Drawer # 2.1: Jam's Drawer

In a completely different mood: the one drawer in the cabinet created by someone else, the very     talented young Chinese artist, Yu Ji (于吉.) 

I met Yu Ji some 8 years ago, in my very first months of living in Shanghai. In anticipation of my 2005 show for Laumeier Sculpture Park in St Louis, I and a slew of Shanghai University students built miniature bamboo scaffolding all around the furniture in my apartment. The students were recommended to me by their teacher at Shanghai University, the artist Petra Johnson. There was lots of excitement around working with a foreign artist: some days there was up to 10 of us in my very small apartment on Tai Yuan Lu. It was my introduction to chaos China-style & it was great: cultural questions flying in all directions.

Yu Ji, or Jam, as she's known in English, was among those students. Though we are in generations & cultures far apart, we recognized a kinship in our sensibilities & so we continued to work together through the years of compiling the Cabinet. Most of the patterned boards that line the drawers are thanks to her good work cutting & gluing; in her great charming way, she has negotiated many a situation on my behalf for which I am very grateful.

I had thought of asking a number of artists friends to fill drawers but somehow, in the end, I only asked Jam. She filled hers in the weeks just after the death of her grandfather. He had been, at one time, a successful shop owner but persecutions by his neighbors during the period of the Cultural Revolution left him forever changed & fragile. He spent his days, as do many older Chinese men, tending to his birds, building and repairing their cages: the rails in the drawer are ones that Jam found while clearing his workbench. Her drawer stands as a memorial to him & has an eeriness like nothing else in the Cabinet. I feel really honored to have it; it preserves in the cabinet something of the quality of our conversations together over the years.

Drawer # 5.2 : Money & the chaos of memory

photo credit: Lisa Movius

We lay awake for hours last night, cloaked in a barrage of firepower, as the city hailed, on the 5th day of Spring Festival, the arrival of the God of Wealth. Though there were some spectacular fire blooms in the sky, on Money Night, it's all about the NoISE, noise, NOiSe, NOISE.

On the other end of the spectrum of seismic disturbance, are the moments preserved in the money drawer. Curiously packaged change handed over by taxi drivers; a coin flipped by the shop ladies at the corner convenience store to prove it counterfeit by the sound of its landing & the iron rust crawl under its silver surface (though the economics of manufacturing costs vs. just-over-6-cents purchase power elude me); jin mao/the golden cat, the Money Cat, beckoning silently at the back to draw in luck & fortune; a rubbing of Chairman Mao...

The largest paper bill in China is the 100RMB note, about $6.20US now, down from the $8 it was worth when we first arrived. In those days, banking was still pretty rare here - even the US/China joint-venture that He-Whom-I'm-Trailing was running, operated on a cash economy & it was the norm for a person purchasing a flat or a house to arrive with a suitcase or two full of 100 RMB notes. Consider  $150,000 in $10 bills. Consider walking around a US city with that much cash in hand.

There must be a good market in counterfeiting, anyway, as the 100RMB note with its portrait of Mao Tse Tung has dozens of secret detections built into it, including an invisible watermark also of the Chairman's visage. Pay with a Chairman Mao & the shop girl with hold it up to the light, examine it at great length from several angles until satisfied that it is safe to add to the cash drawer. A series of gestures once mimicked by a visiting colleague of ours, on receiving 100 RMB change from the shop girl, to great general hilarity.

One unusual day, instead of the scripted choreography, the girl grabbed a scrap receipt lying on the counter. In the blink of an eye, she'd placed the receipt over the 100RMB note, rubbed a coin across the slip of paper & there, to my great amazement, appeared, like Christ on the Shroud of Turin, Chairman Mao. Before she had a chance, I swept the receipt into my pocket.

"Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory," wrote Walter Benjamin while unpacking his library. It's these entirely miniscule moments that make up one's existence, moments at once utterly absurd & truly miraculous, and so easily lost into the myriad of details that make up a lifetime. There, in that moment of the revelation of the Chairman, the vague notion of the Cabinet suddenly coalesced into a collection of the fleeting.