Chinese paper folding
Chinese paper burns into gold
The precarious modes of transportation in the everyday life of the Chinese, the tricycles, camouflage a series of subversive contraptions. They are deployed into a choreographic performance of weightless manoeuvres, where a balancing act between interlaced floating pieces and slender structures, will gradually infiltrate Tilanqiao, a disbanded labour camp in Shanghai. Small movements, such as pedalling, that are amplified into hammers and wrecking balls become extensions of the human body to carve into the prison blocks. In tandem, by re-appropriating techniques from the already existing on-site garment factory, ensembles of variously crafted textile topologies are collectively weaved, laced and threaded.
Prisoners, their families and friends, political dissidents and eventually neighbours congregate to create these sequence of spaces of varied intimacy levels. What start off as inconspicuous gatherings, become public festivities, where some of the mobile fabric pieces are burnt as offerings, released to soar over Shanghai or hoisted back onto the tricycles to be iconically dispersed into the city. The prison camp provides the initial setting as a place transformed from control and repression to one where hierarchy is broken down through these radical gestures. A spatial and temporal palimpsest that, through its complex layering between revealed and concealed traces of informal occupation, reifies the memory and realities of this charged place. As a transitional reclaimed space, it opens rooms for dialogues and cultivation within China's current social and political phenomena.
Falun Gong practitioners
before and after the practice is banned
LaoGai of Shanghai
Tilanqiao Prison Camp conditions
Timeline scenario of infiltration
Tactics of Invasion
The clandestine tricycles + contraptions
assembling materials
populating structures
carving into the prison blocks
Hungry Ghost Festival
Sky Lantern
Spatial Enclave - 01
the furry envelope
