Here are some images of things I have found in the street. In some cases, things that I wish I’d made.
There is a haphazard feeling to life in Huang Jai Ping. If people need some sort of structure to help them with their everyday life or work, then they just build it. What they build will tend to be a very ad – hoc, temporary structure purely constructed for a specific purpose. These structures are an everyday sight in Chongqing, which nobody questions or probably even notices; whether it is strings of sausages slung over a coathangers, hanging in trees, or baskets full of hot-pot vegetables propped up on a street bin, not to mention washing hanging from every available horizontal line or bar.
Before I left Manchester I was warned by the curator of the Chinese Art Centre, Ying Kwok, to beware of well meaning cleaners, who might tidy or throw my work away without realising. Due to the mundane materials I use to make work, I am already used to this being a problem in the UK. In China, however, I have not given anyone the opportunity to throw any work away, as it has only existed for a moment before I have dismantled it myself. This is generally the way I work, when in somebody else’s studio, but I had considered that the cheap and readily available materials here in Chongqing might encourage me to make more concrete structures, constructed over a longer period of time – however this seems less and less appropriate the longer I am here in Chongqing.
Jessica Longmore
Thursday 25th November
