Drawer #66: Pinwheels!

Summer breeze thru a shanghai pinwheel

A video posted by @cshmigel on Jul 21, 2015 at 11:11am PDT

The summer blew by without blogging but the Cabinet itself, in its new NC home, 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.

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 Hillyer Art Space.

Along the bottom of the cabinet are 3 large drawers.

And  it occurred to me that one of them would be a good home for my Shanghai Daily book, seen below as installed in my first "chinese" show, Chinese Garden for the Delights of Roaming Afar, at Laumeier Sculpture Park back in 2005.

The book is a collection of articles & photos extracted from the Shanghai Daily, 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 Shanghai Daily with its strange facts about things like the percentage of cookware at the market found to be faulty & the obstructive dangers of laundry displays & 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 not love "Chicken & Chatting prove keys for long life" from today's edition:

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

I also loved the little notebooks I taped my selections into, with their retro-futuristic covers (as Shanghai's urban philosopher, Anna Greenspan, might call them) and their interior pages gridded & lined in various ways appropriate to their subject.

Eventually, I bound all the little notebooks together into a satisfyingly chunky paperback.

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:

My friend Petra Johnson has been making great use of this format to document her Walk With Me 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...

But those violet sequins are going to have to go somewhere; they are just too luscious!

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.

Drawer # 7.5: Pink String

Drawer 7.5 celebrates the hardest-working & most humble member of the Shanghai Material Goods Society, one of my very favorite Shanghai things: the ubiquitous Pink Plastic String. To be found for sale everywhere, in every hardware, stationary, housewares, you-name-it shop.

But, apparently, so much a part of the texture of the city that in my entire archive of photos, there's only the above two records of its existence. But, trust me, it's everywhere and it's used for everything.

Bundling up parcels, precious & scrap...

Stringing things up ...

(Cheating a bit re: pink on the far right but it's such an inspired use of plastic string!)

Repairs... 

For additional "native" chair repairs, check out Photographer Michael Wolf's "Bastard Chairs."

The pink is sometimes coral (as in the drawer) which marks its quality as a bit dicer than that of the purer translucent pink. It can also, sometimes, just very, very occasionally, be found in delightfully bright green...

(No doubt this, my favorite product, is made of recycled plastic in some ferociously polluting/health-damaging way. Check out Journalist Adam Minter's Shanghai Scrap blog for a fascinating & horrifying look at the Chinese recycling industry: shredded reds here & fields of grey there. But it really is just about the only packing string you can buy...)

I hated pink, as a child, especially pastel-ly girl pink; I thought it a totally sissy color...maybe it was on principle, or maybe, it was early aesthetics as I thought pale blue was pretty yucky too. It wasn't until deep adulthood, when I became fast friends with a two year old who wouldn't wear anything but, that I really started to appreciate pink's special glow. Here in China, pink matches everything & itself in all its own varieties, doesn't have any gender connotations, & men wear it freely...but still, I kinda love that it's girly pink that's doing the yeomen's job of tethering Shanghai to itself.

Photo credit above: Bruno David; all others: Christina Shmigel

From the top: 1. Coral Pink string with that other hard Shanghai worker, the blue plastic hose  2. Coral pink string        3. Pink string: you can never have too much  4. Random bits of plastic string collected on the street. All the compartments are lined with Chinese brocades: this was the  first drawer in which I understood how to use them in a more collaged sort of way...

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.