这一天，我们坐在阴影之中、学习了一下围棋、同时聊了一会儿天。这一“天”，一个关于公共空间的一天、关于象征性行为的价值的一天、以及与孔子对比庄子靠个体（个人）社会的一天。
on this day we sat in shadows, tried to learn how to play Go, and had a talk about public space, the value of symbolic acts and Zhuangzi versus Confucius’ possibilities for a society that relies on the individual.
这一“天”貌似与任何天的一样，日落时观众开始围绕旗杆等看降旗。穿着白上衣黑裤子的一小队广场卫队进场，队长在按节奏喊“下！”队员便棋子般一个一个被“下”到看客周围的固定位置上。象征性貌似也在呼应我们，所以我们再下了一盘大棋。
the close of this day appears to be like any other day, where an audience crowds around at dusk to watch the daily lowering of the national flag. black and white-clad guards march in, and their commander shouts, “xia!” in a timed rhythm, releasing them one-by-one like playing pieces in stationed positions around the perimeter of tourists. Symbolism acts back upon us, and we play another game of go.
摄影：大米
filled with initials and dotted with territories (for aka-chan)
Dearest aka-chan,
Has it been a big year for you, preceding and to come after the day yesterday which was indeed a day? i think about you often this year, you know, something like the distance of six months and the time of always. it makes me happy your daughter declares you are four years-old this time.
Actually, i celebrated your day in the city where we travelled, four years and 11 months ago. i wrote a message to z and we will meet after the 14th of this month. and probably i will meet mevrouw a at the beginning of next month. and f later in that month. but there are many more initials that have been lost, and sometimes this feels like the ocean, sometimes it feels sad. but i still don’t want to admit regret, so last week i visited an ocean filled with initials and dotted with territories, an ocean that knows very vast and very small at the same time.
At the bottom of a granite hill, there are many seafood restaurants which make this area a popular place to visit. you have to pass through small alleyways filled with creatures in glass tanks, and when you see a jade green postbox you can turn slightly to the right, then keep walking to get to the sea. this is one of the old postboxes from the colonial era, one of only seven left in the city bearing the cipher of King George V, but its freshly painted green-blue is really just a bad moustache.
when you emerge from the alley and arrive at the ocean, actually it looks not so much like the sea but a river. There is another bank with another hill on the opposite side, with granite that is identically uniform and equigranular (the average grain size is just over 2mm) to the granite on this side. There are some aunties and uncles playing cards on this side. Maybe there are on the other side, too. Although it is less than 500 metres across to the other side, it is wide enough not to see aunties and uncles over there. But my aunt used to live on that side, maybe only for about one or two years. Now she lives closer to this side, closer to where our family grew up, which maybe makes sense because here we are at the gateway for the Fujianese immigrants coming into the city. There were also many immigrants from Chiuchow, which is further east and further north from here as you keep heading along the coast. If you keep going further and further east and further and further north, you will arrive in Japan, and it is through this gateway that many Japanese merchants also passed, as well as Portuguese merchants on their way back from Japan.
The ocean is very vast. But here it is very small, less than 500 metres across, and there is a small temple for the goddess 天后 Tinhau. Actually, it is better luck to call her 媽祖 Matsu. She is the goddess of the seafarers, and you will find many temples in this region dedicated to her. Once i visited her island and sat on the cliff of her knees, looking over to China. I fell asleep at one point, and when I awoke, I was in China. Twice when people awoke here, they saw Matsu resting in the clouds——once in 1953, the year my mother was born, and once just last year, when I was halfway between here and Japan.
If you entered the harbour from the east, perhaps Chiuchow or Fujian or Japan, her presence at this gateway would have calmed you, and upon passing through the inlet the water would have indeed been calmer, and you would have rested easy only to be ransacked by the pirates watching from above on the granite hill. there have been gangs and clans and colonisers here, changing hands and moving around for longer than we know. there have been territories since the beginning of these beginnings… something is always east to somebody else. sometimes the view is long and vast, and sometimes it is less than 500 metres across.
anything fun going on
Is ‘Anything fun going on?’ a funny or weird question? I thought it was quite quotidian——’怎么样?’、’What’s up’——but if it all sounds too rhetorically polite and this context of digital correspondence should eliminate inquiries into some IRL, please accept my sincerest apologies.
unwarranted aside into anecdote. i was in a shopping mall the other day and while browsing a selection of a proud to be Texas-born international company’s fine wristwatches, the perky shop assistant asked, ‘So what have you been up to today?’, the unfortunate response being my fleeing the store. What should be reported of my day to a pouncing stranger tracking my eyeball movements to see which watch i’m attracted to——or as if now the policing and surveying has become so diffuse that everyone, even the shopgirl, is a viable check and measure on the status update of each and every consumer. Because yes we are all consumers now, taking precedent over ‘citizenry’, no more obviously felt than by way of those worldly practices people are able to maintain relatively easily in every place (latte, hamburger, uber ride). Of course, this is an observation of privilege coming from an (un)fortunate frequent traveler of ‘destinations’ that bear Starbucks logos as opposed to those other greater parts of the world still lacking decent infrastructure and education for its inhabitants, parts of the world that are still war-torn or ‘uncivilised’, parts of the world where the imperatives for freedom are not yet measured by the variety of packaged goods. And even if you don’t frequent Starbucks, or McDonald’s, or hitch uber, the fact that there are equally plentiful ‘organic’ and ‘artisanal’ backups is another minima moralia.
That is the fun going on, actually. We’re having so much fucking fun everyday we don’t know what to do with ourselves. Asking ‘anything fun going on’ is offensive, maybe, you’re right. Like swiping feeds, goddamit, information bloodsucking, ‘consumers are always right’.
‘Anything fun going on’ is like the airline attendant at the check-in counter who, since I’ve told her my profession is ‘artist’, asks where my most recent favourite exhibition has been. She is curious to know not only the city but the name of the institution, and for a moment i imagine her honestly believable sincerity. She proceeds to ask me which show was my favourite. A show that I have participated in or any show in general? Yours. Okay, hmmm… trying to be quick and effortless (speed and style as truth), I tick off a show that took place at a gallery in a different city. What is the name of the gallery? And as I name a name, I wonder about her interest in the institutions of culture, about the casual sophistication of big brothering these days, at this makeshift tin terminal that appears to have been built specifically for flights to the United States and Israel. This is perhaps due to the extra demands for security, both from the increased chance of malicious attacks and from the U.S. imposition of preemptive security measures abroad to prevent such attacks. So when a young Italian woman in uniform asks me about the fun details of my life, a subjective displacement has already taken place, and cynicism says it’s not a person talking to me, but the mechanisms of a system which have already striated us into one of a few alternating roles: policing agent, perpetrator, victim or just another piece of data. Friendliness as an appropriation for smoother extraction. Consumer interaction as marketing as profiling as social control as endless production.
You always put the state and the spy as counterforces, but I am afraid ‘the gravitational force of what is bourgeois’ within us entertains the story in its complexities of rendering forces ambiguous. Spy works for state. What is the name of the state? And how do you do today?
Posted by 丫 | reply »where we used to say words to one another
opportuning: “love is excuse 4 exhibition”、two salons later、後她的後 post the post、inventories pending、雪上加霜 adding insult to、work on work、最爛的編輯 the worst editor、女 woman、that 18:21 song、his 8 year-old golden age、responsibility for fetish、怎麼互相扶持 how do we support one another、怎麼說「nurture」、剝削朋友 exploiting friends、the gathering of failed proposals as a form of depth、schwag politics、不要在我面前說「效率」這個詞、北京徵集 open call to beijing、”it’s complex [emoticon] and rather not over wechat”、。。。
Posted by 丫 | reply »After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
it was our dream come true
i miss some of you some of the time
sketch from 《公众 PUBLIC》, 2008-2009年
iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter went online in the first month of 2006 and the first post was backdated thematically for the 31st of December, 2005.
it could all be a lie, making long sentences and abusing commas, for over ten years now. i wanted to make a book, but she could see no reason for more excess of materialisation, another she and we just never have the time. the service desk of on-demand distractions is backlogged, piled up. and there goes…
there is a lack of reason for loose configurations, too, here and there encounters, wanting to overhaul, but remembering where you came from.
HE SHE WE THEY YOU YOU YOU I HER SO PRONOUNS TO
BEGIN THE
DANCE CALLED WASHING WHOSE NAME DERIVES FROM AN
ALCHEMICAL FACT THAT AFTER A SMALL STILLNESS THERE
IS A
SMALL STIR AFTER A GREAT STILLNESS A GREAT STIR
—Anne Carson
all love and dust to the other roundtable of 王尘尘 Cici and 刘心宇 LIU Xinyu this month.
the .3 percent
he said, “our progress is not inevitable“.
Posted by 丫 | reply »
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