Bicycles and tricylces haul all kinds of things: furniture, collected material for recycling, loads of market produce, as well as getting people from a to b. There are bike lanes on many streets and mobile bike repair stops to repair flat tires, etc, on many busy corners. Herds of bikes cross major intersections en masse. I appreciate the range of riders and the ingenuity of the people who load their bikes up.I’m thinking about making a small picture book that would archive the range of bicycles and their uses in Beijing.
Garry (Kennedy, my partner), arrived on Saturday from Halifax, Canada, and he’ll be here for the residency until the end of October, too. We were thinking of getting our hands on a couple of bikes, but we’re having second thoughts, even though we’ve rented bikes in Berlin for three years in a row. The traffic, including bike traffic, is thicker here and crossing at the six-lane intersections is daunting.
Here’s Kelly working on the translation with the layout person at the printers. That evening Cath Clover and other Red Gate Residency folks were at an opening at the Pickled Art Centre, run by Li Gang. That's where I took this picture of the back of a four-year old's t-shirt.
Beijing t-shirts
Many people here wear t-shirts with texts on them. It seems to be a trendy thing to do. These are often in English and may be expressions, or simply words, like love, or brandnames, like Nike. (Catherine Clover, who is also on this blog and in the Red Gate residency, remarked that brands are a common language. If you say to a cab driver, take me to Starbucks, you can be sure there is no confusion.) In thinking about the way corporate space informs who we are and what we do, I’m interested in the way brands are inserted and penetrate our lives. You can see this in previous work I’ve done including 24/7, Testdrive and Totalled (www.cathybusby.ca).
I’m asking myself if wearing such t-shirts is emblematic of an idealized freedom of expression, or do the wearers just like the colours and design? Is it a happy expression of a move away from the uniform and uniformity/conformity?
I started taking pictures of people wearing t-shirts a couple of days ago. I soon realized I should ask their permission to do this. So yesterday I met with Red Gate’s translator, Sol Nan, known in English as Kelly. I explained that I thought I wanted a card, like a business card to give to people whose t-shirts I wanted to snap. I asked her if this would make sense to people, or if it would be too much of an intrusion, or just not make sense culturally. She thought it would work. We went to a printer’s where Kelly and the layout person worked it out. I’ll pick up the cards tomorrow morning.
