Text/ Lin Yi
"The Book of Dust" is a graphic work by Xia Youzhi, taken from the author's life in a community in Central, Shanghai, spanning ten years of experience and feelings. Place and time are the closely linked dimensions of this work, which constitute its basic skeleton.
Community living is an experience shared by most people. Eat, sleep, go out, go home, and say hello to neighbors who know each other well or don't know each other well. Encounter repetitive public landscapes every day and live a similar private life. Human interactions have unpredictable fluidity, and no one knows who will leave for what in the next moment. The emotions between the residents of the community are polite and alienated, which is different from the traditional local "acquaintance society", and maintains a delicate balance of private distance under the premise of public space.
Xia Youzhi talks about the reproducibility of the city in "Trek". He dismantled some of the material parts of Shanghai, the streets, the signs, the facilities, which, like Lego particles, chimerized, spliced, and expanded into the body of Shanghai and all the cities outside of Shanghai. A city can always see the GENES of other cities. The more modern the city, the more similar it is.
The personnel scenes depicted in the works are all familiar to us. The people kicking shuttlecocks in the corners of the square, the domestic puppies and the wild cats in the corners, the young boys and girls who grew up and disappeared, a few tall trees and shrubs that served as isolation belts, the old people who flew kites and the children who played football... This work does not have a strong Shanghai symbol, and it can be said that it is from Nanjing, Guangzhou, or any community of a county town that is still prosperous. This ambiguous natural universality is one of the values of this work, which indicates the location of the place and invisibly breaks the boundary.
After all, Xia Youzhi is not a native of Shanghai, he is originally from Anhui, and he settled in Shanghai and started a family because of his work, and is a new immigrant to the city. Unlike works like Jin Yucheng's "Blossoms", when we look at it, we know that it is written in Shanghai. Xia Youzhi's written atmosphere is still a universal language that is outside the local area, and there is no obvious Shanghai flavor. Perhaps, this also explains the characteristics of the city of Shanghai, which always makes people who live in it feel that they are passers-by. Although, here, it has been ten years.
Ten years is an important time scale. It will give rise to feelings of wanting to remember something.
The text genre of "The Book of Dust" is a life essay, and the compilation structure is divided into four parts: spring, winter, autumn and summer, and the first part is written from the birth of the daughter, which is obviously a conscious choice. A life was born in the city, grew up in this community, from the eyes of the father, around the daughter's writing, naturally became a main line of the work, the timeline that belonged to this life has since been intertwined with the place of the community, and the ordinary facts described in the work have become meaningful. There are also the daily narratives of rat hunting, pest control, silkworm raising, cicada catching, buying vegetables, planting flowers, haircuts, and seeking medical treatment, which constitute part of life and become one with people themselves in the quiet passage of time.
Dim corridors, abandoned sofas, hanging air conditioners, some figures, a few fallen fruits... More than 100 photos are all black and white, those dim images that are not very clear, with a sense of mottled vicissitudes, black and white images are the most suitable shapes for memory. The feelings it conveys make ordinary scenes dignified, especially when they are gathered together as circumstantial evidence of words, and the relationship between photos and reality becomes complex and deeply emotional.
"The Book of Dust", signed from the article of the same name in the anthology, describes the endless home life with dust. Dust is the biggest enemy of the home, attached to the surface of the utensils at any time, and the speed of human cleaning is far from catching up with the return of dust, "We use vacuum cleaners, rags and mops all day long, and then we are defeated by dust, like a comedy version of Sisyphus." "What can be done? Camus said that what matters is the process. Competing with dust for time may be the essential core of life.
This article is a book review of Xia Youzhi's book "The Book of Dust", authorized by Nanjing University Press)
Selected Chinese books
"The Dust"
Xia Youzhi
Nanjing University Publishing Company
August 2021
When you feel that your skin begins to soften and regain its elasticity, spring begins in the Central Community.
In the photographs and texts, the seemingly clear terms of urban orientation eventually dissolve into the repertoire of life that flows day and night: the old people continue to move discarded chairs into the small garden. The kite appears and disappears. In autumn, people take their dogs to watch the sunset in the open space under the camphor trees.
Watching and meeting seems aimless, but in fact it picks up and connects the fragments of life. It records the moments when people and insects, fish, grasses and trees encounter each other, and also records the delicate social scale between people, the spiritual rebellion of youth, and the warmth and stubbornness in ordinary days. Gaze and thought eliminate the boundaries of the city, both tangible and intangible—some by Metasequoia, laurel, and coral trees, while others by taboos and silences. Cities are not just a collection of spaces, but also time itself. The change of seasons, aging and growth have become the hidden veins outlined in the book.
Good books in Chinese
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