Author BTR's collection of novels "Shanghai Capsule" is published: he is an Asian city observer

An exhibition can become a novel, creating a fictional situation in a real space, and a novel can also become an exhibition on paper, weaving fictional components into real life. Recently, Shanghai writer BTR's latest novel collection "Shanghai Capsule" was planned and published by the Ideal Republic Beijing Daily Publishing House.

Art intervenes between man and the world. The book contains 19 stories like 19 mirror halls reflected in the virtual reality, and 19 journeys involving the virtual and the real, preserving the wonderful capsule full of myths for the urban life of our time.

This is the latest collection of novels by Btr, an Ariesian who loves novels, movies, contemporary art and other "useless things" who love novels, movies, contemporary art and so on. Like collecting objects for a vast and complicated museum, Btr watches, imagines, wanders, and always slides lightly and slyly into another space in those moments of epiphany.

BTR is obsessed with fresh and interesting narratives, "Shanghai Capsule" contains 19 "exhibition novels", building 19 exhibition halls out of thin air, entering from the entrance, in the space constructed by words and pictures, you can freely watch, imagine, wander, and shake with him... 19 stories, 19 halls of mirrors reflected in the virtual and real, and 19 journeys involving the virtual and the real, have preserved the wonderful capsules full of myths for the urban life of our time. In btr's pen, you can always expect that somewhere, art will suddenly pour into reality and change it.

btr writes novels, translates novels, edits magazines, takes photos, paints, curates, reviews contemporary art, literature and films... It can be said that he is an "all-round cross-border creator". Novelist Li Zishu said: "BTR is always outside the world, he sees, if he does not say, you will always not see." ”

Writer Sun Ganlu commented: "BTR is an Asian city observer. Everything on the street, from the messy wires to the dirty dumpsters, from a light in the middle of the buildings to a piece of scrap paper in the corner, is touched by his contemplation, thus appearing poetic and ambiguous; he finds Asia everywhere, or he reveals an Asian perception everywhere. A vast locality, a self-transcendent everydayness. ”

BTR seems to be always looking, always reflecting, and in his work we can always see previously unseen angles and constraints: art does not lend us more than just a vision, art is a laboratory of the real world, bigger than reality.

"Shanghai Capsule" book excerpt trial reading

overview

On a rainy red night, a white pigeon is parked on the letters of the airport Starbucks signboard. A group of uniformed people began to move at neat steps, and the disturbed people were redistributed, like another game of Go.

The cathedral in Mirror Lake has only one façade, and you can only walk through the church door, but you can't tell if you are walking in or out of the church. The earth and the kingdom of heaven are one and the same.

In the room of the social software "Broad Talk Hall", people are constantly broadcasting what they see and hear while walking on the road, reconstructing the nearbyness with their voices: "Because the memory is still fresh, everyone is describing a kind of visual cache." In between the high talks, the city emerged.

A building outlines lines and shapes with yellow neon tubes. When I got closer, I found that the building did not exist, it only existed in the imagination of the yellow neon tube.

On Google Maps, the road is now shown in red, which is heavily congested, but the real world in front of him is a smooth road with almost no people and no cars.

At the work meeting, the lively chat in the WeChat group became a bullet screen of the scene in front of us. As a result, the tired, suffocating routine of work seems to be distant, almost invisible.

Historians of 2060 travel back in time to Shanghai in the winter of 2021, where clouds above their heads are silently gathering into one sentence: "You will not be afraid of the horror of the night." The clouds soon turned into a small shower and landed in the silent alley of Anfu Road: "In the blink of an eye, we flew away." ”

Every night, after the lights are turned off, the family is always lit with white lights, like display windows on a commercial street. Is it an apartment or an art gallery, a living room or a bathroom? "The real estate industry is also in a slump, so I borrowed this no-man's land to do some of my own creations." A posthuman museum after the extinction of mankind.

A map of the garden was found in the basement of the bungalow, most of the names are fictional, but the overall path of the garden is quite consistent with the real Suzhou Lingering Garden. This underground garden, the "back garden", borrows scenery from abstraction to figuration and fiction to reality.

An unfinished manuscript of an English novel was discarded in the teahouse, and the writer resolved to translate the first half of the manuscript and continue it according to a preset framework. He decided that the girl sitting opposite was about to enter the story he had conceived. To write a novel is to add fictional elements to real people and see how their lives will change.

……

19 stories of art breaking into reality. "The world is too boring, we might as well build another one."

Nandu reporter Zhu Rongting