Drawer 6.1: Shells

According to To Have & to Hold, Philipp Blom’s wonderful (pun not intended) book on collecting, wunderkammers 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, John Trandescant , collector extraordinaire, acquired an unknown fruit: the banana! - & collecting those arriving wunders became a preoccupation for those of means.  The “custom of the time” was that cabinet of curiosities should include both naturalia & artificialia;  Nearly always, among the naturalia, there were shells, easily transported by sailors from far-flung locations.

When I started in on my own Cabinet, I had no idea that shells were de rigueur so there must be something about them that just begs harboring. There are Nautili (sp?) in Drawer 3.2 (from HWI’mT & my honeymoon) and there’s coral from Hainan Island/South China Sea in Drawer 3.7. 

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. 

On a bicycle tour, on my way to Xitang, the Water Town that hosted Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 3, I started to notice massive piles of…

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!

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.  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…

Not sure how much of a market there is for shell water bowls for crickets ...

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
Photo credits: Full drawer: Bruno David; all others, Christina Shmigel.

For related drawers, see Drawer 3.2: Double Happiness, Drawer 3.7: Coral by Sand & by Design  & Drawer 8.1: Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)

Drawer # 3.7 : Coral by Sand & by Design

This drawer, with its bits of coral collected on a beach on the Chinese island of Hainan, came to mind as I walked today along a different beach, this one at the edge of a small fishing village on the coast of the South China Sea, just west of Shenzhen. I had imagined, while I packed to come here, sunny weather, temperatures in the mid-70's. But it's raining. And, in order to stay warm in the chill wind, I'm wearing just about everything I brought in my suitcase. Still, it is quite lovely in the quiet emptiness - so unusual for China! - walking along the beach bathed in the violet light cast by my new purple umbrella, purchased at the single shop in Guan He village, the Guan He Department Store, a proper old-fashioned five & dime.

I'm here as one of 6 artists invited for the inaugural residency at iDtown, "an arts district betweens the mountains & the sea." We arrived last Tuesday to find studios not quite ready (surprise) for occupancy but the former factory compound has been wonder enough, leaving me too gobsmacked to even shoot many photos. I'll post more about the factory & the other artists soon but for now here's the view from my studio box out to the end of the studio building, including one of the "la feng" (chinese for "cool") bicycles we use for the 5 minute ride between village & factory...when it's not sheeting down with rain, that is...

The two circular objects included in the drawer are cast ceramic filters for I-know-not-what, purchased in a shop full of other unidentifiable ceramic wonders. Their delicacy & the logic of their design appear to me as the human mind channeling the cleverness of the natural world's design.

In good weather, the village beach is crowded with the froth of brides posing for wedding photos. At the farthest end, there are a series of tableaus, mixing up, like this drawer, the natural & the man-made, in one direction the sea, in the other a factory, plastic gardens in between.

The natural world the manufactured world the invented world colliding into each other...

Drawer #3.7: From top, boxes 1, 2 & 4:  coral collected on Hainan beach; box 3: particle filters made of cast porcelain purchased in the hardware market in Shanghai. Drawer liners: chinese brocade in wave pattern.
Photo credit for full drawer: Bruno David; all others are mine.

The Writing on the Wall #1

One of my new jobs requires that I visit factories. (Yeah! I get paid to visit factories. How cool is that.)

The other day, in the entry of a factory's administrative building, here's what I saw:

It sent me off into a little cultural reverie.

The Chinese take a certain (justifiable) pride in their ability to "eat bitter" (chi ku/吃苦), i.e. to endure hardship, so that fit right in. But the (american?) upbeat of the "enjoy" startled me. I assumed that Enjoy/Endure somehow came out of the tradition of Chinese proverbs expressed as 4 characters, like get the moon from the bottom of the ocean = 海底捞月, but the factory's laoban, the Boss, pleased & amused when asked, credited, instead, a European playwright whose name was escaping him... (like Chinese names inevitably escape me...)
Well, it turned out (thanks to Google) to be Goethe. One of my early friends & guides-to-life here, the German artist Petra Johnson, used to often remark on the sympathy between Chinese & German philosophical positions...which, given that what I know about either fits into a teaspoon, I had to take her word on. And then, suddenly, here's that connection, 18c Weimar to 21c China, writ large on the factory wall.

The Boss says that once, unexpected words, arriving in his mailbox, saved him from despair.

There's lots that I love about the factory visits. For one thing, there's the familiarity & pleasure of being in a workshop: so far, the factories resemble not the sweatshops of one's imagination but the production studios of various artist/craftspeople back home, just greatly expanded. For another thing, there's a kind of ease of communication because, while we have no spoken language in common, the workers & I share a language of materials and processes... something a kin to what I imagine musicians experience across cultures.

But what I love most about going out to the factories is how it shakes up my consciousness. The reality  in which one lives appears so steadily & unwaveringly as Reality... & then, encountering all these lives, all these dreams & aspirations, all this endurance & hard work & ingenuity & pride out at the factories, it so vividly brings home that there are so very many Realities out there, some so dramatically different from one's own.

And yet, proves the writing on the wall, between centuries & cultures & lots in life, there's connective thread... It ain't just a job.