WATERMELON IN SUMMER AND SWEET POTATO IN WINTER
Plastic Bags, Corrugated Paper, Red Pen, Chloroprene Adhesive, Newspaper, 536X386mm Double-sided Newsprint, etc.
Shanghai
2021.06
portfolio
Plastic Bags, Corrugated Paper, Red Pen, Chloroprene Adhesive, Newspaper, 536X386mm Double-sided Newsprint, etc.
Shanghai
2021.06
portfolio
photo by Yifan Li
It was starting from my curiosity about a shop named Watermelon In Summer And Sweet Potato In Winter. After interviewing the shop owner, I found the characteristics of seasonal products sold in fixed shops. I started my research with mobile vendors and found that with the urban expansion and the changes in the mobility of residents, the governance of vendors in urban planning had also evolved step by step.
I simulated the collective worship of consumerism as a sales service of watermelon (the summer product) in the project. The performance characteristics of traditional Chinese religious beliefs of worship and communication with the Buddha were used to express the new look of retail commerce under the control of capital under the changes of seasonal, spatial, and regional mobility. In the process of exploration, it was found that the number of plastic bags prepared by the vendors was much larger than the number of watermelon products. Therefore, plastic bags would represent a symbol of belief under consumerism. And the absurd sense of division expressed in consumerism could be summarized in the previous research on the evolution of vendors in three terms - “identity”, “flow” and “right”. The three respectively led to the concrete creation of the project, and the means of splitting, rearranging and combining were used for the regular expression.
Back to the space
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photo by Yifan Li
Ultimately the resulting operational patterns are taken out of their own system in a dispassionate form in order to show what is happening in the seasonal space. It is then put back into the seasonal flow space that was studied at the beginning, in the form of an exhibition that again actively communicates with the content of the space.
photo by Yifan Li
The entire work is presented in the form of a real newspaper (size, dimensions, layout), with the three-dimensional content and methods of production printed in a flat format on the real newspaper and scanned again. The desire is to make the viewer aware of the fluidity, seasonality and regionality of the object of study in the same way as the fluidity of information received on a daily basis.