Virtual Drawer #6: Shanghai Colorways

So I mentioned that I'm in reclusion with color lately...

Clockwise from top left: 1. Coils of  large plastic tubing for I know not what 2. my neighbor's bedsheets hanging below my bedroom window (personal space much?) 3. stacks of plastic tubs  (one of my favorite stripey sights)  4. the bench on our subway line  (line 10) , dubbed by the Shanghai architect/tour guide Spencer Dodington, as the LL line,  the "Lovely Lavender Laowai Line." (Laowai means foreigner & this particular line, passing as it does thru many neighborhoods favored by laowais, seems to carry an disproportionate number of us,) The red part is the "courtesy seat." In a city where commity is often lacking, people are really very conscientious about giving it up for those in need.

Drawer # 2.4 : Shadow Puppet Laundry

(Aww, my first .gif...& something that feels much more like "my" aesthetic...)

4 bits of laundry drying on a clothesline suspended in the middle of the sidewalk.  A windy day.  Shadows re-drawing the clothes over and over again...

Drawer 2.4: Graphite drawing & milk paint on cardboard

Photo credit: Bruno David

Shanghai Daily # 1: Laundry

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

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

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