The waiting room of the Department of Motor Vehicles is of course a dismal place: expectedly generic cream-coloured walls, empty except for an L.E.D. number call board and the state logo plaque, a television in the corner and a single formica counter top with ball-point pens on chains attached to it. The rows of chairs are arranged in two directions, presumably for maximum television visibility, but most people look down at mobile phones anyway, or stare into space somewhere beyond the range of the television set.

But today it is an exciting scene to return to, and waiting vacuously feels like a nostalgic act. It looks exactly the same as it did when I came here many years ago, the same bureaucratic cream wall for the same bureaucratic procedure. And for all it’s clichédness, i’ve missed the variety of colour presented behind all that blankness of expression that can only be witnessed in North America. There are probably as many planets and cultures here as there are individuals in the waiting room, but they’ve cleverly staggered the numbering system so that we don’t examine things too linearly. An Asian boy wearing a shiny black down jacket sits down next to me, his transparent document folder neatly organised with all the required paperwork. He doesn’t have to wait too long, and when his number is called I feel the surprise in the black-rimmed eyeglasses slouched on his nose as he walks away. There is a bearish old man who inches across the room with a walker, but his loud, craggy voice with a strong southern accent (enough to satisfy Michael) flirts with the DMV employee like a slick, young stud; other people in the waiting room smile with their heads down. Everyone is polite.

A skinny, stereotypically troubled looking girl (black eyeliner) wears a sleeveless short dress and lazily kicks her three bags——two black and one teal with an E.T. airbrush print on one side——on the ground in front of her as she moves up the queue. A mother and her two daughters, all dressed in black, wait seated together in the row in front of me. The girls take turns using their iPhones or handheld mirrors to check themselves in preparation for having new ID photos taken. Mother gets up at one point to remind the DMV employee to replenish the toilet paper in the women’s restroom and upon her return, says to the girls, “Well…that’s taken care of.”

Beyond a staggered numbering system of waiting, it is difficult to know whether or not we exist in the same time-space. How did you assume that there was a consensual notion of reality? When could we have used the word “us”? For all our attempts to describe it so, how do we know a relation?

My thoughts move from the backs of people’s heads through to the ninja movie on TV. Flying black-clad zombies are pierced by tips on how to save money and political campaign advertisements. There aren’t any plants here. The mini-blinds along the windows are all open to differing degrees. It’s cloudy outside.

Attention diverts to my own electronic devices now, too. I brought the silver and black mobile phone you left when you moved away. I put my SIM card in it and suddenly our lives are mingled into one interface, except that much of mine is sharpened into little rectangles of an unrecognised encoding. Bureaucracy, an organised form of protectionism, just as easily renders us illiterate as it claims efficiency. For the same reason it is not possible to delete the folder of your text messages, so these few months of your life stay stuck in my hands, another life in another city not here, amidst 60 odd foreign faces at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Everyone looks bland here, but somehow it makes certain relations all the more apparent, and I feel close to you somehow, looking inside-out. I wish you were here to pass the time with me, to run errands together and wait in line and make bureaucratic procedures intimate, like bitter jokes about getting married and having kids.

These are momentary islands of waiting for another radical shift of the senses. Waiting is like insurance for belongingness, and realising now that I’ve missed you all this time I feel a closeness that only occurs in distance. not sure whether I prefer it this way or not.

I ask the attendant behind the computer how long the wait is. “That’s the question of the day”, he quips, and of course we both know that we can never really know how long we have to wait. Ask how much work we can get done in an interim period, or ask how a simple quip and come-back rides us through the day. Ask a slippery American tongue, ask for a decade. When I asked her once about love she said she would choose the option that gave the most possibility. But even no is a possibility. So I try not to count too much.

biography

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“Visibility makes bare the conflictual nature of autonomy.”

“Visibility makes bare the conflictual nature of autonomy.”

I don’t remember anymore exactly what context these words were written, random scribblings here and there, nowhere near as precise as her drawings, my notes having lost their specificity in time and space——depending upon one’s mood, everything can be about art or love or politics. The truth of that is an X-X-X, or “cha cha cha“, as she says, and even if i didn’t want to teach anybody anything, words fall out sloppily and ego still wishes for someone to pick them up.

“Visibility makes bare the conflictual nature of autonomy.”

I write it down because i don’t know who you are, or perhaps that’s merely a reflection of how little i know myself. Our togetherness isn’t really about a specificity in time and space, so there was no need to ask for visibility in the first place; we could accept speed, the vaguenesses of motion, non-places and all that sort. And why, would that invisibility make us more connected in some way, as if we could melt into some general idea, the seamlessness of an a-history? “Let’s not leave any traces,” I remember thinking, but my, now isn’t that sloppy.

Autonomy was seldom and always the question. Even in art, love, politics and science, like cha cha cha, it was actually the struggle of a singularity, call it human, but this singularity was much more a plea, a collective bargain, only yeah, maybe without singular demand. To be seen is not the same as being heard, and if we tried merely to subsist, voiceless for centuries, would that mean we were toiling backwards, trapped or free? She said today, “It would be very difficult to leave, being born into this kind of life, and if we did, it would be very difficult to come back.” I thought of the freedom of precipices, another dramatic moment, that articulation such that we are changed yet again, forever. What does it mean to be heard?

Are we co-conspirators, simply because you see me; what makes this withness, and if love is the thing to turn anyone into people, what holds us together and must we stand apart from everyone else? There are wars in politics, disagreements in science, revolutions in art. But love is both an anyone and a people, constantly exchanging identities, on a precipice. I see you…

—all images taken Autumn 2011 from 张谷英 Zhangguying, Hunan Province

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courtship

china is like greece. china is like isreal. china is like peru. china is like
china is not like.

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展览题为“如何独处” The Title of the Show is ‘How to Be Alone’

1// 《但愿我能为您描绘得更好》第二期里献给友子的歌: “菜单／那么今夜何处是京都／猫咪马琳”（演唱者：“声音向导”乐队，声音介入部分：何颖雅、何京蕴） From the publication iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter number two, for Tomoko: “Menu/So Where Is Kyoto Tonight?/Mullin The Mog” by DirectorSound with inserts by Elaine W. HO and Anouchka van DRIEL
2// “解手与生产”，尝试为高灵口头翻译Paul CHAN的文本  “Pee and Production”, trying to orally translate a text by Paul CHAN to GAO Ling

3// 爸爸骑着摩托， 儿子坐在后座上打着快板， 我们一起在儿童电影夜场喝了点酒，家作坊2010年  The boy comes home with his father playing kuaiban, we had been drinking at the kids’ movie night, HomeShop 2010
4// “你好呀，劳伦斯老师！” 这段对我外婆的采访录音是1991年我中学历史课上的家庭作业——“口述历史”，我妈妈也在“其间”。 “Hellll-o Mizz Lawrence!” An oral history project, my grandmother, mother and me, 1991

5// 五岁的我，在数数和唱歌  When I was 5 years old, counting and singing
6// 我在购买的迷你SD卡上找到了70多首歌，从中选了十首歌并通过数码处理，把它们的节拍统一成每分钟120拍（特殊感谢Ryan KING在数码处理） Music found on the micro-SD cards purchased to create this work, whereby among 70 songs in total ten were chosen and digitally synced at 120 beats per minute (processing courtesy of Ryan KING)

—–
装置在《第三房：如何独处》展览，站台中国，2010年11月11日－2011年1月24日
Installation part of The Third Party: How to Be Alone (or nowhere else am i safe from the question: why here?), on view at Platform China, 11 November 2010 – 24 January 2011

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sunday

walking around a new city on a sunday morning, thinking about cakes and the lives you will never live. getting lost. it’s raining and the sloping roof of the opera house makes you miss architecture. a scone with fruits and nuts, the king riding by.

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