MUSEUM FATIGUE

Mystery Object #25: Chinese Rockery Fountain

February 23, 2019 by Museum Fatigue

While visiting the Nanjing Confucius Temple area a few months ago with some visitors, I happened cross an incredible object. It was a water fountain for sale in a tourist shop at a dramatic discount. I was immediately captivated by its motion and drawn in by its fascinating and unconventional details. My companions initially thought that I was joking when I stopped to watch the fountain, and then after I inquired about its price, they realized I was serious. Look […]

Categories: China, Culture, Mystery Objects, Objects of Power, Uncategorized • Tags: water fountain

In Defense of Serendipity, Some Notes

February 22, 2019 by Museum Fatigue

I’m too busy these days to have time for any kind of review of the books that I’m reading, but I have been wanting to post more on this blog and since I type notes up on my books anyway, I might as well share some of my comments and choice quotes. I encountered Sebastian Olma’s book, In Defense of Serendipity, through a reference in another book to the preface, “The Great Digital Swindle,” written by Mark Fisher. In Fisher’s preface he asks […]

Categories: Books • Tags: Mark Fisher, Repeater Books, Sebastian Olma, serendipity, Silicon Valley

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“Scan & Go” at Watson’s: Checking Out on the Sales Floor

January 24, 2019 by Museum Fatigue

Yesterday for the first time I experienced a retail store employee as a “checkout point.” I visited a nearby Watson’s store to buy a pack of Bandaids and when I went to the cashier’s counter to pay for my purchase, I noticed a sign that said, “Scan & Go” in English and Chinese. I was a bit mystified because for most of the past two years I always pay with things by “scanning and going”—pulling out my phone, opening Alipay, […]

Categories: Digital Payments, Retail, Surveillance, Technology • Tags: Alipay, WeChat

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The Nanjing River Bridge Gets a Facelift for its 50th Anniversary

December 30, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

Two years ago, in the fall of 2016, the Nanjing River Bridge (南京长江大桥) was closed for extensive renovations. The first Chinese-constructed bridge across the Yangtze river, when it opened in December 1968 it was extolled as an example of China’s “spirit of self-reliance” (自立根生). Its opening was also the high point of the rustication program of “sent down youth” during the Cultural Revolution, and former zhiqing with whom I have worked over the years have commented on the significance of […]

Categories: China, Objects of Power • Tags: Cultural Revolution, Nanjing River Bridge

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No Earthrise in China?

December 28, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

This week was the fiftieth anniversary of the perspective-changing image of the Earth taken from Apollo 8 while in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve 1968. The iconic photograph of the Earthrise—the first color image of Earth from space—and its effects on our understanding of our home planet were the topic of many articles in the media this past holiday week. So imagine my utter surprise when I showed this photograph to a classroom of over seventy Chinese college students at […]

Categories: China, Environment, Photography, Scripts • Tags: Earthrise

Crowd Control at the Beijing Station Ticket Window

December 26, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

One of my earliest memories of life in China was fighting for tickets at railway stations and movie theaters where the idea of lines was a culturally alien one. Decades later while it is common to see folks in urban China line up for everything in a way that is familiar, some spaces are still being negotiated. As interfaces between the urban and rural, train stations remain just such a potential space. Urban China, however, has numerous examples of design […]

Categories: Bodies, China, Discipline, Uncategorized • Tags: Beijing Railway Station, design, queue

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Utopian Gesture #1: Recycling Bins

November 7, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

As a first example of a utopian gesture, I present the most beautiful and ideal collection of recycling bins I have ever seen. In fact, it seems unfair to refer to the collection of such a wide variety of objects at one location in such nicely designed containers as simply recycling. It is more like a recycling station or miniature recycling center—it collects a wide variety of things in six different major categories. Pull-top cans: soft drinks, Sprite cans, beer cans, Coke […]

Categories: Consumption, Environment, Utopian Gestures • Tags: garbage, Jussi Parikka, recycling

Utopian Gestures

November 6, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

For some time I have been sensitive to the variety of utopias that I encounter here in China. Of course, by utopias, I don’t mean the comprehensive, complete, all-encompassing social utopias of the type that national leaders or religious figures imagine and occasionally attempt to realize on a large scale—like the communist one featured in Chinese propaganda imagery from the 1940s through the 1970s. Rather, I have been attracted to much smaller utopias—the attempted everyday utopias that are intentionally modest […]

Categories: Objects of Power, Utopian Gestures, Utopias and Dystopias

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Hanging “Public Relations Advertisements” (Propaganda Displays)

November 4, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

Yesterday, for the first time ever I passed some workers installing one of the many displays of the “Core Values of Socialism” that have proliferated around the city over the past few years. The Core Values can be found in numerous formats (paper posters, painted on surfaces, printed on surfaces, carved in stone and displayed or projected visually) and in a wide variety of locations (at street intersections, at bus stops, on construction barriers, on or in busses, in taxis, […]

Categories: Advertising, Scripts • Tags: China, marketing, propaganda poster

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Taiwan Election Sickness (March 21, 2000)

November 2, 2018 by Museum Fatigue

Many times over the years I have shared an anecdote with various colleagues who work in China about an article I once read in the Mainland Chinese newspaper, The Global Times, about “Election Sickness” in Taiwan during the second presidential election in March 2000. The article was memorable for its recounting of the deleterious effects that the democratic elections were having upon the bodies and minds of the electorate. I remembered clipping the article and saving it, but had forgotten […]

Categories: Bodies, Mythologies • Tags: democracy, election, sickness, Taiwan

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