that-dont-fit-in-drawer-12-to.html" target="_blank">phone cards</a> displayed in a glass case, out front, on the sidewalk. The phone cards listed long strings of numbers, all of which had to be entered into the phone, with various press 1’s & press 2’s, instructions all in chinese. I relied heavily on the kindness of the phone card seller to get me thru this task; while he plugged away on my phone, I pondered the aesthetics of the painted lists.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Across the street from my shop was another, also covered in phone number paintings and a street or two further away was “phone number street,” its every facade bedecked in phone number paintings:</span> long lists of cell phone numbers, the occasional number crossed out or checked, <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">always drawn by brush in red paint with blue, sometimes black, embellishment,</span> always arranged schematically in rows & columns in accordance with some established convention. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Besides phone card sales, the business of these shops was a bit of a mystery to me. </span>Why you would buy your phone number there rather than at one of the two phone companies, I didn’t know. Why were only one or two numbers crossed out or checked? Who actually knew what those few marks recorded: the signs never changed over time, no additional checks or crossings out from one visit to the next. And why would you make 150 0085 8588 your entryway number? (Though, admittedly, it's rather magical with its rhymes & symmetries.)</span></div>
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I never thought to ask; I just worked up an explanation to suit myself. Tying the Chinese penchant for numerology to the signs’ wealth of auspicious 8's & 9’s & 5’s and dearth of <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/04/drawer-44-emptiness.html">foreboding 4’s</a> - go ahead, count ‘em - I concluded that they must be… Auspicious Phone Numbers! Since I never asked, no one told me different: Auspicious Phone Number Paintings they were & shall remain. Sometimes the imaginative flight is so much more satisfying than the plain truth. <br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;">I studied the patterns & the scripts endlessly, admired the fluidity of the vernacular </span><a href="http://www.jasper-johns.org/0-9.jsp" style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif; font-size: 18px;" target="_blank">Jasper Johns’</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: medium;"> brushwork, pondered their organizational systems. The signs as paintings were a wonder to me, each individual sign on the verge of revealing something of its painter’s character. But what really sent me was what the paintings did to disorient the spaces they occupied. A different artist than me, one of greater energy & audacity perhaps, might have dismantled the best display (the one where they also made keys?) & simply re-installed it somewhere to great acclaim. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Alas, not being that artist, I, instead, shrunk those spaces into the drawers of the cabinet. And then later, expanded them again, into glass vitrines. By virtue of which mimicry, I came to admire the signmakers yet more.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px;">"T<a href="http://issuu.com/brunodavidgallery/docs/christina-shmigel_catalog_2011_v2_issuu" target="_blank">he View in Fragments: Auspicious Numbers</a>" Cardboard, milk paint, glass vitrine, 13.5 x 14.25 x 9" Collection of<br />
M-Restaurant Group, Shanghai. On view at <a href="http://www.m-restaurantgroup.com/glam/m-event-detail/events/m-restaurant-group-ups-the-glam-factor-on-the-bund.826.html" target="_blank">Glam, Shanghai.</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The newly arrived often say to me how much change I must have seen in SH in my time here. Now <i>I</i> get the dazed look that I saw on the faces of the “old china hands" to whom I had made the comment on <i>my </i>arrival. The changes have been huge, of course, but also, so continuous, so incremental that one can be hard pressed to quantify them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Back when my archiving began, locals, Chinese and foreigners alike, easily recognized the contents of the drawers and laughed at their nostalgic familiarity. Now, ten years later, there are things in the drawers that the newbies can’t recognize because those things don’t exist in the Shanghai anymore. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The auspicious phone number shops are now all gone.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Before</b><b>:</b> My IP man.* (see below.) <b>After: </b>The Q<b> </b>that replaced the auspicious numbers shop. </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I don’t know what my phone seller thinks of having moved in from the curb to the antiseptic, climate-controlled environment of the Q. Probably he’s glad to be part of the great Chinese accomplishment of pulling millions out of poverty into, at the very least, a modest middle class-ness. There’s no arguing with that. But me, I miss the liveliness of the street, the paintings with their telling scripts, the quirky spaces that evolved out of their owners’ needs & ingenuity, all those small moments of individual expression.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; text-align: center;">A Chinese friend describes spaces as "organized' & "not so organized." On the left, the corner of the fruit & phone card sellers on Shan Yin Lu back in the days of "not so organized"; on the right, same corner post-organizing. Better or worse?<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-align: justify;">In the end, I don’t think my miniature versions really capture much of what I loved about the Auspicious Phone Number shops. It turned out that the dizzying spatial effect of the number paintings requires a full-bodied scale and that the combination of chaos & order that is the street eluded me. What’s left in the drawers is maybe like the transcription of a lost language as rendered by the last remaining non-native speaker but, if only for me, it gives a bit of immortality to the anonymous sign painters & display constructors, recording & preserving just a trace of the endeavors that once gave me so much to admire.</span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kz23FUuiqS8/VmZmS0K9KxI/AAAAAAAAB9A/IAIfcNpWqk4/s1600/AusNumbers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="456" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kz23FUuiqS8/VmZmS0K9KxI/AAAAAAAAB9A/IAIfcNpWqk4/s640/AusNumbers.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>*</b>Re the IP man:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> <span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Inside the shop , maybe 5x7', were sodas for sale & a tiny side room in which the man's wife cooked. Their little boy sat on a small chair inside the shop at tiny card table that served as his desk & their dining table. A ladder led from the tiny room up to a sleeping space. We were almost the only foreigners in the 'hood then: </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">the man, </span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">off to somewhere on his electric bike,</span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> gleefully waved if he buzzed by me like he'd spotted a favorite</span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> stray cat. </span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">One day, just back from the States, I found the small shop transformed into a Q, a chain convenience store. When I went in & congratulated the IP man, he didn't much respond. Apparently, there's still some market for phone cards, as his old case is now just inside the doorway (you can see the IP behind the bike wheel in the photo.) The pitched roof above the Q sign is the space that was the bedroom for the old shop; perhaps it still is...</span></div>
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From the top: 1. Collection of IP cards for international calling 2-4. Variations on a theme...</div>
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Photo credits: Vitrine & full drawer: Bruno David; all others are mine. </div>
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<span style="text-align: left;">Related posts: <a href="http://binetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2015/10/things-that-dont-fit-in-drawer-12-to.html" target="_blank">Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer #12 </a>; <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/08/drawer-36-white-tile-buildings-with.html" target="_blank">Drawer #3.3: White Tile Buildings</a></span></div>
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Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-25321533951300998592015-11-24T16:51:00.000+08:002015-11-24T16:51:57.309+08:00Drawer #7.3: Mop Knobs Tutorial<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So here’s how it goes if you are me: you’re planning just a quick simple post - a visual ode to the humble stripy mop - </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">sparked by something you’ve heard on the “radio,” (<b>1</b>) which leads you to thinking of a certain Chinese artist’s Mop</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">(<b>2</b>) and when you look him up, you find his planning drawing (<b>3</b>) which leads you to wondering: exactly how are those mop knobs</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">made anyway? (<b>4</b>) which leads to taking one apart (<b>5</b>, <b>6</b>, <b>7</b>) and which then - you can’t very well leave it undone, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">can </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">you -</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">is harder to reassemble than expected…and so on until the afternoon is done & the post is not.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">1. The spark, a story from Adam Gopnik <a href="http://ing.org/program/adam-gopnik-practicing-doubt-redrawing-faith/transcript/8093" target="_blank">as told to On Being's Krista Tippett:</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>J</i></span></span><i style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">ohn Updike was once asked why — for an ad, I think, like a whiskey ad or some crazy thing — </i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="color: #232323;">why are we here? Why do we live? </i></span></span><i style="color: #232323; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sounds like a ridiculous question, but he had an instant answer for it. He said, “We’re here to give praise.” </span></i><i style="color: #232323; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We’re here to give praise.</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #232323;">2. </span><span style="color: #232323;"> </span><i>Black Broom, </i>2000, by </span></span></span><a href="http://www.designboom.com/contemporary/chenzhen3.html" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">Chen Zhen</a>, a <span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #232323;">Chinese artist from the 90's, drawn to the same sorts of humble objects that I love </span></span></span><span style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">- street chairs, mops, t-shirts - but who infused them with great scale & explosive energy, creating </span><span style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #232323;">exuberant, life-affirming </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/arts/international/chen-zhen-shanghai-remembers-a-native-son-with-art-retrospective.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">installations</span></a><span style="color: #232323;">…and sadly, passed away too young.</span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chen Zhen images via <a href="http://www.designboom.com/contemporary/chenzhen3.html" target="_blank">design boom</a></td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">3. Chen Zhen’s drawing for <i>Black Broom</i> depicting how the mop “strings,” attached at the top in the direction of the </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">mop handle, are flipped over - like a chignon! - to form the mop knob.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">4. But that, as it turns out, is not how the real mop is constructed.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">5. Mop dissection shows that the strips of stripy t-shirt material are actually laid in <i>both</i> directions from the end of the handle. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s the strips laid <i>along </i>the handle that make the mop full & dense; use Chen Zhen’s drawing as a guide, you end up with a</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> v</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">ery stingy mop.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">6. A thick band of an alternate fabric, folded on itself & wrapped around the intersection of the two sets of strips, is nailed in four places into the pole. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">This is the part where you wonder what tools the maker had at hand: it’s a right pain getting that cruddy nail to pierce thru all those t-shirts layers </span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">& then it all bounces back as there’s no hard resist on the opposite side of the handle…</span></div>
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<span style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">7. And then, </span>stripy<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> strips in place, you flip, and voilá, the chignon/knob! Wrapped twice around with…ha! aluminum wire! So there’s no rust! </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">(</span><i style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">You</i><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> are probably bored to tears by now, but </span><i style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">me</i><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">, I am so pleased to discover this detail…)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The great John McPhee, in his wonderful essay, <i><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/14/omission" target="_blank">Writing By Omission</a></i>, makes the argument for putting less than the writer knows into an essay, </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">leaving more “white space” for you, the reader. I’m here to say that I did leave a few things out - the man</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">occupying a street corner, all his mop-making supplies laid out on the ground beside him </span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">(but you can read about him <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.ae/2013/02/drawer-15-stripey-mops.html" target="_blank">here</a>), and the university student w a mop on his head (who is <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.ae/2013/03/drawer-67-opera-mops.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lOENdmW9OxM/VlQYEwsvUAI/AAAAAAAAB6A/_shkn9J4RzY/s1600/christina-shmigel_48o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="433" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lOENdmW9OxM/VlQYEwsvUAI/AAAAAAAAB6A/_shkn9J4RzY/s320/christina-shmigel_48o.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From "The View in Fragments," the Stripy Mops vitrine. Shmigel 2011, Mixed media, 8.5 x 12.5 x 6.25"<br />Photo: Bruno David</td></tr>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But what I still must tell is what I realized while writing: that I need to turn one of the knobs in the drawer on its side; </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">while the stripes & colors give me great pleasure, it’s the knobs that really make me love these mops. </span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Quietly handmade, crafted where so little here is, crafted just to the level they need to perform their function, t</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">herefore elegant but entirely humble. And ubiquitous:</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">in the entryway of every household goods store, & there must be at least one to a street, </span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">over stacks of bad-quality plastic bins & all matter of cheaply manufactured goods, there they are, reminding me of some</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">one individual maker, some “fellow traveler” out there working away by hand.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So there you have it. If you are me, your sense of life purpose is confirmed & renewed: </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">we are here to give praise.</span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yoPYg13NpHg/VlQUN8umsrI/AAAAAAAAB5s/Af21S9cU3LQ/s1600/Christina_Shmigel_drawer50.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yoPYg13NpHg/VlQUN8umsrI/AAAAAAAAB5s/Af21S9cU3LQ/s640/Christina_Shmigel_drawer50.jpg" width="174" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Bruno David</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Drawer 7.3 from top:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">1. M</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">op knob, bought in a cranky old neighborhood in the north of the city, at Qiqiuha’er Lu,</span></div>
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<span style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit;">irresistible<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> during lunch break </span></span><span style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">from an project planning meeting at an architecture studio</span><span style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">2. Medicine tin (see post on <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.ae/2013/10/drawer-81-traditional-chinese-medicine.html" target="_blank">TCM</a>) </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">3. The rest of the mop #1</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">4. Another </span>irresistible<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> mop due to classic pink & orange color scheme, from a shop </span></span><span style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit;">on Jixiang Lu,</span></div>
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<span style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">just around the corner from home & a bit of found wire, one part I always pick up scrap metal bits on the street, one part <i>homage</i> to <a href="http://designobserver.com/article.php?id=38485" target="_blank">Henrik Drescher's <i>Nervenet</i></a></span></div>
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<span style="color: #232323; font-family: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Related: <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.ae/2013/02/drawer-15-stripey-mops.html" target="_blank">Drawer #1.5: Stripey Mop</a>; <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.ae/2013/03/drawer-67-opera-mops.html" target="_blank">Drawer #6.7: Opera Mops</a>; <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.ae/2013/10/drawer-81-traditional-chinese-medicine.html" target="_blank">Drawer #8.1: Traditional Chinese Medicine</a></span></div>
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Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-79593563742958905052015-11-10T12:55:00.000+08:002015-11-10T12:55:24.200+08:00Drawer #3.4: Our Founder or the Laoban Brand<div style="font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-family: helvetica;">A miasma, according to the dictionary, is "a poisonous atmosphere formerly thought to rise from swamps and putrid matter and cause disease" and today</span><span style="color: #404040; font-family: Arial; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span style="color: #404040; font-family: helvetica;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Shanghai is wrapped in one. </span><span style="font-family: helvetica; text-align: center;">My lungs hurt and my head is thick. I’m hacking like a local. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: helvetica; text-align: center;">I duck into the closest Family Mart to pick up some lozenges & there's the Ricola right next to the cash register. But no, I think, what I really need is “Golden Throat.” A box of which I find in the rack of chinese remedies across the way. I’m a little shocked, a little stricken even, to realize that my preferred brand of throat lozenge is a local one. It might be a sign that I have been here too long, that I’ve actually </span><i style="font-family: helvetica; text-align: center;">acculturated</i><span style="font-family: helvetica; text-align: center;">.</span></div>
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At least I think it’s the Golden Throat Dule Lozenge [sic] but the little portrait photo on the box is All Wrong. </div>
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Who’s this woman? What’s become of the black & white guy, the one with the comb-over, whom I've come to trust as the almighty reliever of cold misery? My suspicion-wrought-by-fakes meter kicks in: maybe it’s not Golden Throat at all but an imitation, an ineffective pirated version. But, on close inspection, the colors of the box, the [entirely un-soothing] moire striping of green & yellow & blue & white, seem exactly familiar & so I purchase the box. Inside the box, in the gold foil wrapper, the lozenges are in hermetically-sealed packaging rather than in their former sticky glob but the old soothing vapor is still the same & my hacking subsides…</div>
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Once, in my first months in Shanghai, I bought some vials of lord-knows-what for their stripy packaging & the grainy pokerface portrait that graced them. “Who’s this guy?” I asked a friend, thinking I’d learn of some cultural icon, some Chinese Betty Crocker or Quaker Oats guy. But no, after scrutinizing the portrait, the friend handed back the container & shrugged, “<i>Lao ban." (</i>老板.) </div>
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<i>Lao ban</i> is the Chinese word for boss and/or proprietor and also the title by which you address said person. It's a word you learn early on & use all the time: is the <i>laoban</i> here? <i>Laoban</i>, how much does this cost?<i> Lao </i>老 is the word for old but in an honorific sense: if you, in your transaction with the<i> laoban,</i> are the <i>lao pengyou</i> (老朋友/the old friend), you get a sweeter deal. </div>
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If it’s a woman boss, like our new Golden Throat chickie, she’s a <i>lao ban niang</i>/老板娘. Sometimes - it comes with another twinge of shock - I overhear our driver referring to<i> me</i> as the <i>lao ban niang</i>.<br />
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There’s a portrait of another <i>lao ban niang</i> on the awning of a restaurant that's on my bike route.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"> <b> Before </b> <b> After</b></td></tr>
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I think of her as the<i> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltb5RrKCb5Q" target="_blank">Lao ban niang</a></i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ltb5RrKCb5Q" target="_blank"> of Pig Sty Alley</a> before she let herself go, maybe when she was just beginning the training that transformed her into the ferocious Kung Fu Mistress of Steven Chow’s hilarious send-up, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373074/" target="_blank"><i>KungFu Hustle</i>.</a> </div>
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The force of that <i>lao ban niang</i>’s “lion’s roar” can bring her whole neighborhood to a stand still & she’s hell on her meek little husband. [Spoiler alert: she's secretly one of the Good Guys.]</div>
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My chest’s feeling a little clearer after a few dule (?) lozenges but my stomach’s a little queazy. Maybe it's just Pig Sty Alley on my mind, but what’s the Golden Throat <i>lao ban niang</i> done with the <i>lao ban</i>? A hostile takeover? Or something even more nefarious? And this, ladies & germs, is how the Cabinet turns into Historical Record: for soon maybe no one will even remember the <i>Lao ban</i> with his big forehead & his aviator glasses. Soon even I might think I made him up. But here he’ll be in the drawer of <i>Lao ban</i><span style="font-family: helvetica;"> Brands, preserved for however long plastic foil might last… (oh but why ever didn't I save the box?!?)</span><br />
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<b>Drawer 3.4 from the top: </b></div>
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1. You know, I still have no idea what these are: shreds of something jerky-like that tastes vaguely licorice-y, vaguely sweet, vaguely salty...The large character on black background is<i> tian </i>meaning heaven which these are not exactly. <i>Yo! Late breaking news! I just read/translated the characters for the very first time in 12 years (I am sooo slow!!) : wu hua guo gan.</i> Dry fig!! </div>
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2. Also no idea but it's here for the poetic look of the <i>laoban</i> with his classic chinese round eyeglass frames (known at our house as "PuYi style" after the ones worn by the last emperor of China.) The back of the box is graced with little "putti," a very un-Chinese image. Manufactured in Hong Kong so the characters are written in traditional Chinese characters, not the simplified ones used on the Mainland. </div>
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3. My man, Laoban Golden Throat, may he rest in peace. </div>
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4. Close-up of the portrait in #1: why would something that looks like a mug shot of the Cambodians done away by Pol-Pot seem like a enticing sales pitch? </div>
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<span style="text-align: center;">Photos: Full drawer, Bruno David; all others are mine.</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: center;"><b>Related posts: </b><a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/04/drawer-12-hell-meds-and-more-for-ghosts.html" target="_blank">Drawer 1.2: Hell Meds</a>, <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/10/drawer-81-traditional-chinese-medicine.html" target="_blank">Drawer 8.1: Traditional Chinese Meds</a></span></div>
Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-58117876931694187492015-10-26T12:47:00.001+08:002015-10-26T12:47:03.360+08:00Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer #12: To Give or Not to Give UpIn the days of old, when He-Whom-I'm-Trailing & I first lived in Shanghai, before Skype & pre- weChat, in order to make an international call, we needed something called an IP card.<br />
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The IP Card gave you a super long string of numbers that you had to punched in to your phone in order to access an international line. Somewhere in the course of the sequence of numbers, you inevitably screwed up which meant you had to punch that whole incredibly long set of numbers, sometimes several times, before you finally got a [crackly] line thru to the States. It could drive you nuts. If you needed help in [so-called] English, the IP card gave a number for that too. That help number gave you two options: you could "press 1" to hear...umm... something not quite intelligible... Or, you could "press 2 to give up."<br />
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Which also became the code for "having a really bad china day."<br />
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So, yesterday, on the street, I tried to decipher the meaning of this t-shirt ... If it's advertising a help line, then, painfully, the phone number is one digit too long.</div>
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You might as well "press 2."</div>
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Which is the gallows humor way around to the real point of this post: to say how proud I am of two "<a href="https://give.everydayhero.com/au/tim-56" target="_blank">Everyday Heroes</a>" who are putting their time in on Not Giving Up On Yourself: my nephew, <b>Tim Shmigel</b>, who raised $41,000AUS to date for <a href="http://lifeline.org.au/" target="_blank">Lifeline</a>, an Australian crisis support and suicide prevention organization, by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/everydaysteps" target="_blank">walking 6000 kilometers from the bottom to the top of Australia</a> (and then biking back down to Sydney!) and my brother, <b>Peter Shmigel</b>, who has just taken on the challenge of growing Lifeline's outreach by becoming its CEO. Amazing beings, both of them!</div>
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Tim's goal is to raise $60,000 so, if you've the inclination to help, here's the donation link: <a href="https://give.everydayhero.com/au/tim-56">https://give.everydayhero.com/au/tim-56</a> Any size contribution is deeply appreciated!</div>
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<br />Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-39445772875610929262015-10-18T22:00:00.000+08:002015-10-18T22:00:01.803+08:00Drawer #66: Pinwheels!<blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-version="5" style="background: #FFF; border-radius: 3px; border: 0; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 658px; padding: 0; width: -webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width: 99.375%; width: calc(100% - 2px);">
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A video posted by @cshmigel on <time datetime="2015-07-21T18:11:24+00:00" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;">Jul 21, 2015 at 11:11am PDT</time></div>
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The summer blew by without blogging but the Cabinet itself, in <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2015/07/cabinet-on-move.html" target="_blank">its new NC home</a>, did not go unattended. After several years of only opening drawers digitally, it was interesting to re-install all the curiosities back in the drawers & give the whole project a good think.<br />
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There were several drawers that were empty when the cabinet shipped out in the late fall of 2010 and several small book projects that were meant to be in the drawers that never got done and a box of things in Shanghai that have been wanting to get into those empty drawers... & so that's what the next months are dedicated to as I get the Cabinet ready for a show opening April 1 in Washington D.C. at the <a href="http://hillyerartspace.org/" target="_blank">Hillyer Art Space.</a><br />
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Along the bottom of the cabinet are 3 large drawers.</div>
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And it occurred to me that one of them would be a good home for my <u>Shanghai Daily</u> book, seen below as installed in my first "chinese" show, <u>Chinese Garden for the Delights of Roaming Afar</u>, at <a href="http://www.laumeiersculpturepark.org/" target="_blank">Laumeier Sculpture Park</a> back in 2005.</div>
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The book is a collection of articles & photos extracted from the <a href="http://www.shanghaidaily.com/" target="_blank">Shanghai Daily</a>, the government-run English language newspaper, the newspaper scraps taped into the study notebooks used here by school children. In my first years here, I loved reading the <u>Shanghai Daily</u> with its strange facts about things like the percentage of cookware at the market found to be faulty & the obstructive dangers of <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/search/label/Shanghai%20Daily" target="_blank">laundry displays</a> & the doings of the Beijing Opera school (above) & moralizing editorials about visiting your elderly parents...I mean, with all that is going on the world these days, how can you <i>not</i> love "Chicken & Chatting prove keys for long life" <a href="http://www.shanghaidaily.com/metro/society/Chicken-and-chatting-prove-keys-to-long-life/shdaily.shtml" target="_blank">from today's edition</a>:</div>
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Gong Jingfa wipes the forehead of mother-in-law Li Suqing, 116, at the family home in the Pudong New Area yesterday. Li, who moved to the city with daughter Tian Yulan and Gong from northeast China’s Liaoning Province in 1975, is Shanghai’s oldest resident. She was named at a ceremony yesterday as one of the city’s “longevity stars.” The Chinese character on the wall means longevity. — Zhang Suoqing</div>
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I also loved the little notebooks I taped my selections into, with their retro-futuristic covers (as Shanghai's urban philosopher, <a href="http://smile.amazon.com/Shanghai-Future-Modernity-Anna-Greenspan/dp/0190206691/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444976205&sr=1-1&keywords=anna+greenspan+shanghai" target="_blank">Anna Greenspan,</a> might call them) and their interior pages gridded & lined in various ways appropriate to their subject.</div>
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Eventually, I bound all the little notebooks together into a satisfyingly chunky paperback.</div>
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Traditionally, Chinese books are soft-covered with stab bindings. Their profiles are relatively slim, perhaps 1/2- 3/4" thick, which means that a long text might require several volumes. These volumes are then encased in a hard board case wrapper that leaves the top & bottom edges exposed. An example with just a single volume:</div>
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My friend Petra Johnson has been making great use of this format to document her <a href="http://www.walk-with-me.org.uk/index.php" target="_blank">Walk With Me </a>project & she graciously took me along to the Chinese Art supply store on Fuzhou Lu where she has her cases made. Not only did they make a beautiful wrapper for the Shanghai Daily book - though it must have been mystifying why one would put a beautifully crafted case around such a mess of a book! - they also sold the kinds of papers I'd been looking for when I first started lining the drawers...Not being able to locate those papers then, I resorted to chinese brocades with their acidy bright colors & I suppose it was for the best...they certainly put the noise & the flash, the neon, into the cabinet in a way these papers wouldn't have. As seen below: the original version of Drawer 66 on the left & the new drawer in progress with the encased book & new papers on the right...</div>
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But those violet sequins are going to have to go somewhere; they are just too luscious!</div>
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<br />Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-68399727973797376762015-07-01T01:05:00.000+08:002015-10-09T17:52:40.023+08:00Cabinet on the MoveAnother long hiatus here on the blog as the Cabinet of Curiosities made the Big Move from Saint Louis, Missouri to <a href="http://www.bakersville.com/" target="_blank">Bakersville, North Carolina</a>...along with all the stuff we've had in storage for the past 10 years (!!)<br />
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All this time that I have been posting about it, the Cabinet has been quietly minding its own business in the beautiful downtown StL loft of my friend, architect and professor, <a href="http://architecture.uark.edu/people/faculty-and-staff/profile.php?uid=mackeith" target="_blank">Peter MacKeith</a>.<br />
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Former Associate Dean at the <a href="http://www.samfoxschool.wustl.edu/" target="_blank">Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art</a> at Washington University in St Louis and <a href="http://arkansaslife.com/drafting-a-legacy/" target="_blank">now in Fayetteville</a> as Dean of the <a href="http://architecture.uark.edu/about/index.php" target="_blank">Fay Jones School of Architecture</a> at the University of Arkansas, Peter wrote a wonderful thoughtful essay, <a href="http://issuu.com/brunodavidgallery/docs/christina-shmigel_catalog_2011_v2_issuu" target="_blank">This Phenomenal City: Christina Shmigel's Shanghai, in St Louis 2011</a>, for the<a href="http://issuu.com/brunodavidgallery/docs/christina-shmigel_catalog_2011_v2_issuu" target="_blank"> catalogue</a> of my show at <a href="http://www.brunodavidgallery.com/" target="_blank">Bruno David Gallery</a>.<br />
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The journey of the Cabinet from Shanghai to StL was quite the travail. First stuck in customs in NYC, then caught in blizzards, it finally arrived two weeks late for the actual opening of my show. On the night of the second opening, it nearly got snowed out again. So I'm very grateful to Peter for offering post-show to give it safe harbor & for all the years it has had in the good company of <a href="http://workandenergy.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">John Watson</a>'s sculpture (far right of photo above) and Peter's collection of blue shirts...<br />
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Now the Cabinet is in my new studio, buried under boxes of all the other work from that St Louis show - plus boxing bags & golf clubs & dozens of other things for which we can't believe we paid storage fees...it's like having the Goodwill truck <i>deliver</i><i> </i>donations.<i>.. </i><br />
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The Cabinet of Curiosities goes on the road again (oh the weight) in the spring for my show in Washington, D.C. at the <a href="http://hillyerartspace.org/" target="_blank">Hillyer Art Space</a>. Opening 4/1/16: come open drawers, live and in person!</div>
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<br />Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-76087321970751360452015-05-26T17:01:00.000+08:002015-05-26T17:01:46.989+08:00Row 8: Insulated Pipeline<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The back compartment of each drawer of the 8th row, starting with 8.3 and heading across 8.4, 8.5, 8.6 , 8.7 & 8.8...</td></tr>
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Somewhere, sometime, in the grand scheme of the Cabinet, I had the idea that a theme should run secretly across several drawers, for the amusement of the discerning observer. In the end, only two such patterns emerged, one in Row 4 (which I actually think was accidental. See 4.5. 4.6 & <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2015/04/drawer-47-bonsai-by-another-name.html" target="_blank">4.7</a> ) & this one across the back reaches of the drawers in Row 8. There's one other planned path & that is the meridian that runs in a somewhat interrupted square around the peripheral edges of the Cabinet...but that's another story... <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/10/drawer-81-traditional-chinese-medicine.html" target="_blank">8.1</a>...</div>
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The wrapped pipe that runs thru these drawers, though it hardly does justice to the real thing, is meant as an ode to the artfully insulated plumbing of the old lanes...During the "High Communist" period, housing in Shanghai was scarce & entire families were forcibly moved, by the government, into single rooms in houses built as single family homes; a lane house likes ours might have been occupied by as many as 5 or 6 multi-generational families, some twenty or thirty people. </div>
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When we first moved into the house, I had the same conversation over & over again with curious neighbors: How many floors? Three. How many people? Two. How many children? None. Followed by much head shaking & muttering on the part of my cross-examiner.</div>
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The kitchen under the old style was communal, sometimes housing several burners, each with its own gas meter; food prep was done outside at the sink in the lane. Our immediate neighbors still live this way, three or four unrelated couples prepping their food & washing their laundry outside (and, in their kitchen, playing mahjong deep into the wee hours of the morning...)</div>
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For full drawers in this row, check out Drawers <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/10/drawer-81-traditional-chinese-medicine.html" target="_blank">8.1</a> & <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/04/drawer-82-ghost-flowers.html" target="_blank">8.2 </a>& <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2012/12/drawer-86-things-for-dead.html" target="_blank">8.6</a>...with others still to come...</div>
<br />Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-50159834434546937292015-05-19T19:31:00.003+08:002015-05-20T06:51:00.694+08:00Drawer #1.3: Predatory Goldfish, on Wheels<div style="font-size: 20px;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 18px;">…which, actually, with a little research,</span><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 18px;"> turns out t</span><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 18px;">o be a Predatory Carp.</span><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 18px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 18px;">Which, according to my <a href="http://smile.amazon.com/Chinese-Art-Motifs-Visual-Imagery-ebook/dp/B00BOE16FO/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1432032199&sr=1-3&keywords=patricia+welch" target="_blank">Chinese Motifs</a> book, is distinguished by 1. its scales 2. “its wide mouth & two pairs of barbels attached to its upper lip” 3. its long dorsal fin. Homophone Alert: <i>carp</i> is (<i>li </i></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;">鲤)</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">which, depending on its tone, can mean <i>profit</i> (</span><i style="font-family: Cambria;">li </i><span style="font-family: Cambria;">利) or it can mean <i>power</i> (</span><i style="font-family: Cambria;">li</i><span style="font-family: Cambria;">力)…but a “<i>carp among lotuses (lian lian you yu</i> 莲莲有鱼)" plays the <i>lian</i> </span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">莲 </span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">of <i>lotus</i> against the <i>lian</i> </span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">连 </span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">of <i>again</i> </span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">(”<i>again and again</i>,”</span><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">lian lian </span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">连连</span><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> ) and the <i>yu </i></span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">鱼</span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">of <i>fishes</i></span><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> against</span><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> the <i>yu </i>余 of <i>surplus</i> to wish you again & again may you have an</span><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> excess of wealth... or carp.</span><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></span></div>
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But calling this drawer <i>CARP </i>wouldn’t really make you want to open it, would it…and open it you should because it’s really about Again & Again, Abundance of Delight. </div>
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Like the pondful of fake lotuses you discover behind the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Buddha_Temple" target="_blank">Jade Buddha Temple </a>… </div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: medium;"> and the troves of tassels at the Notions Market…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: medium;">and the <a href="http://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g308272-d459928-Reviews-Huxinting_Teahouse_Huxinting_Chashi-Shanghai.html" target="_blank">Mid-Lake Teahouse</a> mid-Yu Garden, familiar to you on arriving in Shanghai from the novel you are reading by <a href="http://smile.amazon.com/Death-Red-Heroine-Soho-Crime-ebook/dp/B004HYHA0S/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1432032451&sr=1-2&keywords=qiu+xiaolong+inspector+chen+in+order" target="_blank">Qiu Xiaolong</a> in which policeman/poet <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qiu_Xiaolong" target="_blank">Chief Inspector Chen</a> has a clandestine meeting in the 1990's with his informer, Old Hunter. To reach the Teahouse, they, like you, have traversed a demon-defying ”nine-turn” (a.k.a. zigzag) bridge (<a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2015/04/bridges.html" target="_blank">see drawer 5.3</a>) “full of tourists at every turn: People pointing at the lotus flowers swaying in the breeze, throwing bread crumbs to the golden carp swimming among the blossoms.” And photographing each other & themselves like mad.</span></div>
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Not to mention the rare delight inside the cabinet of being released from the tyranny of the grid (only 4 other drawers are missing a divider: <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/02/drawer-15-stripey-mops.html" target="_blank">1.5</a>, <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/04/drawer-23-beauty.html" target="_blank">2.3</a>, <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/02/drawer-32-double-happiness.html" target="_blank">3.2</a> & <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/07/drawer-35-on-jet-lag.html" target="_blank">3.5</a>…) so that the goldfish toy, sold by the tiniest, most ancient, slip of a woman from her shop that is merely a cupboard attached to the outside wall of her lane house, can skitter about as the drawer slides open… </div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 18px;">A Swedish friend, just six months into her Shanghai life, asks, “Have you found that your aesthetic changed after you came to China?” How else to explain the hot fuchsia Crocs in my closet, linens on my bed the color of orange marshmallow peanut candies, window curtains covered in sequin daisies...</span></div>
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For other related drawers, see <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2015/04/bridges.html" target="_blank">Drawer 5.3</a> & Drawer 8.3 &<a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/04/drawer-82-ghost-flowers.html" target="_blank"> Drawer 8.2</a> to hear the monks chanting at the Temple...</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Drawer 1.3: From top: 1. Chinese Knot Tassels whose color combinations never fail to send me; 2. Carp pull toy with small carp swallowed inside; chinese brocade in water or seaweed pattern; 3. Sample of tea from the Huixinting Tea House, Yu Garden, Shanghai. Photo credits: Full drawer: Bruno David; all others: Christina Shmigel</td></tr>
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Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-90053768963751850682015-05-12T12:28:00.000+08:002015-05-12T12:28:15.083+08:00Drawer 6.1: Shells<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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According to <a href="http://smile.amazon.com/Have-Hold-Intimate-Collectors-Collecting/dp/1585673773/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430796198&sr=1-2&keywords=philip+blom" target="_blank"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">To Have & to Hold</span>,</a> Philipp Blom’s wonderful (pun not intended) book on collecting, <i>wunderkammers </i>first appeared in the 16th ct. with the Age of Exploration. Never before seen marvels were arriving in Europe with every returning ship - in 1633, <a href="http://www.strangescience.net/tradash.htm" target="_blank">John Trandescant</a> , collector extraordinaire, acquired an unknown fruit: the <a href="http://smile.amazon.com/Sexing-Cherry-Winterson-Jeanette-ebook/dp/B007I7SU8W/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430796339&sr=1-1&keywords=sexing+the+cherry" target="_blank">banana</a>! - & collecting those arriving <i>wunders</i> became a preoccupation for those of means. The “custom of the time” was that cabinet of curiosities should include both <i>naturalia</i> & <i>artificialia;</i> Nearly always,<i> </i>among the <i>naturalia, </i>there were shells, easily transported by sailors from far-flung locations.</div>
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When I started in on my own Cabinet, I had no idea that shells were <i>de rigueur</i> so there must be something about them that just begs harboring. There are Nautili (sp?) in <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/02/drawer-32-double-happiness.html" target="_blank">Drawer 3.2</a> (from HWI’mT & my honeymoon) and there’s coral from Hainan Island/South China Sea in <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/12/drawer-37-coral-by-sand-by-design.html" target="_blank">Drawer 3.7</a>. </div>
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But the shells in Drawer 6.1 come to the cabinet not by benefit of sea or sailor but from the waste heaps of the captains of industry. </div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 18px;">On a bicycle tour, on my way to <a href="http://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/zhejiang/hangzhou/xitang.htm" target="_blank">Xitang</a>, the <a href="http://www.chinahighlights.com/shanghai/nearby-ancient-town.htm" target="_blank">Water Town</a> that hosted <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkAeSgHplvc" target="_blank">Tom Cruise</a> in <i>Mission Impossible 3</i>, I started to notice massive piles of…</span></div>
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oh! perforated clam shells!…filling the front yard of every structure on both sides of the road. It took me not a short while (duh) to realize their reason for being: buttons! The town’s entire industry is shell buttons… shell buttons: who had ever really thought about how shell buttons come into being. For sure, not me. And now, how glorious! Shell button holes!</div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 18px;">Turns out that the scrapped & perforated shells are also players in one of China’s many Copy-Cat-Economy stories: the industry started when one clever soul saw the opportunity in all the discard clam shells from the town’s food trade. He made a lot of money. So all his neighbors, one by one, began to follow suit.</span><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 18px;"> </span><span style="font-family: Cambria;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Soon there was so much stock that competition drove the price straight down. Now, no one is making much money as there’s just the tiniest profit margin per button. Which still doesn’t make 'em cheap at Shanghai’s notions market...where I’m always coveting them…</span></span><br />
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<span style="text-align: left;">Not sure how much of a market there is for shell water bowls for crickets ...</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Drawer 6.1: From top: 1., 3. & 4. Perforated shells from Shell Button Factory Yard, Xitang, China 2. Tin container with Traditional Chinese Medicines found in the Cabinet at time of purchase <br />
Photo credits: Full drawer: Bruno David; all others, Christina Shmigel.<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">For related drawers, see <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/02/drawer-32-double-happiness.html" target="_blank">Drawer 3.2</a>: Double Happiness, <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/12/drawer-37-coral-by-sand-by-design.html" target="_blank">Drawer 3.7</a>: Coral by Sand & by Design & <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/10/drawer-81-traditional-chinese-medicine.html" target="_blank">Drawer 8.1</a>: Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)</span></div>
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Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-77895636235735095692015-05-05T10:51:00.000+08:002015-05-05T10:51:50.175+08:00White Monkey: The View from the Other Side One of the very first words you learn to recognize, as a non-chinese speaker in China, is the word <i>laowai</i>. The two characters read as old/老 & outside/外; together, 老外, they mean "foreigner." You hear the word ...well, just ALL THE TIME. Walk into a shop & it will sound out like a public service announcement for the attention of all those in the room who might not have noticed that yes, indeedy, you are not Chinese. Politely, you'd be addressed as a <i>waiguoren</i> 外国人 , an "outside-country person", so <i>laowai</i>'s maybe a little rude, a little slangy, maybe kin to a Southerner calling NYer me a Yankee. <br />
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Sometimes I hear it while I'm on my bike: stopped at a light, the rider on the back of the motorcycle next to me informs the rider in the front: "<i>laowai</i>." It's my favorite [obnoxious] trick to turn to that keen observer of phenomena, and ask, excitedly, in Chinese, "Really? Where?! Where?!" This almost always produces a look of total consternated embarrassment on the faces of my fellow travelers. Very satisfying.<br />
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It's the <i>Foreigner's </i>Cabinet of <i>Chinese Curiosities</i> because I'm definitely an outside person looking in, making up sense for things foreign to me. Here, from the New York Times, a slightly cynical, very funny/cringe-inducing video of the view from the other side. In low moments, in his former position, HWI'mT would bitterly decry that all he'd been hired to do was to be the "white monkey" at various functions & now, who's to argue...<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="373" id="nyt_video_player" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html?videoId=100000003652442&playerType=embed" title="New York Times Video - Embed Player" width="480"></iframe><br />
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We've started house hunting in the suburbs of Kunshan, a small city (only by Chinese standards: 7 million pop) an hour or so from Shanghai and exactly smack dab inside the housing bubble described in the video. Now we can swing into negotiations with the secret bargaining weapon: we can be the loss leader! The manager of one "Canadian style" (?!?) compound has already told me that he'd be so happy to have us, a better quality of tenant, professors & artists, culture people, in his compound. Extra discount if we swan about in our Royal Mountie hats?Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-51935413224547583392015-04-30T10:50:00.001+08:002015-04-30T10:50:29.773+08:00Drawer #5.1: Calligraphy & the Rat<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">To honor the birthday this month of He-Whom-I’m-Trailing, it’s the drawer of his celestial animal, the winner of the </span><a href="http://www.topmarks.co.uk/ChineseNewYear/ZodiacStory.aspx" style="font-family: Helvetica;" target="_blank">Great Race</a><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">, that Cat Out-Smarter, the Rat. (Me, I’m a Dog. Despite being the strongest swimmer among the racing beasts, Dog came in just one before last, distracted by the loveliness of the water into taking a leisurely bath. There’s a theory that divides work into “tasking” & “musing”: me/Dog, very big, HUGE in fact, on musing. Hence the long gaps between posts. Rat, on the other hand, definitely a tasker.)</span></div>
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The novelist David Mitchell [tasker] once likened the state of mind of the writer working on a novel to that of a person who has left a bathtub running on an upstairs floor. My Running-Bathtub-Thought/Question, while working on the Cabinet, was: what exactly are the criteria by which objects make (or not) the cut. I chose things by intuition, sensing my way to "rightness". But what the parameters for inclusion actually were, I could never quite make out. Obviously, there was the practical considerations of how the thing would fit into its cube of space (see <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2015/04/bridges.html" target="_blank">Drawer #5.3</a>.) But what was it that made the object worth preserving?</div>
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The Rat Drawer maybe helps define the sort of stuff that <i>didn’t</i> make the cut. It contains things associated with the Four Treasures of the Scholar, the tools of Chinese calligraphy: the inkstick, the brush, the <i>xuan</i> paper (mistakenly called rice paper in the West, its main ingredient is actually the bark of elm trees) & the grinding stone on which the inkstick becomes liquid ink. The Chinese pride themselves in, are exceedingly fond of reminding you of, China’s “3000 years of Continuous Civilization” (3000?<a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=3000+years+of+continous+civilization&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8" target="_blank"> 5000?</a> I’ve hear it so often that I stop listening as soon as I see the conversation heading in that general direction…and don’t even start on the subject with HWI’mT.) Calligraphy, inkstones, literati scholars, decidedly all part of the 3000 years of Continuous Culture story. </div>
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I’ve got <i>lots</i> of reasons for avoiding that story. One is that those 3000 years of continuous history do not permeate life as it is lived here in the way that they do, for example, in Japan with its National Treasures that have been dying with indigo in the same complex way for 9 generations, etc etc. Another is that when the traditional does shows up in China, it’s often as a cliché, easily grasped & favored by a newly arrived foreigner (leading to what I now think of as “souvenir art.” I could name names but I’m as guilty as anyone. See below.) And, maybe most importantly, the traditional art of China, with its precision & mastery & refinement, well, it just doesn’t speak to me. Not to bring the Japanese into again, but Chinese art is very short on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi" target="_blank"><i>wabi-sabi</i></a>, the honoring of that which is impermanent, imperfect and incomplete, the qualities that, for me, add excitement to objects. And - let me be honest - imperfect & incomplete is just about my level of craftsmanship.</div>
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For my first show in Shanghai, at the <a href="http://www.duolunmoma.org/main/main_e.html" target="_blank">Duolun Museum</a>, I made a series of pop-up books depicting various things of old: teahouse, moon gate, calligraphy, chinese garden. Looking at the pop-ups now, they seem much too tasteful to me, charmed by the clichés & connected hardly at all to the experience of living here.</div>
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<i>Pop-ups, inside operable bamboo windows modeled on classic window styles in Chinese gardens, supported in turn by the bamboo scaffolding used for construction; "The View From Afar," <a href="http://www.duolunmoma.org/main/main_e.html" target="_blank">Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art</a>, 2006.</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But the scarps from the pop-ups were much too lovely to throw away…so they became the tabs for a “<a href="https://guildofbookworkers.org/sites/guildofbookworkers.org/files/exhibits/100anniversary/retro/Kyle.shtml" target="_blank">flag book</a>,” a structure invented, not by the Chinese in all their years of civilization, but by <a href="https://guildofbookworkers.org/sites/guildofbookworkers.org/files/exhibits/100anniversary/retro/Kyle.shtml" target="_blank">Hedi Kyle</a>. Miraculously, when placed spine up & out, the book not only fit into the cube of drawer space but showed off one of its wonderful features. And that set the theme for the drawer.</span></div>
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Treaure #1, the inkstick, is made by mixing the carbon soot of various substances with a binding agent & forming the mixture in a mold. I’m partial to the cicada-shaped ones (see drawer 3.8) but here we’ve a Rat. Where there's calligraphy, there are red "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)" target="_blank">chops</a>," stone stamps, that identify the artists & all their commentators (yes, they write in the margins & sign themselves with chops.) The red tin holds the vermillion paste that pigments the chop: quality pastes of ground cinnabar are kept in lovely containers but here it’s the local stationary store’s stamp pad variety, a Shanghai brand. The fan, of course, is standard issue chinese art & beauty, represented here by a signifier… </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A chop created for He Whom I'm Trailing & me by our friend <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2014/07/what-do-you-love-most-about-shanghai.html" target="_blank">Petra Johnson</a> on the occasion of our wedding: note the box, the stone & the vermillion paste...<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">So maybe it’s Sausserre that holds the key. The objects that are included in the cabinet are almost entirely drawn from quotidian life: dishwashing soap, packaging string, cigarettes, sleeve protectors, medicated soap, unremarkable architecture. In themselves, as signs, the objects are of very little value. At first glance, what they signify is often the negative value that we associate with “made in China,” cheap & ugly & disposable. But in their associations, there’s often another value, a signifier of things that the Chinese deeply value - marriage, numerology, spiritual practice, culture, the ancestral past - the 3000 years of Continuous Culture. And that’s the space that was interesting me to preserve: the place where ugliness becomes beauty, banality turns out meaning-full. Not the obvious manifestations of Culture but where it perks out of everyday life with its collisions, its unexpected flashes of magic.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">(See <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/02/drawer-14-chinese-zodiac-animals.html" target="_blank">drawer #1.4</a> for what you need to know about the Chinese Zodiac… Click here for the story of the <a href="http://www.topmarks.co.uk/ChineseNewYear/ZodiacStory.aspx" target="_blank">Great Race</a> & here to finding out just which animal are <a href="http://www.topmarks.co.uk/ChineseNewYear/Zodiac" target="_blank">you</a>…) </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: justify;">Drawer #5.1: From top: 1. Tin of vermilion paste used with chops 2. Box of Fan Medicated Soap 3. Flag book made of scraps from Chinese calligraphy magazines featuring famous classical texts. 4. Boxed inkstone. The lining material, cheap brocade, features the chrysanthemum which, according to <a href="http://smile.amazon.com/Chinese-Art-Motifs-Visual-Imagery/dp/0804843163/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429769666&sr=8-1&keywords=patricia+welch" target="_blank">Patricia Welch</a> in her book on Chinese art motifs, "is a symbol of intellectual accomplishment." She goes on to say (see it coming?) that "the Chinese have been cultivating chrysanthemums for more than 3,000 years..." Photo credits; Full drawer: Bruno David; all others, me.</td></tr>
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<br />Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-73834119370405811682015-04-22T08:00:00.000+08:002015-04-22T08:00:00.630+08:00Drawer # 4.7: Bonsai by Another Name<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It took me not a few walking tours to understand that the secret of delight in this city is to pass thru those walls, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">whether by gate or by lane or by [sp]iPhone…</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Like here, just down from us at #18, secreted</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> behind the gate at #25: a front courtyard entirely filled with <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penjing" target="_blank">penjing</a>.</i> (See also <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2015/04/bridges.html" target="_blank">Drawer #5.3</a>) All f</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">or the benefit of a renovated lane house in which no one seems to have lived, ever: the windows stand ajar today exactly as they were left when the house was completed nearly two years ago…A quick spy yesterday showed evidence of an <i>ayi </i>(housekeeper) in the form of a plastic broom by the door but the goldfish (oh surprise) are (no doubt, long) gone...</span></div>
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Stash of ceramic penjing accoutrements at the cricket market.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Look to your right just as you enter Shanghai’s classical Chinese Garden, <a href="http://www.thechinaguide.com/shanghai_yuyuan/" target="_blank">Yu Yuan,</a> into the corner where the garden’s surrounding walls should meet, and you will see a tall pile of seemingly randomly dumped rocks. If you walk towards that pile, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">officially known as a "rockery", </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">you will discover that its arrangement is not random at all</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> but has, in fact, a structure, created by an interior passageway. Follow the passageway and, to your surprise, you will find an opening in the garden's enclosing wall. Step thru that opening & the vista expands vastly outward, onto a large, shadowy pond, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">a covered bridge, </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">pavilions of various sizes, walkways over waterways, all beneath dozens of towering pine trees whose limbs start nearly out of sight above your head. </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s magical, a sleight of hand, the shift from the contained architectural space of your first encounter with the garden to this soaring forested watery space. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I love that opening in the wall beyond everything: I linger there in that liminal space, in the line with the wall, teetering between the two spaces,</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">like Alice jumping in and out of the looking glass, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">savoring </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the reality shift.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; text-align: center;">Drawer #4.7: From top 1. Ceramic temple for <i>penjing</i> 2. Cardboard structure based on temporary pre-fab housing for migrant workers. The numbers are scraps of stickers found all over the city advertising services, particularly ones for obtaining various kinds of residency permits (more on this in a future post...) 3. & 4. Various small ceramic objects based on tradition Chinese architecture, some monumental like the pagoda, others pedestrian like the row of humble single story houses. In the Ming Dynasty, only nobility were permitted to build a two story house. Top right in number #3 is a lead pagoda with a crane perched atop. Photo credits: Full drawer: Bruno David; all others are mine.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-27411523780105055582015-04-11T14:31:00.001+08:002015-04-11T14:31:37.656+08:00Drawer # 5.3: Bridges<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A lot of water under the bridge since the last post…</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Little lead bridges from the Bird & Insect Market, [irresistible] gaudy brocades from the Fabric Market, sticker labels from the Haberdashery & Notions Market.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Bridge specimens: the arched bridges of the Summer Palace in Beijing, the zig-zag bridge that leads to the Tea House in the center of the pond at Yu Gardens in Shanghai, a pavilioned bridge for West Lake in Hangzhou: bridges in your pocket.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: center;">Each of the drawer compartments is a rough cube of space, approximately 5” deep by a little less than 4.5 wide and 4.75” high on the face, offering up several design challenges: The depth of the box inviting all things to disappear into its darkness; the static square which, in the days before Instagram & the iPhone, was so far removed from my preferred compositional shape, the panoramic landscape rectangle…& then, how to get something dynamic, or with a narrative thread, going across the dull rhythm of a 4-square-beat row...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And thus the nature of the project developed: display mounts would have to be built & what to do with them…the solution borrowed in the end from the packaging of goods here, chunky cloth-covered boxes, with little blades of (alas) plastic for stab closures, interiors formed & padded & lined for their content’s safe harbor. In my resistance to altering the cabinet itself - something too venerable & grand in its mass & age for me to permanently impose my dreamings on to it - the liners needed to be removable. Not finding the market of the fabrics that clothed the boxes, (though I know it now: the Chinese painting stores on Fuzhou Lu), I settled on the cheap chinese brocades, with their vivacity of color & pattern, raw & punchy, kin to the plastics & the neon of the city.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As I write this, I'm suddenly reminded of my very first Shanghai purchase, from the shop inside the Jade Buddha Temple. (Buddha, unlike his fellow traveler, apparently did not throw the buyers & sellers out of the temple.) One of the spookier things I’d ever seen for sale. A pale pinky porcelain hand, perhaps that of Buddha, or maybe of Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, rising out of a bed of lotus petals: I’m not much of an acquirer but this thing I had to have. As I stood paying, the clerk whisked off with the hand, and on her return, it was yet more a thing of wonder: contained in its very own cloth covered box (whetting my appetite for said boxes), resting on cheap, electrically school- bus-yellow satin (now very familiar as the liner of choice) & secured by red satin ribbon tied in a bow. Like the Cabinet in miniature: formal & sober on the exterior, a racket of color & consternation & delight on the interior…]</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">(And if you though my Buddha hand was over the top, you should see the one I gave my brother as a wedding present…) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">General wisdom here says that evil spirits are incapable of negotiating zig-zags. He-Whom-I’m-Trailing says that he is relieved to know that one’s demons are so easily out-witted.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Drawer #5.3: each compartment contains one or more cast lead bridges. Miniatures of famous classical Chinese bridge types, the bridges are from among the objects used in the classical Chinese art form called "<i>pen jing.</i>" A variant of the Japanese tradition of bonsai, in <i>pen jing</i> miniature figurines & buildings are inserted around dwarfed trees & stones to create "a world in a teacup."<br />Photo credits: Full drawer: Bruno David; all others, the artist.</td></tr>
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Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-29824081062950028352014-09-29T20:57:00.000+08:002014-09-30T13:08:22.289+08:00Drawer # 5.4: Tian Ai Lu or Sweet Love Street<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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He-Whom-I'm-Trailing and I, we live off of Sweet Love St. </div>
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I'm not kidding. <a href="http://www.topchinatravel.com/china-attractions/shanghai-tianai-road.htm" target="_blank">Tian Ai Lu/ 甜爱路/Sweet Love St.</a> </div>
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Despite the maniacal buses that are its main traffic, Sweet Love Street is really a very Sweet Street. Unlike the average Shanghai street, lined with <a href="http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder/PlantFinderDetails.aspx?kempercode=a892" target="_blank">London plane trees</a>, Sweet Love Street is lined with super tall super straight cedars. And while it's true that Sweet Love Street is made up mostly of walls separating the street from the adjacent living lanes, the walls are adorned with marble plaques inscribed with the love quotes of Pushkin & Goethe & Tagore. There are typos in the inscriptions.... Poor <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172055" target="_blank">Yeats</a> "loved the sorrow of your chang in gface" and some dubious choices... <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/love-s-omnipresence/" target="_blank">"whereso'er I am, below or else above you..."</a> but still, you can't help but feel the sweetness as you walk back from the local Starbucks, hand-in-hand, on another lovely Sunday afternoon along Sweet Love Street. </div>
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But maybe the sweetest thing about Sweet Love Street is the postbox at the end of the street. Local lore has it is that should you post a letter to your love from that Sweet Love Street postbox, it will get postmarked with a heart stamp. <a href="http://www.topchinatravel.com/china-attractions/shanghai-tianai-road.htm" target="_blank">Fact checking online</a>, it sounds a little more complicated: you have to go to the guard house of a lane several blocks away where the guard will stamp it for you...or maybe it's at the p.o. in the park but then only for "special anniversaries." Like love, I guess, a little complicated...</div>
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Be that as it may. Today, it's seven years since He-Whom-I'm-Trailing & I got hitched so I've pulled out the drawer whose theme is wedding favors. We end up with piles of them whether we go to weddings or not. They are always cheap & tacky & therefore, somewhat irresistible to me & so a few just had to end up in the cabinet. And <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/02/drawer-32-double-happiness.html" target="_blank">Double Happiness</a> cigarettes: always a must at weddings...</div>
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And finally, that little red rectangle of <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/search/label/Marriage" target="_blank">traditional wedding fabric</a>, it's a flip book. From our very own wedding, the dress rehearsal for our first dance, which looked a little something like this:</div>
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Post done, I'm off to Sweet Love Street. After all these years, I'm going to test that mailbox...if my love note does indeed come back to my love with a love stamp, I'll add it as a Curiosity!</div>
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Drawer #5.4 From top 1. Two Googley-Eyed Cow packets containing chocolate 2.Double Happiness brand cigarettes, double happiness matches & Elephant matches with a Made in China image on the liner beneath 3. Sequin-covered heart wedding favors 4. Flipbook of artist's wedding dance with traditional wedding fabric patterned cover. Photo credit full drawer: Bruno David; all others: me.</div>
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For related drawers, check out <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/02/drawer-32-double-happiness.html" target="_blank">Drawer 3.2</a> & <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/08/drawer-56-tea-blankets.html" target="_blank">Drawer 5.6</a>.</div>
<br />Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-41955945546619031862014-09-22T14:33:00.001+08:002014-09-22T14:33:12.924+08:00Native Repair #1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I've been giving a lot of walking tours lately. On various themes: Art Deco on the Bund, Shanghai Off the Beaten Track, Creative Shanghai (Art & Markets near the Bund.) I love doing the walks; they bring me close to the textures and details that make the city inspiring to me. (So please contact me if you are game for one!) </div>
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What I love best is that every walk, no matter how well planned, offers itself up as improvisation. I think of it as the walk throwing out a few gifts & I walk with curious anticipation. As we turn to exit from a derelict building, suddenly, there's a wedding shoot, the bride in a voluminous strapless gown voguing in the doorway, brilliant scarlet against all the concrete grey. Or, as I stop on a corner to show images on my iPad of <a href="http://littlevictories.co/" target="_blank">Little Victories</a>, an mobile art gallery created by artists from the <a href="http://www.swatch-art-peace-hotel.com/artists" target="_blank">Swatch Art Residency</a>, a posse of rough&tumble three-wheel-deliverymen gather around for a rousing discussion amongst themselves about...well, I don't know exactly what but they sure are excited to see their tricycles on my screen.</div>
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Or just something perfect like this:</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Abi5bBWypog/VB-z5BTELBI/AAAAAAAABbQ/rzE31FDDxzQ/s1600/Peg%2Bleg%2Bchair.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Abi5bBWypog/VB-z5BTELBI/AAAAAAAABbQ/rzE31FDDxzQ/s1600/Peg%2Bleg%2Bchair.jpg" height="640" width="640" /></a></div>
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An improv known from my travels in Africa as "native repair."<br />
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For more chair repairs, ones that put my favorite pink plastic string to work, click <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/06/drawer-75-pink-string.html" target="_blank">here</a>. For many more images of variously patched up chairs in Hong Kong, see Michael Wolf's wonderful collection of photographs, <a href="http://photomichaelwolf.com/#bastard-chairs/1" target="_blank">Bastard Chairs</a>. And finally, to come make art in Shanghai, click <a href="http://www.swatch-art-peace-hotel.com/apply" target="_blank">here</a> to apply for a residency at the Swatch Art Hotel.Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-27178279625330501732014-09-02T13:49:00.000+08:002014-09-02T14:09:22.842+08:00The Smoke Flowers of Cai Guo QiangIn Chinese, there are firecrackers, 鞭炮, <i>bian pao</i>, in whose name the second character gives a nice little onomatopoetic blast. And there are fireworks, 烟火, <i>yan huo</i>, which literally translates as "smoke fire", which I misheard early on as the very poetic 烟 花, <i>yan hua</i>: "smoke flowers."<br />
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But in the case of the fireworks performance of the artist <a href="http://www.caiguoqiang.com/" target="_blank">Cai Guo Qiang</a>... they really were smoke flowers. <a href="https://vimeo.com/103547331" target="_blank">Eight minutes</a> of colored smoke (environmentally safe food coloring) on the themes of "elegy, remembrance & consolation" that gave me that feeling one sometimes feels so powerfully, of being privileged to be right here, right now, at this very moment in time.<br />
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Here's a little gif of images shot during the opening salvo of his current exhibition, "<a href="http://www.caiguoqiang.com/exhibition/cai-guo-qiang-ninth-wave" target="_blank">The Ninth Wave</a>," at Shanghai's <a href="http://www.powerstationofart.com/en/" target="_blank">Power Station of Art</a>. Thru 10/26/14.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://picasion.com/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="gif maker"><img alt="gif maker" border="0" src="http://i.picasion.com/pic78/75e4928b65768c0d2173bc03e6c21b0d.gif" height="400" width="400" /></a><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">Click <a href="https://vimeo.com/103547331" target="_blank">here</a> for the artist's video of the full performance ('cause it's really not the same without the <i>pao</i>!), </span><a href="http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/cai-guo-qiang" style="font-size: medium; text-align: start;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;"> to experience Cai Guo Qiang's artistic power & charisma, </span><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">and </span><a href="http://www.caiguoqiang.com/taxonomy/term/131" style="font-size: medium; text-align: start;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;"> for <u>Peasant da Vincis</u>, <br />an early project of Cai's in Shanghai, that I also truly loved.</span><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;"><br /></span></td></tr>
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<br />Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-63569569528058283732014-07-30T17:39:00.000+08:002014-07-30T17:56:22.313+08:00What Do You Love Most About Shanghai...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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...is the question I most dread while Stateside (where I have been these past few months.)<br />
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What, if anything even, do I love about Shanghai?<br />
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Do I love the food? Not especially & sometimes not at all.<br />
The people? Only a statistically insignificant percentage of the population.<br />
The air quality? Like Rick about the waters in Casablanca: I was misinformed.<br />
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Makes me feel like a complete curmudgeon.<br />
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So, in the face of The Question, it was a very good thing that, yesterday, I went for a walk.</div>
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(Actually it was a few days ago but technology has stymied me: the photos below are meant to be the slide show found <a href="https://picasaweb.google.com/117772848269742703547/PetraSWalk?feat=directlink#slideshow/6040578521053866818" target="_blank">here</a>.) </div>
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Because, as I walked, I was reminded that there really is a thing I love most about Shanghai & it's also the thing that the Cabinet of Curiosities is about.</div>
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The walk that I walked was mapped by the artist <a href="http://www.petrajohnson.org/" target="_blank">Petra Johnson</a> for her multi-city project <a href="http://www.walk-with-me.org.uk/index.php" target="_blank">Walk with Me</a>. Accompanied by another walker, usually a stranger to her, Petra walks a predetermined route. At 15 fixed points or "islands," her companion is given a small slip of paper with a <a href="http://www.walk-with-me.org.uk/Composition.php" target="_blank">prompt</a> that frames the next section of the route: "observe a moment of kindness" makes the street a very different place from "identify a moment of tension" (which was marked on my walk by two parked bicycles suddenly falling over of their own accord.) The responses to the prompts are noted down & kept in an archive called the <a href="http://www.walk-with-me.org.uk/Composition.php" target="_blank">Composition of the Ordinary.</a></div>
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Starting at a <a href="http://kioskxiaomaibu.org/" target="_blank">kiosk</a> on Shaoxing Lu, a very sweet street, well known to me as the street where Petra lived when I first came to Shanghai (& she was among the very first people I met here & was often a guide in those early years as well...) we wended our way thru streets unknown to me until, finally, we arrived, several hours later, at the <a href="http://www.powerstationofart.com/en/" target="_blank">Power Station of Art</a>, the former power station that now houses the Shanghai Biennale & other mega-sized shows of contemporary art. Skirting new high rises, flashy commercial developments and broad traffic-filled roadways, the route ran like a hidden river, along streets & lanes seemly unchanged since I first encountered Shanghai 10 (!?!) years ago.</div>
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I walked with Petra (top photo) and sinologist & curator Anja Goette in real time but while I walked in Shanghai, they walked in Berlin. Anja opened the prompts in Berlin, & by way of <a href="http://www.wechat.com/" target="_blank">WeChat</a>, we overlaid the two cities with moments of surprising synchronicity. This world is a strange and mysterious place.</div>
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What startled He-Whom-I'm-Trailing & me the most, and constantly, when we were newly here was the intimacy with our co-inhabitants that the city imposed upon us: a man scrubbing inside his boxer shorts at a fire hydrant, a woman at the curb washing her hair, a child testing the aerodynamics of scrap of paper in the sprawling sidewalk chaos of his family's fruit stand, sleepers of all genders & ages sprawled on cots & lounge chairs, escaping airless rooms for the slightly cooler air of the street... The line that divided private space from public space seemed hardly to exist.</div>
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But with the modernization of Shanghai, that feeling of intimacy subsided. The sense of a being one in a "school of fish" that I loved in the daily swarm of bicycles (see post re: <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/07/things-that-dont-fit-10-little-more-pink.html" target="_blank">Little Pink</a>) disappeared with the advent of metro lines & automobiles; the open-air street life shuttered up into glass-fronted shops & air-conditioned mega-malls. Mobs of trendy(ish) young couples trawling for international brands replaced the small posses of card-players with their undershirts rolled to air their bellies in the summer heat.</div>
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And so it came upon me with a rush of feeling when I found that curious and disconcerting intimacy in tact & thriving on the streets of Petra's walk. It raised in me a revery of tenderness towards the city & its details, toward particular individual lives. It returned to me the sense of wonder & amused affection with which I began the Cabinet of Curiosities, the desire to preserve various small moments of extreme & delightful ordinariness, to build a collection of physical objects that would trigger this extraordinary mundane of which I already anticipated losing track. </div>
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As seen on WeChat, Berlin, a vibrant place in my imagination, seemed quiet, historical, spare of objects & beings, almost stunningly so. Helsinki, on my first visit there recently, with its calm & order & the purity of its design sensibility, had me nursing a secret nagging wonder: wouldn't I, over time, feel lulled into boredom there? </div>
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But Shanghai: the sheer busy-ness of what a Chinese friend calls "the not-so-organized" space, the unpredictability, the constant (or incessant & unremitting) stimulation. To walk out the door & see: a plastic basin of eels tip over, eels slithering by the dozen down into the sewer drain; slightly dated dresses catching the breeze on a laundry line, perhaps those of one of the park's ballroom dancers, a woman trying to retrieve the opportunity lost for lipstick & high heels during the androgynous monotony of the Cultural Revolution; a family on low stools, shelling peas, their son fully concentrated on his homework at a card table, the scrawny cat at his feet working over a fish head; a net sack full of bullfrogs 3 times the size of my hand. So many very particular details so very close, so available to one in a flood of strangers.</div>
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Petra's walk returned to me the opportunity here for ceaselessly just plain noticing. The crazy density of textures - not necessarily of beauty or culture or history - just of everyday life. The closeness of all these individual souls living out their individual days as part of a huge anonymous blob of 22 million beings living all together in this one spot. </div>
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So now next time someone asks the dread question I've got the answer...</div>
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(Much thanks to Petra for designing the opportunity & to Anja for the company! That really was a great walk!)</div>
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<!-- Blogger automated replacement: "https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F-OI3TmD37Dqs%2FU9RyKRlFK0I%2FAAAAAAAABMQ%2FBSj-mptSBzM%2Fs1600%2F03.%2BIMG_2704.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image%2F*" with "https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OI3TmD37Dqs/U9RyKRlFK0I/AAAAAAAABMQ/BSj-mptSBzM/s1600/03.+IMG_2704.jpg" -->Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-82729657185050975472014-04-17T10:35:00.001+08:002014-04-17T10:35:17.769+08:00iDtown #3: The Factory<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Girolamo in his studio box</td></tr>
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The three of us for whom the factory was the thing began by scrounging. Maybe there's something in a western art training that encourages that? Girolamo pulled all sorts of broken pallets & crates & scraps of wood into his studio, Savinder collected artifacts from the still unemptied rooms of the former living areas of the factory and I snapped up as many as I could find of the plywood jigs that the workers had cut for gluing hardware to the giant glass studio doors.<br />
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Ours was <a href="http://www.idtown.cn/main.html" target="_blank">iDtown</a>'s first residency & so the workers had no idea yet that what was refuse to them was art supplies to us. No sooner would Giro fill his studio with the detritus he needed for his installation than the workers would diligently return his studio to a pristine state. It got to where everything in his studio wore a label identifying it in chinese as "the artist's work." I, on the other hand, while on a bit of R&R in the big city of Shenzhen, got a call from Hang Feng on behalf of the workers: could they take down my installation as they still needed the jigs...artists stealing from workers, workers stealing from artists, made Hang Feng hysterical with laughter.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cuG-JtfADLk/U0TQ6-w6stI/AAAAAAAABHo/DeMHuAdT3tQ/s1600/Savinder+composite.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cuG-JtfADLk/U0TQ6-w6stI/AAAAAAAABHo/DeMHuAdT3tQ/s1600/Savinder+composite.jpg" height="443" width="640" /></a><br />
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<a href="http://www.savinderbual.com/works.html" target="_blank">Savinder Bual</a> had one of the best finds of all: a fragment hanging on an abandoned bedroom wall, portraying, as it turned out, the young woman chemist who steered the former dye factory's process. The collaged flowers were a weird synchronicitous confirmation of Savinder's preoccupations as she came into the residency. As various toys & gizmos arrived from Taobao to be promptly dissected, Savinder's worktable grew into a wonderland of mechanical objects ready to bloom. Her playful experiments finally lead to a, for her, rare video in color, a celebration of the beauty of the peeling mint-colored factory walls & the spiral mechanism found inside a disassembled measuring tape.<br />
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To see the delightful thing that became of the blue green bulbs on the worktable, click <a href="http://www.savinderbual.com/unfurling.html" target="_blank">here</a> for "unfurling."<div>
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Without Savinder's help & encouragement, my own first foray into video would probably never have happened...still working out how to get it embedded here so for now just a still teaser...<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo credit: Chen Hang Feng</td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.girolamomarri.info/girolamo-marri/news" target="_blank">Girolamo Marri</a> loves to work that moment that so many of us would most prefer to avoid, that tense time when some idle interaction stretches out into profound embarrassment: <a href="http://www.girolamomarri.info/girolamo-marri/ghost-of-a-talk" target="_blank">the invited speaker</a>, while remaining at the podium, never actually begins his speech; the TV interviewer, waiting for the equipment to be "repaired," <a href="https://www.blogger.com/" target="_blank">keeps the interviewee standing absurdly</a> by...<br />
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At iDtown, Girolamo prepared a meal that could not be eaten...resulting in an extra factory run for resident artist <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2014/04/idtown-residency-2-beach.html" target="_blank">Li Xiaofei</a>. In yet another illuminating moment about "Made in China" really means (see Chen Hangfeng's <a href="http://vimeo.com/54336859" target="_blank">Xmas ornament village</a>), the factory turned out to be a workshop, stocked with PVC & microwave ovens & an extended family with the artisanal skill of creating, in plastic, extraordinarily faithful reproductions of real food. For Girolamo, they conjured up the remains of a chinese meal: a metal bowl smeared with sticky red sweet & sour sauce, another full of discarded fish bones, a small porcelain bowl holding the final grains of rice... all labeled "the artist's work" just in case...<br />
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Giro further put us all in an state of anxious suspense with his <a href="http://www.girolamomarri.info/girolamo-marri/nine-gentle-ghosts" target="_blank">Nine Gentle Ghosts</a>, 9 <a href="http://www.bialetti.com/coffee/stovetop/moka-express-c-1_7_22.html" target="_blank">Moka </a>Espresso pots rigged to eventually spew their contents out with a loud retort (a small anxiety of potential that I experience every morning as our own pot hisses to fullness...) I've since learned that in Rome, during a period of political unrest in the 70's, Moka pots replaced the traditional glass bottles as containers for molotov cocktails. Their handles made them easier to run with & to hurl, & that little factoid confirmed for me that there's a certain anarchic pleasure that Girolamo takes in the world.<br />
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For what I got made, stay tuned for the next post... <span id="goog_823120851"></span><br />
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For the first post in this series, an intro to the artists, click <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2013/12/idtown-residency-artists.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
For the post on the other artists at the residency, click <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.com/2014/04/idtown-residency-2-beach.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-6412472591051469752014-04-07T16:10:00.000+08:002014-04-09T13:40:00.600+08:00iDTown Residency #2: The Beach <span style="background-color: #edf4ff;"><br /></span>
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<span style="background-color: #eeeeee; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Finally, a series of long overdue posts to bookend the post introducing the cast of characters at the iDtown residency...an amazingly productive time for all & here's what got made...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #eeeeee; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I was so entranced by the factory that I might not even have mentioned that we lived a stone's throw (or really, a leap over the prefab worker's shelter on the far side of our garden) from the beach of the South China Sea. But, interestingly, for all four of the Chinese artists (out of the seven of us), it was the ocean & the beach that were the thing. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #eeeeee; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Ed Lo, perhaps answering his ancestral call to sea, spent his days on the beach harvesting sound. You might imagine this sound as that of the waves breaking on the empty shore during the lonely off-season but you would be entirely off the mark. This is China & even in a deserted village there is ceaseless human activity. Each day of even marginally good weather the beach filled with wedding photographers & dressers & stylists & their prey, the [very young!] newly- or soon-to-be- weds.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo credit: my bad studio snap of Ed's beautiful b&w photo...<br />
for more beautiful images go to "Ears & Eyes" at <a href="http://www.auditoryscenes.com/" target="_blank">www.auditory scenes.com</a><br />
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<span style="background-color: #eeeeee;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">n Ed's black & white still,</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> it looks like La Dolce Vita but it's actually Happy Island Photography, working to the susurrations of the charismatic photographer's "xiao xiao Xiao." (smile smile Smile.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #eeeeee;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">At the end of residency, everyone's studio box became their exhibition space...a new experience for all to remove the traces of a working studio & transform the space into gallery. The transformations were lovely in every case but it was in Ed's studio that I stayed on & on, listening to the stones & cement speak the quiet that was in hiding at the beach...</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> C</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">lick <a href="http://vimeo.com/85358639" target="_blank">here</a> f</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">or something of the experience in</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Ed's </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Eyes & Ears: Homage to Rolf Julius." And </span><a href="http://vimeo.com/85801000" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> for his take on the tranquility of the factory, "Eyes & Ears Special Project: Concert for the Empty Loft."</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #eeeeee; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">While Ed was trying to grasp the current moment, <a href="http://issoart.canalblog.com/" target="_blank">Jiang Hong Qing</a> had flown off in his mind to the future history of Guang Hu, to a time when China is the world's only superpower & deeply invested in the genetic engineering of humans.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo credit: Collected from our WeChat exchanges...I think it's shot by Vivay, Glorious Barista.</td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: #eeeeee;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">On Guang Hu Beach, employing a plastic doll allegedly modeled on the Chinese-American basketball star, Jeremy Lin, and a slew of props ordered from the amazing Chinese online marketplace <a href="http://www.taobao.com/market/global/index_new.php" target="_blank">Taobao</a></span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">, Jiang Hong Qing staged </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Dust Harbor," </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">a short animated film that somehow managed to fully capture the inner life of a young soldier yearning for home. </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Seemingly abandoned by his command, yet continuing to </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">serve out of a sense of duty, he ponders the meaning of existence & of selfhood as reflected in the individual grains of sa</span></span><span style="background-color: #eeeeee; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">nd on the beach. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #eeeeee; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Jiang Hong Qing</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> received a classical academic art training but eventually turned to video & animation. Film, he says, allows him to explore </span><span style="background-color: #eeeeee;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">what he feels is</span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> the essential human condition, our existential loneliness, the way in which we are each ultimately unknown to the other. But, as </span></span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">He-Whom-I'm-Trailing observed, it was probably Jiang Hong Qing's skill as a figurative sculptor that gave</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> the plastic doll the range of expressive postures & gestures</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> that allowed</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> one to so fully empathize with the young soldier, </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">so completely believe in his identity and personality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="http://www.lixiaofei.org/en/work/" target="_blank">Li Xiao Fei</a> whose work is all about factories - to date, he has filmed in some 190 of them - was often away from our factory, filming in </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the nearby industrial cities of Guangzhou & Shenzhen.</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Not so surprising as it's the factory work life that fascinates him & our factory was hollowed out of all but us "creative industry" types. But, in the end, it was not the factories but the stories told by the Guang Hu villagers about the dark tankers that hovered off the beach that inspired the video Li Xiao Fei showed in his studio box.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Juxtaposing the wonders of wedding photography & the silent menacing presence of the tankers illegally dredging</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">sand offshore, Li Xiao Fei's video was poignant & </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">amusing &</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> quietly provocative in the mix that makes all of his work so absorbing to watch. As with Jiang Hong Qing, there's a central premise that informs Li Xiao Fei's </span><a href="http://www.lixiaofei.org/en/text/guanyu.html" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">Assembly Line</a><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> videos, an epiphany that came to him as he rode the Circle Line Cruise around NYC, the reality that all of us in our way are on an assembly line, each of us finding meaning where we can in what we do. He writes: "<span style="line-height: 20px;">Assembly lines, large or small, uphold social systems and maintain a surface appearance of order...</span> <span style="line-height: 20px;">This order is constantly being cut up, restructured, transformed and rebuilt into an illusory reality.<span style="font-size: x-small;">"</span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo credit: all above snapped by me from videos playing in the artists' studio boxes</td></tr>
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<span style="text-align: left;">The little bell sound that Taobao's Chat makes is now forever associated in my mind with the artist who made it possible for us all to be at the iDtown residency in the first place, <a href="http://www.chenhangfeng.com/" target="_blank">Chen Hang Feng</a>. T</span>hose of us who don't read Chinese <span style="text-align: left;">kept him so busy ordering materials on Taobao that he unfortunately never got to make any of his own work.</span><span style="text-align: left;"> But he did get to the beach. T</span>o all of our awe, i<span style="text-align: left;">n a wetsuit bought on Taobao, </span>for up to an hour each day,<span style="text-align: left;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;">H</span>ang Feng swam in the cold cold sea<span style="text-align: left;">.</span></div>
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Next up, what the factory inspired...</div>
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Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-38109802128370561872014-03-12T18:32:00.001+08:002014-03-13T06:55:12.280+08:00Drawer # 2.2: Slowly Trotting in with the Year of the Horse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I've been lost in life's sauce... finally surfacing today with the post that should have gone out for Chinese New Year's. But then again, given the state of the world these days (O Ukraine, O so many places & people & things), it's never too late to send out auspicious symbols. </div>
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These being Chinese auspicious symbols, of course, there have to be a lot pertaining to what the street beggars call "moneymoney"...<br />
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The Laughing Buddha, Budai, is apparently laughing all the way to the bank, teetering on one gold ingot while hefting another upward. Perhaps better to share it with the God of Wealth, hovering on his own ingot, distinguished by the side flaps on his royal cap and flanked by clouds/yun/云 of<br />
good fortune/yun/运 which are not just lined with silver but laden with gold ingots...</div>
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After money, there's food.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">Fish/Yu/</span><span style="font-family: 'MS 明朝';">鱼</span> you may have read about
<a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.ae/2013/02/things-that-dont-fit-in-drawer-3-sounds.html" style="font-family: Times;" target="_blank">before</a> on the blog...fishes wish you abundance & prosperity. These ones in the drawer are especially special as they are paired in two: marital happiness. Though they look a lot less happy in their twosomeness out on the street,</div>
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like the fate predicted by her mother for <a href="https://www.amytan.net/" target="_blank">writer Amy Tam</a> if she didn't look both ways before crossing the street: "smashed flat two eyes one side of face."</div>
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The word for peanut contains the word for "giving birth," not to mention that the nuts in their shell bear a semblance to twins in a womb, so no surprise here: they're auspicious for fertility & abundance. Oranges are the house gift of choice at CNY. The characters of their name can read as "lucky plant," their color associates them with gold, & roundness, in general, is a good thing. Pineapples have too many homophones to mention so let's just say, riches & good fortune. I love them best collapsible.<br />
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The character <a href="http://cabinetofchinesecuriosities.blogspot.ae/2013/02/drawer-14-chinese-zodiac-animals.html" target="_blank">fu for good fortune</a> <span style="font-size: large;">福 </span>shows up several times in the drawer as well as, to my surprise, on our front gate, stuck there, I guess, by the neighborhood committee. A good thing as I got to say "fu is upside down" which sounds exactly the same as "good luck has arrived". In this case, the homophone works in my favor but, mostly, people wonder what the hell I'm talking about when I speak chinese. </div>
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Somehow I neglected to stick a bat in the drawer. They're also <i>fu </i><span style="font-size: large;">蝠,</span> good for fortune & happiness, unless they get caught in your hair.</div>
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<o:p>At the top of the drawer, there'a teapot charm: Teapot/hu/<span style="font-size: large;">壶</span> is homophones with the <i>hu-</i>s that mean "protect" & "blessing" which feels exactly right when you think of someone fixing you a soothing cup of tea. But you've probably<i> never </i>thought of it in <i>this</i> way: according to Patricia Bjaaland Welch's book, <i>Chinese Art, </i></o:p>the teapot signifies fertility<i> </i><o:p>"ostensibly because of the</o:p> manner in which the spout dips into the waiting cup." And you thought I was being over the top about those baby peanuts. This interpretation does, however, shine a worrisome light on all those non-functional/sculptural teapots out there in the craft world...</div>
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And finally, at the bottom, there's those funny fish bone looking things near where the fishes tails ought to be. Those are (meaninglessly upside down) the character shou<span style="font-size: large;"> 壽 </span>written in the ancient seal script. The<i> shou-</i>s are wishing you a long life. (Here they are in their rectangular form. In their round form, they'd be wishing you a natural death at the end of that long life. It's a good wish but still...)</div>
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<span style="font-family: Times;">Even if it is just full of sequins & kitschy gold hollow plastic, this
drawer sings out with radiant energy. May it bring good things your way.<span style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Dvi5v-7esyw/UyAZ-kfYbNI/AAAAAAAABDs/s30ttgXyrDM/s1600/Christina_Shmigel_drawer10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Dvi5v-7esyw/UyAZ-kfYbNI/AAAAAAAABDs/s30ttgXyrDM/s1600/Christina_Shmigel_drawer10.jpg" height="640" width="212" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Drawer #2.2: Plastic charms gathered from the city's markets, disassembled & reorganized; gold sequins, square & circular, sold in huge sacks at the notions market, more coveted by me than are ingots. Photo credit for drawer: Bruno David; all others are mine. Most of the information on the symbolic meanings of things are from <br />
Patricia Bjaaland Welch's wonderful book <br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Art-Motifs-Visual-Imagery-ebook/dp/B00BOE16FO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394613444&sr=8-1&keywords=patricia+welch" target="_blank">Chinese Art: A Guide to Motifs & Visual Imagery</a>.</td></tr>
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And just for fun...a little Horse Year tune courtesy of Marybelle Hu...</div>
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<br />Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-688582702240772831.post-90730697479724938592013-12-23T22:52:00.000+08:002013-12-23T22:52:24.610+08:00iDtown Residency: The Artists<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AvqcD54_JT4/Uq7I5BpBYLI/AAAAAAAABAc/rsASIE8vIz8/s1600/studio+box+w+tree.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AvqcD54_JT4/Uq7I5BpBYLI/AAAAAAAABAc/rsASIE8vIz8/s640/studio+box+w+tree.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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The floating corners on the left side of this image belong to the floating boxes that are the six studios set variously slant inside the shell of one of the former factory buildings at the<a href="http://www.idtown.cn/main.html" target="_blank"> iDtown</a> residency. Inside the studios are:</div>
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<b>Chen Hangfeng</b>, a Shanghainese artist working in sculpture, installation & video, is the artist who invited all the rest of us. His recent 4-channel <a href="http://vimeo.com/54336859" target="_blank">video</a> documents an ancient Chinese village known in the Qing Dynasty for the beauty of its landscape, and in this dynasty, for its xmas ornament industry: it really changes your idea of "made in China" to see all the handwork & invention that goes into the "cheap crap" you buy at Walmart. Hangfeng's work walks a quietly political line between the art & traditions of China's past and the realities of its current culture of consumption. <a href="http://www.chenhangfeng.com/ChenHangfeng/Works_zuo_pin/Works_zuo_pin.html" target="_blank">www.chenhangfeng.com</a></div>
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<b>Edwin Lo</b> is a sound artist from Hong Kong. I am very curious to see what he captures here as the landscape seems to corresponds to so many of his themes. He writes about an earlier project: <i style="font-family: 'Gentium Book Basic'; line-height: 18px;">But something that is pretty hard to express are the emotion, isolation, solitude, nostalgia and romance associated with places I had been, which are unexplainable or even understandable. It probably is one of the key moments in my life that I really want to express and tell something anyhow...</i><span style="font-family: 'Gentium Book Basic'; line-height: 18px;">Ed comes from a seafaring family, with a fisherman for a grandfather & an oil tanker captain for a father, so it falls to him at every meal (and I mean, <i>every</i>) to answer the "what's this fish" question. </span><a href="http://www.auditoryscenes.com/">www.auditoryscenes.com</a></div>
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<b>Jiang Hong Qing</b>, a conceptual artist working in various media & teaching video in Shanghai, has out done us all for cool (<i>la feng le</i> in Chinese) with an exceptional pair of bicycle glasses. His quirky way of seeing the world slant comes thru in all of his work, including a project inspired by Roland Barthes in which he weighed against each other, on a scale, volumes of the Bible as translated into various languages. As we all hide from the [unseasonably yucky] elements at the local coffee house, Jiang Hong Qing is storyboarding a mythic history of the village, past & future, and ordering all sorts of curious props on Taobao...<a href="http://issoart.canalblog.com/">issoart.canalblog.co</a></div>
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<b>Commercial break</b>: seriously, the coffee house here in this village is a complete outlier, like no other cafe I have ever been to anywhere. Molika, a.k.a. Vivi, who owns it, knows things about coffee that I didn't even know there were to know. In the evenings, she gives coffee lessons that include the science of brewing. She's been training a young man named Ah Baung, but, try as he might, his coffee has a bitterness that hers never ever has: it's all in the temperature, she says, so you can't really get a steaming hot cup but oh it is so sweet & smooth... and then there's the being whose favor we are all courting, the coffeehouse cat, Nai Pao...</div>
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<b>Li Xiaofei, </b>artist and founder of a number of art spaces, does spectacularly grand - think of Frederic Church's icebergs - documentations in video & photography of factories that process elemental materials like salt & coal, & also incredibly touching interviews with the people that work in these factories. His is the kind of work that brings me sharply up against how narrow is my understanding of the world's realities. <a href="http://www.lixiaofei.org/">www.lixiaofei.org</a></div>
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<b>Girolamo Marri</b> is an Italian artist who worked in Shanghai for a number of years before heading off to the Royal College of Arts in London to do an M.A. in sculpture & performance. He's the Artist as Trickster, turning assumptions & pieties on their heads, in ways that are anarchic, funny, and revealing. Girolamo brings a whole cast of characters & false facts to every meal, recently introducing into the English language, a Punjabi word, useful in art criticism, that describes dung so lowly that even a dung beetle refuses to roll it. <a href="http://www.girolamomarri.info/">www.girolamomarri.info</a></div>
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<b>Savinder Baul</b>, from the U.K., works in video animation, inspired by early film technologies like the zoetrope & the stereogram. Savinder taught in Shanghai for a year. In one of the videos that came out of that time, she attached a traditional Chinese kite of a falcon, a silhouette you often see in the Shanghai sky, to the ceiling fan of her flat. The bird rode around & around on the fan in a continuous loop. The existential futility of it could make you panic...or it could make you laugh. <a href="http://www.savinderbual.com/flight.html">www.savinderbual.com/flight.html</a></div>
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And then there's me, the chirp. Writing this up, it strikes me that all these artists share a deep seriousness, a great sense of humor/appreciation of absurdity & an intense engagement with the human condition. I feel so honored to be included among them. Now, if only the rain & cold would quit so we could get ourselves from the coffeehouse to the studio...</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">At the coffee house. <br />
From the left: me, Molika, the barista; Ah Baung, her student; Edwin Lo; Chen Hangfeng; Jiang Hong Qing.<br />
Coffee house photo courtesy of Savinder Baul; top photo, me.</td></tr>
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Christina Shmigelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08996156314274862673noreply@blogger.com0