Goodbye Shanghai. I will miss the haze and height, the whitewashed trunks, the red pearlescence, the “rooms pretending to be boats”, the clasp of the fog, the kindness, the hard work, the optimism and the open mouths. I will not forget the contradictions: the wealth and obedience, the constraint and potential, the attention and distraction, the one-sided opinion in the impossible search for identical pairs. The feeling tall but small.
I have filled up my notebook, my cameras and my head with attempts to record sensations, memories and ideas for new work: intangible heritage; broken eggshells; the stone’s curve, weighed down by thoughts; the pecking process of short fragments; beige tiles, plastic ivy and concrete spider; invisible stumbling blocks in the path of human development; worm-eaten pre-destiny; what knowledge is and what it is not; the modern ruin; the satisfaction of order; nature plus life support and “those for whom all space is one single point.”
Xie xie.
