Found 'art'
I take much delight in happy 'accidents' like this - a curiously shaped tower of bricks left balanced on top of a partly demolished wall, or a plastic bag inexplicably knotted around a telephone wire. This sort of thing does seem to be rather common in China, and I often wonder if there isn't a conscious - if obscure - intent behind such constructions (apart from my conscious intent to record them with my camera, of course). Anonymous guerrilla artists roaming the streets of Beijing? Perhaps some of the hordes of minggong, the peasant migrant workers who staff the city's construction sites (and factories and restaurants) letting off a bit of creative steam?
I take much delight in happy 'accidents' like this - a curiously shaped tower of bricks left balanced on top of a partly demolished wall, or a plastic bag inexplicably knotted around a telephone wire. This sort of thing does seem to be rather common in China, and I often wonder if there isn't a conscious - if obscure - intent behind such constructions (apart from my conscious intent to record them with my camera, of course). Anonymous guerrilla artists roaming the streets of Beijing? Perhaps some of the hordes of minggong, the peasant migrant workers who staff the city's construction sites (and factories and restaurants) letting off a bit of creative steam?
2 comments:
Well, another possibility is that some -- though surely not all -- might actually mean something, in the manner of hobo signs or code [Wikipedia].
The bricks strike me, yes, as somebody more or less doodling with construction material, but the plastic bag on the wire is... almost semantic. Do you remember where you came across it? Have you seen it in just one place, or has it cropped up elsewhere, too?
I remember the first time I saw a pair of sneakers slung around a power, thinking it was a hilarious prank. Then I saw it a 2nd time someplace else, and a third, and started to wonder what it meant. (Apparently I wasn't alone.)
Yes, I thought of hobo signs too; but, as far as I've been able to discover, there's nothing similar in China (I'm sure there is, but it's not something the middle class Chinese know about or care to discuss).
The plastic bag was a one-off. It was on 'The Street', my favourite street where I lived for my first two years here - during the process of its demolition.
I too had wondered about the shoes-on-a-wire meme. That seems to happen the world over. Well, in Europe, anyway. I'm sure I've seen it in a film somewhere, actually; I have a suspicion it might be Tornatore's Everybody's Fine.
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