It will always be presumptuous of the visitor upon their return home to say they understood a locale, and to claim capture of a jewel as gleaming as Shanghai within the ornate crown of China is certainly brazen, but after 99 days in Shanghai I feel I understood something of the locale. Sensations, too fleeting, words, too coarse, I present images. They suffer from most of the limits of images, but they approximate what I saw, and in turn what I felt, that something about Shanghai.
Presented with an open field and a horizon, people make their way through a thicket of possibilities to progress. Whether that way is forward depends on the map you consult. For what it’s worth, those I consulted to navigate the Shanghai Metro added the names of stops constructed since the maps’ printing as vinyl stickers locating where they are now on routes and presumably will be in a future map’s printing.
I include as supplement to these three perspectives of the place, a slate of textures, which, were they more than pictures to brush our finger ridges over, might hone even truer to what I felt.
People
“严禁 大小便 违 者 罚款”
–– From a large sign posted at eye-level on the exterior of a building.
Possibilities
“他们 都 选择 了 同 一种 更酷 的 工作 方式”
–– From a subway stop digital billboard whose center panel of LEDs were dead.
Progress?
“下 一次 大 灭绝 , 离 我们 有 多远?”
–– From a science museum exhibit.
Textures
“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game.
A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.”
–– From “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” by James Agee and Walker Evans.
