unforgetting
re-archiving xintiandi Cherry Xinlan Yang B.Arch Thesis RISD May 2020
Unforgetting: Re-Archiving Xintiandi A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Bachelors in Architecture in the Department of Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. By: Cherry Xinlan Yang Rhode Island School of Design Class of 2020 Approved By:
Hansy Better Barraza, Professor | Primary Advisor
Silvia Acosta, Professor| Secondary Advisor
What is a thesis for me? A thesis for me is a conscientious, sincere investigation that probes an identified problem to find non-conclusive answers on my own terms. Thesis is a journey that will write itself, requiring my close attention as it beckons me to explore unknown paths. As I attempt to answer the questions that I throw at my thesis, it will very likely respond with even more questions. Hopefully, I will end up somewhere completely unexpected and different from where I began. A thesis for me is to settle in with doubt, make it a friend and regard those doubts as a mirror to reexamine my existing beliefs. I will actively engage with challenges to my biases; if I ever find myself getting a little too comfortable, maybe that is a sign to be wary. In a world of many alternative perceptions of realities, this thesis will challenge me to reflect on my own value systems, how I have arrived at my current perceptions and how I can move forward in relation to the other value systems within my context. I am a female, cisgender, ethnically Chinese daughter and sister, who was born in China but spent most of her life in the western contexts of New Zealand and America. While it is necessary to move forward starting with my own lens that has been built by my circumstances, I must read, discuss, watch and observe as widely and extensively as possible to begin to understand alternative lenses to constantly frame and reframe my worldview. Thesis will ask me to set my own guidelines while maintaining critical self-examination and remaining open-minded to external critique. In my personal thesis journey, I will have to confront the answer searcher within me that has predominated the way I operate throughout my education. I must set aside my preoccupation with the traditional educational certainty where success was tallied out of 100. Answers were black and white, until the uncertainties in the logical safety net of the sciences became apparent. Thesis is not about trying to say the right answer, but about making wellinformed decisions and knowing that those decisions might change. When faced with uncertainty, I should remind myself to pursue the questions with courage, be unafraid to take risks, make mistakes, and remain hopeful that discovery is on its way. A thesis is a search for truth on my own terms. It demands an acceptance that there is no objective, final answer. It will require an intimate acquaintance with the process to explore enough paths to forge my own truth while remaining open to future conversations.
“Like most Shanghai residents who had lived through such sweeping historical changes, they regarded the Communist Party as unapproachable, and saw themselves as people left over from a previous era. Moreover, living in the heart of society, caught up in
the swirl of everyday life, they barely had a chance to develop a coherent opinion of themselves, let alone grand concepts like “the nation” or “political power.” They are not to be faulted for their narrow frame of reference, because
a large city is like a huge machine that turns according to the principles dictated by its own structure; only its tiniest components have a human texture, and it is these tiny components that people hold on to, otherwise they would fall into the vacuum of abstraction.”
Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, Writers Publishing House, 1995.
thesi unfor
is statement: rgetting This thesis is a re-archival of a city’s suppressed narratives to provide spaces for alternative voices in order to contest dominant and singular truths. The self-exotification of historical structures repurposed as persistent commercial containers promotes a dominant narrative, sanitising the story of a place while propagating state-sponsored agendas. The remnants, erasures and replacements within a city are subject to those with power to select what a city remembers and forgets, of what once was, and what it has become. Previous governmental opposition to signifiers of class is now contradicted by the promotion of gentrified spaces as part of a new language of Chinese identity and citizenship. Rather than seeing them as spaces of exclusion, Chinese citizens are encouraged to see them as exemplary. Such deliberate image-making tactics denies room for the voices of its people, some of which are in conflict with the agenda of the state’s unquestionable authority and consummate correctness.
Archive
(v.) an act of selectively maintaining the remembrance events, necessitating selective omittance from the archive resulting in forgetting
Collective consciousness
A collection of beliefs, ideas and moral attitudes that are influenced by the proliferation of sounds, images and texts within a society; used to include or exclude ideas to generate sentiments; multifaceted, conflicting
Collective memory
“In each epoch memory reconstructs an image of the past that is in accord with the predominant thoughts of the society.” - Maurice Halbwachs
Individual memory
“The problem is with crude concepts of collectivity, which assume a homogeneity that is rarely, if ever, present... In practice, the construction of a completely collective memory is at best an aspiration of politicians, which is never entirely fulfilled and is always subject to contestations” - Guy Beiner
Historical memory
How an individual remembers events is influenced by how they learn of those events and how those events are portrayed, manipulating one’s perception of events and parties involved Not subjective, but multifaceted; a fluid way in which groups of people create and identify with narratives about historical periods or events, sometimes based on present circumstances.
who is The The The and
user, whom I design for user can not exit from dialogue with a place user are the bodies that arrive with a purpose without
Memories are passed down through generations Some are explicit, others latent Remembered and repressed Forgotten yet existent Dormant memories from another time and place Fragile are the memories and the bodies to hold them My audience are the people who repress, reconstruct, revise, re-remember. But my users never knew. They are the ones who come after.
the user?
Urban Artifact
The urban artefact is not not only the physical thing in the city, but also all of its history, geography, structure and connection with the general life of the city - Rossi Objects within a city that perpetuates the permanence of an idea, often about the history of Shanghai that prefers to propel only ‘positive’ memories
Monument as a nemonic device
“In fact, I am inclined to believe that persistence in an urban artifact often causes it to become identified as a monument, and that a monument persists in the city both symbolically and physically. A monument’s persistence or permanence is a result of its capacity to constitute the city, its history and art, its being and memory.” Rossi
Re-archive
To reflect on the original methods of archiving as well as the content and interpretation of the archive, and to archive again with more inclusive lenses.
Programming
a means of positioning the user in the present and relating them to the past memories and present conditions.
Site
Spectator
A site for my thesis is the space where remembrance and forgetting occurs; in the physical absolute space transformed into social spaces and in the imagined space transformed into memories. A present witness viewing and interacting with objects with memory valence
programming
Programming provides meanings and comes with an agenda, which means it can also change, evolve and develop in response to evolving socioeconomic and political conditions. It redefines itself according to the users, region, time, and events in its proximity. Programming for my thesis demands a confrontation with its user. The user can not exit from complicity in the place-consuming. In ‘The Culture of Cities’, Lewis Mumford speaks of the interrelationship between the mind and the urban forms. Architecture’s formal condition and the city embodies the sensibility, attitude, and dominant worldview of a given culture; it encompasses the private desires, shared beliefs, as well as the conflicts of a people, which results in both the construction and destruction of the city. Therefore, the programme of a city is an expression of its people and its power structures through not only the monumentality of its landmarks but also of the perception of the stories embedded within its artifacts and what that means for its people. A programme is a means of positioning the user in the present and relating them to the past memories and present conditions.
siting Site is about the projection of the city from its people, and its perception in relation to time and place. It is inspired by the scaling of memory in the imagination of the city, its people, and its visitors. The remembering and forgetting of trauma can be manifested or hidden within built environment of the site; it can lead to the reading of memories that self-defy or coexist with the imaginary. A finished image of the city feigns wholeness and truthfulness. The constant erasure and building of new spaces is the busybody of the city and its obsession with its present capitalist image. Site is a provider of context; such a context reacts to new interventions, events and actions within the site. The way site is documented, analysed and experienced affects its representation and consequent perception. A site for my thesis is the space where remembrance and forgetting occurs; in the physical absolute space transformed into social spaces and in the imagined space transformed into memories.
Like those birds that lay their eggs only in other species’ nest, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it. It receives its form and its implantations from external circumstances, even if it furnishes the content (the missing detail). Its mobilization is inseparable from an alteration. More than that, memory derives its in terventionary force from its very capacity to be altered— unmoored, mobile, lacking any fixed position. Its permanent mark is that it is formed (and forms its “capital”) by arising from the other (a circumstance) and by losing it (it is no more than a memory). There is a double alteration, both of memory, which works when something affects it, and of its object, which is remembered only when it has disappeared. Memory is in decay when it is no longer capable of this alteration. It constructs itself from events that are independent of it, and it is linked to the expectation that something alien to the present will or must occur. Far from being the reliquiry or trash can of the past, it sustains itself by believing in the existence of ‘possibilities and by vigilantly awaiting them, constantly on the watch for their appearance. -Michel de Certeau
city objects and memory The city is a catalogue of selective memories that is subject to those with power to decide what it remembers and forgets. The municipal government and corporate developers treat parts of Shanghai as a tabula rasa. The erasures brings about the forgetting of certain histories and belies the power structures inherent in the development of a city. Henri Lefebvre refers to lived spaces as part of place-making: a space becomes a place as a result of being lived in. Meanwhile, the city’s social spaces are products of social processes as “means of control...of domination, of power.� If so, who gets to decide what is remembered and what is forgotten? Whose memories are perpetuated and whose are repressed? What version of history is preserved? In between these histories, what popular memories are conserved?
trains many of China’s elite, didn’t recognize the image of “The Take Man,” the young man with shopping bags in hand standing defiantly in front of a column of PLA tanks on Chang’an Avenue near Tiananmen Square in 1989. That iconic image, which is seared into our collective consciousness and continues to speak poignantly to the West of Chinese aspirations for freedom and democracy, cannot be found in newspapers or in magazines
Stephen Grace, N. Nosirrah, Shanghai: Life, Love and Infrastructure in China's City of the Future, Sentient Publications, 2010.
Old people in Shanghai, still reeling from the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, believe that passionate debates about politics lead to social chaos and disaster; young people in Shanghai are too preoccupied with making and spending money to discuss China’s political system. Producers of a PBS Frontline documentary (employing somewhat questionable methodology) concluded that undegraduates at Beijing University, which
or on television in China. To find it online in China is not easy (thanks to American companies Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Cisco providing the Chinese government with the technology it needs to police the Internet), but the image can be located with a bit of persistence and technological savvy by using a proxy server or encrypted virtual private network to breach the Great Firewall.
collective memory
Maurice Halbwachs advanced the idea of “collective memory” in his 1950 work La Memoire collective. A society has collective memory which is contingent upon the framework within which such a group is situated. As such, the memory of the group exists beyond the individual. The individual’s understanding of the past is therefore linked to the group consciousness.1 I would like to be careful in distinguishing such a collective memory from historical memory, one that is institutionalised, particularly ones that are statesponsored. Pierre Nora argues that memory becomes a subject of study especially when great changes take place in society and rupture the flow of events.2 In Shanghai, its semi-colonial and communist past passes into memory as recent economic and technological industrialisation since the Chinese economic reform has ruptured and remoulded its city fabric. Where certain places were not erased in its reconstruction, its inner replacements catapult a reality that is no longer correspond with its memory, instead of constructing new narratives contrary to the memory of its people and its past events. However, the thesis is aware that ideology is inevitable in the construction of historical narratives, which counters the fragmented collective memory of its people. Guy Beiner contends that “The problem is with crude concepts of collectivity, which assume a homogeneity that is rarely, if ever, present...In practice, the construction of completely collective memory is at best an aspiration of politicians, which is never entirely fulfilled and is always subject to contestations”.3 In drawing upon the idea of collective memory, the thesis is aware of the fragmentation of different remembrances and the possibilities of forgetting. In some instances, an assumed homogenous ‘collective memory’ accepted as a dominant narrative acts oblivious to the suffering of others.
memory of This thesis contends that there are memories housed within architectural and urban forms. If Aldo Rossi speaks of urban artefacts as objects that propel permanence, then they also propagate memories. As the functions of a monument are replaced, the artefact shifts into that of memory. Shanghai propagates certain present and historical images of its own archive through operations of erasure and replacement. Many of Shanghai’s buildings under its list of cultural relics protection unit involves the preservation of buildings from its colonial-era that produces an image of historical past with replaced interior functions. Alongside rapid development of skyscrapers, the municipal government demolished 3.65 million square meters of old housing deemed ‘derelict’, while only buildings and sites with a link to the city’s colonial past are selected for preservation.1 However, this thesis begs to question: whose memories are propagated? Who do such narrated memories benefit? James E. Young, in his essay Memory and CounterMemory, contends that the making of monuments produce myth-making and concretises the narrative of a nation or city.2 Therefore, I would like to question the way in which monumentality in Shanghai has to lead to the construction of single narratives of a glamourous historic past, devoid of the people’s trauma from its communist-socialist past. Moreover, Young reminds us that neither a monument nor its meaning is everlasting since the construction of the monument is dependent on the social, political, and historical values of its shifting contemporary times. If so, then how do we construct a framework upon which monuments can be laid to remind viewers of such ephemerality and heterogeneity of meaning embedded within single monumental sites? In such a tightly controlled space in China with regards to criticism from its people, how can a monument become a counter to its own authoritarian message by reducing the passivity of the spectator and invite a covert engagement from its viewers?
f a city I would argue that the monuments of Shanghai propel certain dominant narratives, which are state-sponsored and provoke a narrative that is glorifying of both its current and previous communist governments. Memory has largely been replaced by reconstructed histories, inflected with nationalism and the single state narrative. As a Chineseborn student learning in the western environment, I was taken by the denunciation of figures who were previously considered heroes and then deemed villainous or vice verse, dependent upon the conditions of ideologies at the time. Consequently I was conflicted about the history of my heritage and birth nation. This thesis of monumentalised memory hence involves the perception of memory and histories to its people and its visitors.
Previous page: 1 Hutton, Patrick H. “Collective Memory and Collective Mentalities: The HalbwachsAriés Connection.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 15 2. Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory. Columbia Univ. Press, 1997, p1-2. 3 Beiner, Guy. “Troubles with Remembering; or, The Seven Sins of Memory Studies.” Dublin Review of Books, 1 Nov. 2017.
1 Wu, Fulong. Chinas Emerging Cities The Making of New Urbanism. Taylor and Francis, 2007. 2 Young, James E. “Memory and Counter-Memory.” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 9, 1999, http:// www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/ issues/9.
Monuments are part of the circulation of collective memories. The representation of buildings that monumentalise memories are instrumental to the perception of themselves and therefore of its memories, instilling constructed remembrances and forced forgetting. Furthermore, top-down preservations of such monuments can lead to the construction of cultural heritage that may be imposing amnesia upon its people.1 Monuments and maps act as the primary representations of a city to its people and its visitors. The completeness and finished nature of a place feings wholeness and truthfulness, when in fact the separate parts of a city are ever-shifting, constantly negotiating both time and space. When preservationist moves force historical imagery upon present buildings to achieve a past original ideal, the unwitting spectator buys into its narrative. Past imagery is used in the present to manipulate history and collective memory in a theatrical display.2 Memory is not evenly remembered throughout a city. Memory congregates especially in the monuments; how are these monuments represented? What interventions and processes can reveal the manipulations of “historical pastiche� that have constructed narratives that supplant or suppress past trauma?
1 Bilsel, Can. (2017). Architecture and the Social Frameworks of Memory: A Postscript to Maurice Halbwachs' "Collective Memory". Iconarp International J. of Architecture and Planning. 5. 01-09. 10.15320/ICONARP.2017.14. 2 Boyer, Christine M. The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
In order to construct this narrative of interiority (the interior of the self) it is necessary to obliterate the object’s context of origin. In these examples eclecticism rather than pure seriality is to be admired because, if for no other reason, it marks the heterogeneous organisation of the self, a self capable of transcending the accidents and dispersions of historical reality. But eclecticism at the same time depends upon the unstated seriality it has bounded from. Not simply a consumer of the objects that fill the decor, the self generates a fantasy in which it becomes producer of those objects, a producer by arrangement and manipulation. -Susan Stewart
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temporality of the trauma in the aftermath
My process began in the fall with the temporality of the trauma as existing in the aftermath. past events are inaccessible and unrepresentable, but always under evolving and shifting interpretations from a moving present.
memory reproduced
memory er
The familiarity of an object as a vessel of memory becomes complicated in its reproduction as a replica, faithful to the original but not the original itself. How much of the original aura can objects of recollection contain?
If no one rememb then does it even happened?
The original bott the replica has b and its evidence being embedded i white, rectagula event of destruct irretrievably in t
rased
bers the event, n matter that it
tle which informed been destroyed erased through in a faceless, ar block. The tion exists the past.
memory retained A mould is the sole existing vehicle to propagate its permanence through future replicas. What are the tools we use to remember the past? What existed before us? How do we represent those pasts and bring them into the present?
perception of the past Punctures in this box of censored imagery asks of the spectator to be aware of themselves in their own biases in viewing these stories. The white box contains censored images of past tragedies, too horrifying to remember, too terrible to forget. The windows place you as spectator and witness to history, but the image you see is twice removed from the event, and the moments captured by the camera becomes hazy, distorted, like the memories that fade. The distortion of the image belies truth in memory; how do we read and perceive memory over time? How are memories framed? How are spaces of memory fractured to make space for the infinite subjective accounts and perceptions of memories?
deconstructing the wall The exposed brick wall as one of the most common building materials.
defying monumental permanence Transparency is brought to a prevoiusly impermeable surface.
A brick wall without bricks, bringing transparency to the impenetrable. The collective wall is broken down to provide space for individuals to repopulate it with memories of their own. Where does the individual become the collective? How is the notion of the collective challenged in a world of infinite subjectivities?
probing My probes investigates the inversion of the brick wall. In the Shikumen typologies of Shanghai, these bricks make the walls of the lanes of shikumen or Lane Houses. The Wall divides the public life of the lanes from private interiors where individual livelihoods, conversations and memories take place outside of the scrutiny of the state. In present urban circumstances, pre-existing Shikumen houses that have not been demolished are renovated to erase its history as decaying row houses and transformed into symbols of Shanghai’s glamorous colonial past. The residents have been forcibly displaced, the interior gutted out and replaced with commercial and retail. In the production of the new space, forty years of the communist past is erased, its histories rearchived and trauma erased.
By deconstructing the wall and removing bricks but keeping the mortar as the glue as the joiner of parts, one can start to regard the parts of the facade for its individuality. Does the notion of the collective dilute or deny the heterogeneous make-up of a group of inhabitants? Collective memory enforces dominant narratives, which begs the question: which collective memory is it, and who does it belong to or benefit in the present? The selective removal of the bricks highlight the absence of material, materialising the forgetting, its once-presence and its nowforgotten state. What once was and what is no longer What is no longer and what ceases to exist in the imagination.
Demonumentalising permanence to create opportunities for the co-exitence of narratives. What is the conflict between envisioning artefacts as a representation of a unified collective narrative versus a collection of overlapping local memories?
Dualities of continuity & discontinuity tension & release transparency & obscurity interiority & exteriority
forward & retreat confrontation & abandonment past & present time & durability
display of the archive The wall inverted to penetrate, perforate, as a means of displaying the disjunction between present and past usages within and without the walls of the shikumen.
As Shanghai’s regime of globalised development continues to propel its architectural amnesia, what are the artefacts of the city that contains collective memory? What are the consequences of symbolising forgetting, and is this a scalable move that can be attached from the singular artefact to the scale of the city? Could Shanghai be rearchived as an alternate city, built from monuments of remembrance and forgetting?
A strange sense of urbanism now invades this city of deconstruction full of inconsistencies, fractures, an voids. Homogenized historic zones protected for their architectural and scenographi value are juxtaposed and played off against areas of superdevelopment, while monumental architectural containers are designed intentionally to turn the urba street inward and internalize their own set of public spaces and services within privatize layers of shops, restaurants, offices, and condominiums. In between and beyond lie the areas of the city left to decay, until the day when they too will be recycled and redesigned for new economic and cultural uses. -Christine Boyer
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fall reflection The wall inverted to penetrate, perforate, as a means of displaying the disjunction between present and past usages within and without the walls of the shikumen. As Shanghai’s regime of globalised development continues to propel its architectural amnesia, what are the artefacts of the city that contains collective memory? What are the consequences of symbolising forgetting, and is this a scalable move that can be attached from the singular artefact to the scale of the city? Could Shanghai be rearchived as an alternate city, built from monuments of remembrance and forgetting?
locating the site of the project My response was found in the Shikumen of Shanghai. These housed the resident private lives and memories of the people who lived through passing regimes - from the colonial establishment of these housing for Chinese labourers in the 1800s, through the 1911 revolution, the heydays of the Republic, and the trauma of the Communist era. In gentrifying acts of amnesia, Shikumen are updated to fit the current regime’s capitalist ideals.
The thesis focuses on Shikumen, a typical alleyway housing type in Shanghai, that contains the whispers and gossip of residents in their private lifes under passing regimes. While there were not ideal living conditions, often cramped with multiple families living in a
single unit and constnat perme of smells and sounds, they hou strong neighbourhood communit and contributed to a quintesse Shanghainese identity.
eation used ties ential
Linong alleyways of Shanghai 2000
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Destruction of Linong alleyways to make way for high-end commercial and residential redevelopment
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Current large city blocks
Site: Xintiandi, northern block
the tourist The tourist is a foreign witness to city that receives new images within a present context. The tourist seeks out the genius loci or the spirit of a place, whereas the local is so attuned to their surroundings, they take it for granted. However, what happens when the tourist is given a false image of the genius loci? How does one begin to define authentic spirit of a place? The Shikumen has been recolonised by the government to market itself as a self-exotified glorification of previous Shanghainese life. The new character of the place is synthetic and constructed to propel a state-sponsored narrative of new capitalist identity.
Taipingqiao
The HongKong development company Shui on Land worked alongside western architects in the Taipingqiao project. One of the parcels is Xintiandi, wherein thousands of residents were displaced and the old structures were repurposed and updated to suit modern image of Shanghai. While the facades were restored, interiors were gutted, staggered floor plates, light wells and
stairs which once connected communal bathrooms and kitchens were removed. Only the nostalgia of the old is kept, stagnating a memory of lilong life for spectators, while the lives are replaced with the new message of consumerist hopes and capitalist power.
Site: Xintiandi, Shanghai
Located in the center of Shanghai City and south of Middle Huaihai The co Road, Xintiandi is a pedestrian street composed of old-styleas a m Shikumen residences and modern architecture. It retains the the antiqu his walls, tiles and exterior of the Shikumen residences of old Shangha private while embodies a totally modern world in its interior. hardsh
Taipingqiao Project Underground Xintiandi North Block
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ommercialisation i and renovation of typical Shikumen residences means of historical preservation appear to tell stories about ue story and culture of the city. However, these omit the real, e aistories of the people who once lived there and who endured the hips of a peasant-proleteriat past.
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Previous Lilong life with tight alleyways, laundry hanging across the skies, neighbourhood chatter, external sinks. Neighbours often gathered to gossip in the later part of the day.
Commercial signs and imagery are inserted into the historic or refabricated brick facades. The people in the alleyways are now tourists and servicemen catering for the tourists.
Facade elevations overlaid on plan of Xintiandi. Red denotes commercial signage.
Xintiandi, northern block Prior to redevelopment
Xintiandi, northern block What is kept and erased for commercialisation. Site selection: where alleyways were mostly preserved.
Life within the Shikumen; before
Life within the Shikumen; now
Before and now; conversion from private residencies to commercial use that is friendly and inviting to the tourist
The original Shikumen contained narrow units that entered from the narrow alleyway with open front courtyards, lightwell and alternating floor plates. For its modern commercial purposes, the interiors have been gutted such that only the container remains as a vessel for the going-ons of within. The axis of entry also pivots from the alleyway entrance to new fronts on the side.
Traditional use of Shikumen
Current use of Lilong
“Vintage villages, regardless of their lack of authenticity, are designed to resurrect local economies. City after city discovers that its abandone industrial waterfront or outmoded city center contains enormous tourist potential and refurbished it as a leisure-time spectacles and sightseeing promenade. All of these sites become culinary and ornamental landscapes through which the tourists – the new public of the late twentieth century – graze, celebrating the consumption of place and architecture, and the taste of history and food.” -Christine Boyer
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the proposal The proposal is a sequence of interventions for the present users of Xintaindi that, rather than denying present capitlist systems or yearning for a nostalgic before, asks for an involved and active participation from present users.
1 Bathhouse to provoke consciousness of one’s body’s inhabitation of space and bring uncomfortable self-consciousness of one’s use of a space (entered through a cafe as a tourist camouflage)
2 Bookstore to supplant the role of the souvenir shop, and allow for a way to take away knowledge rather than self-exotified images and products 3 Darkroom for a film photographer for the collection and creation of constantly renewing content
4 Gallery for the viewing of new archives / rearchives to place the viewer in the present time and bring awareness to the unending motion of time
1 Bathhouse cleansing & bodily intimacy
2 Bookstore learning
3 Darkroom collecting & creating
4 Gallery archiving & reflecting
1 Bathhouse cleansing & bodily intimacy
The young writer, shivering in the garret, struggles to pay the petty rent for the Tianzifang A lowly tofu maker’s writing worships Mao So the local editor publishes his soybean stained writings instead
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He dips below the fog Swirls of warm water slides above his shoulders Tourists look on the comforts of each other
2 Books learni
Ayi wakes at dawn to the sound of bells and bellowing City’s sanitation workers are here to collect the waste of last night Alleyways filled, chamber pots emptied
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The graduate returns to visit Yeye on bitter, burnt, overpriced coffee A foreign structure draws her to shelves of words and memories ese make for better souvenirs than keychains and trinkets
3 Darkroom collecting & creating
Jiejie folds the laundry for her Mama, baba, didi, Xixi, nainai, waigong Where Mao once had his rice Writing for the first meeting
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Li Zhensheng’s journalistic eyes Shutters now capture a new era Brushing past the bygone days When Red Guards stripped his apartment for his films Fresh film strips hang dripping in red light
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Nainai wobbles up steep steps Boards dipping from generations of torn soles Calloused fingers slip hand washed laundry onto the bamboo poles Interlacing the sky between the Gelou
In the moment of breach The rails bring he Im A guarded conspicuousness b
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hing lightness above the stairwell er to a box of memories on display mages from another time and place before returning to daily comforts
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UNFORGETTING through the
tourist’s
lens
Taipingqiao Project Underground Xintiandi North Block
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thank you Thank you to my 杨 and 王 families, who have each inextricably participated in the history of my birth country and made me who I am today. Thank you to 爷爷 (杨福祥），奶奶（王静芬），外公（王 丹平），外婆（杨静芳）, who led lives of peasantry survival so that we could chase the Long White Clouds of New Zealand. Thank you to 妈妈（王立新） and 爸爸（杨刃), who led lives of migrant survival so that I may indulge in self-actualisation in America. Thank you to 哥哥 (杨历）and 妹妹（杨慧茱）for being my number one sibling support system. Thank you to my Zurich crew yangshan, Bebby bou, and yum Gao for the conversations that led my thesis to where it stands as of the date of this inDesign export. Thank you to my Gelman Girls, Jisu Yang and Namrata Dhore, for sparking the thesis with our [re]position exhibition work. Thank you to thesis advisor Hansy Better Barraza, for your empathy, kindness, critical eye, relentless energy and endless patience. Your faith in the design process and in us students is motivating and inspiring. Thank you to everyone who supported me and offered your encouraging words or a listening ear. You know who you are. Thank you to 上海, for your stories.
a special graduation This thesis was completed during the lockdown of the coronavirus pandemic since March, 2020. Special shoutout goes to Jisu Yang who was my roommate at Plantations 39 (they seriously need to change the name of these series of units). She provided me with company, critique, food, matcha lattes, air fried pumpkins and joyful laughter in the darkest hours of the AM.