Joe Knife, designer and musician.
The "Wilderness Country" is the "secret base" for all the children. Children are actually not important, what matters is that everyone grows up from a child, and whether each of us still lives in the heart of that child.
So I made a scene like this, hoping that after everyone enters the door of the "Wilderness Country", they can immediately change back into children.
A country of wilderness
2021.12.12 Shanghai
Hungry or not? I was so hungry that I had just sneaked out and bought a bag of great white rabbits, and there were so many left.
Theater Staff: Please do not eat or drink inside the theater!!!
In 2012, when I was 36 years old, at a particularly low point, someone gave me a poem.
I'll roughly translate this poem:
I don't go to work again, I'm going to hold a scorched-tailed piano and make a white cloud of freedom. There is only one person in this world who can understand my piano sound, and that is the bell period, he is dead. But fortunately, in autumn, the egrets floating by the autumn river can understand my piano.
So I made a decision to leave Beijing for Yunnan.
When is a person happiest? I think there are two times when I'm happiest. One is that when you are a child, from birth to maturity to aging, you are actually the happiest when you are a child.
When you were a child, no one cared about you, carefree, at most, when you made a mistake and were told by parents and teachers, you would find a small corner to hide, hoping that they would not find you.
This corner should be small, the smaller the more secure it is, it is called the "secret base".
There is also a kind of happiness that in the autumn, when the fruit is ripe, there is something to eat, and it is especially happy to be full.
After I arrived in Yunnan, I worked as a carpenter and worked with wood every day.
My father was a carpenter, and it was a scene I had seen as a child, and I felt I should get it back.
This is a chair I made.
I think a man makes a mistake, and it's particularly undignified if he kneels on the laundry board, so I made a chair out of the laundry board and they made the mistake of sitting on it decently.
It was the first house I made, it was all wooden.
It is particularly ugly on the outside, but it is very beautiful on the inside, just like me, not handsome, but very hot inside.
I can't be called an architect because I'm not qualified enough, so I have to practice a lot, to deal with materials.
I've been doing this all the time, so that someone really asks me to make a house, and I make some money one after another.
This single-family house is made for a party A.
After making money, I feel that my wings are hardened and I have ambitions.
I rented a piece of land, thinking I could plant a house on the ground and sell it when I harvested it in the fall.
As a result, the house was not planted for a long time, and the relevant departments came to say that you were illegal and wanted that word.
As a result, all these houses I planted were all written by that word. What to do? Dreams cannot be dashed.
The house was planted on the ground and could not be pulled out. Can the house be turned into a suitcase that can be pushed away at any time?
So I started adding wheels under the house, and when he came to check on me, I pushed the house away.
But then the house got bigger and bigger, and it couldn't be pushed, what to do?
I started buying motors, controllers, batteries, making the house moving, and when he came to check it out, he watched me drive the house away.
This house is called the Breeze Study.
When I built the Qingfeng Study, I used some little cleverness to hang the house in the air. Do not occupy farmland land as much as possible, and do not destroy the land as much as possible, otherwise it is really illegal.
Why introduce this house? I stayed in this house for seven whole years—either living in it or working in it during the day.
I didn't study art, and for seven years I was thinking about all sorts of things, sketching them, and gradually realizing them.
What else have I done in the past seven years? In the past seven years, I have written a few words in my mind: Lao Tzu will make a hundred houses come out!
Seven years later:
Let me pick a few examples, this is one of a hundred.
This house has toilets, slides, stages, and hanging septic tanks, which means you drive this car down the road and your can fly in the air.
It's a café, a bookstore, a florist, a clothing store, a grocery store, any store will do.
The space inside can be used to live in people or become a shop you want. It has no name, and the name you come up with, because you may be party A.
Why don't I dare say I'm an architect? Because I hadn't even used concrete, I really dared to experiment a few years ago.
It was my first exposure to concrete, and they commissioned me to make a small theater that could perform, and I tried it.
The building is simple, it is a dome shape, steel structure, stainless steel mesh to cover it all, and finally smeared with cement.
In the process of doing this, I feel so bored, this building is so dead, after you go in, everything in it is not moving.
So I paid for it myself and added a slide like a starry sky track.
Children can run up from one side, passing through a house at the highest point and then sliding down again.
With this slide, the performances in this theater become impossible, because there are too many children, too noisy, but it does fulfill Party A's wish - especially gathering popularity.
It's the tallest house I've ever built, three stories tall, and it's a theater for shows.
Its internal structure is so complex that I can't draw pictures, I can only do it while doing it.
We were particularly fast, and this three-storey house took a total of 27 days from start to finish.
Contrary to the theme of today's event, which is to wrestle with details every day, I never stare at the details, so today, their screens are so clear that the flaws in my house are all exposed.
Until last year, when my daughter was born, I wanted to make her a little "country", draw a small "national flag", write a little "national anthem" and give it to her as a gift.
At this time, I had experience, rented a legal commercial land, and it was so big.
This piece of land is particularly barren, almost no road, and situations like this belong to some good photos taken at good angles.
First of all, give it a name, but you give it a name called "country", can the country recognize it?
No road looks like a wilderness, so I named it "Wilderness Country."
Then the first thing is to build roads, roads are particularly important, if there is no road, you can't go anywhere.
The second thing is to connect the electricity, and all the cables have to be buried underneath, which is very, very hard.
Because I'm not a designer and I don't have a specific drawing plan, I can do whatever I want.
With electricity, the little houses tried to turn on the lights, and it felt good.
There is a road, there is electricity, what is the difference? There is still water.
What if there is no water? Then dig a well. After digging the well, it can not be stopped, and it can be turned into a lake.
In the center of the lake, a pile of soil is piled up, and a house is placed on the soil, which is a small island.
This small island, you can also give it another story. If you are sick, you row a small boat and go up to an island, there is a temple on the island, there is a doctor in the temple, so the name of the island is "Acupuncture Island".
In Chinese texts, "acupuncture" and "island" have never been combined, this is creativity.
Words like "sunny weather" and "end of the day" are often next to each other, and can become neighbors, couples, friends, and enemies, but "acupuncture island" is never a phrase.
The tree, the whole area is such a lonely tree, if you don't protect it, you will definitely be cut down.
Then turn it into a commercial area and make it into a tree house.
The treehouse was later built into three floors, the first floor was a place to drink tea, the second floor was a café, on the larger side, and the third floor was a room where seven-year-olds could live.
In that wilderness it was the highest and largest being.
This is the scene when the sun sets and the light shines into the tea room.
Speaking of clouds again, clouds are the best background.
Why did I choose Yunnan, why did I give up so many years of connections and illusory resources?
I think clouds are the best answer, colorful clouds, foam clouds, large clouds, small clouds...
Such a scene cannot be artificially created, and imagine that if this house called "samurai" is under a gray sky, it will not have such an effect.
When I was a child, in the winter, I often saw people building pine tree hair into a certain volume and then using it to burn fires for warmth.
I also collected some pine tree hairs and used them to make a labyrinth slide.
This fortress-like thing is hollow, and its construction is particularly difficult. To enable children to drill into, they must also be turned into a maze.
I also made a ladder like this, and this ladder rose from the ground and rose to the sky, with no support.
After everyone saw it, they said, Joe Knife, your career is coming to an end, you dare to violate the mechanics, it is really too bold.
Later, I also listened to their advice, and I decided to rebuild. This design is really too dangerous, then give it a weight, continue not to do support on it, and directly add a house.
It also gave it a new story, because this house is made of iron mesh, especially leaking rain, so it is called "Rain Leak Art Museum".
At each exhibition, only a painting can be hung at the top of the roof 40cm X 40cm, only that place is rainproof.
So I said that an artist can only exhibit one work at a time, and the audience can only go to one person at a time, and I think it is also an idea to add mistakes to this.
It's when the lights are on at night, exactly like a cartoon.
These kindergarten children have graduated, come here to take graduation photos, this is real, three-dimensional, not drawn.
I only started speaking in 2021, which is the last time, so the language function has not been fully restored.
In the past seven years, I basically did not contact anyone, did not see any friends, and focused all my time on doing carpentry and doing housework, so this year suddenly many people added me ToChat, and I still have a little note.
Sometimes we may be stupid in a certain subject or aspect, and feel that we are stupid birds, but through reading, or reflecting and experiencing ourselves, we may gain the power to change.
So I made this stupid bird-like house into a poetry bookstore.
Why do you do a poetry bookstore? Because I think that a bookstore has all kinds of books in social science, literature, and preschool education, that book is very miscellaneous and difficult to classify.
So I only put poetry books, the main reason is that poetry books are not stolen, because it is too difficult to sell.
But this bookstore definitely has the best scene, and it looks like this from the window of the bookstore.
In fact, I am particularly sorry, I have fallen behind, I should have presented you with videos, but I will not do it, and I am embarrassed to rely on the old to sell the old to the young, because I think it will expose my clumsiness. When "One" came to shoot, the video was simply too good.
All of our houses have to have a second floor because I want these little houses to have the function of living.
You look at it and think that this is an ordinary house, but they all have high and low staggered, you can feel the changes of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and you can also have the function of living.
I also hope that these small houses look good at night, and I will have a night view of every house that you just looked at, because night is too important for us, and night is the real you.
It's daytime.
It's night.
The small room on the second floor may be inhabited by the lonely you.
Any building is dead, and it doesn't move in that place, but I can put a hat on all my buildings.
There are many hats here, why do you wear hats? Because it looks good.
But wearing a hat has another use, to hide shame.
My buildings are ugly, so I'm going to put hats on them, but this hat has to be moving.
▲ Material source Netizen: Pavilion on the road
So the wind is particularly important, and as soon as the wind blows, it makes you feel particularly healing.
This becomes a beautiful backdrop. It's the age of mobile phones, and aesthetics no longer rely on the eyes.
Now the aesthetic criterion is whether a stranger will pull out his mobile phone when passing by here.
If you pass by and this person is not even interested in looking at this thing, the designer will have to pay back.
These are my daughter's daily playmates, like things coming out of cartoons, but they are all physical objects, they can be moved, and they are quite fast.
She will become friends with these monsters, she will also point fingers at these monsters, and I will not care about her when I encounter problems.
Not only my children, but most of our children in Lijiang City, Yunnan Province, have been here, and the "Country of the Wilderness" is their "secret base".
Children are actually not important, what matters is that everyone grows up from a child, and whether each of us still lives in the heart of that child.
I'm very busy every day, but when I hear a lot of kids coming, I make time for myself to become kids and play with them.
We also have a lot of self-made cars like this, all of which are battery-sized and very safe.
I would take them in a car like this, and their screams, that happy sounds, that feeling of uninhibitedness especially healed me.
That's all kinds of weird things we can do to take these kids for every day.
My story is basically shared, and this is the old boy who has not grown up inside, and his name is Joe Knife.
He has been dreaming, his dreams have not stopped to this day, his dream is to make all the scenes you have just seen fly into the sky.
If you have doubts, it's okay.
At different times, in different places, in different predicaments, the poem can be reinterpreted.
How I just translated it, you may have forgotten, but at this moment I can re-translate it:
Say goodbye to the city, take all my sorrows with you, and leave you. Even though I had nothing, fortunately only I was left and could start over.
Thanks, I'm done.
painted eggshell
You didn't invite me back, it seems you're really hungry. I sang a song for sleepy and hungry people, and it was called "Good Night Baby."
▲ Joe Knife "Goodnight Baby" a live version
Hurry up and shout another song, or I'll really go down. Temporarily add another song, my voice just opened and let me go down, a little unbearable.
Anyway, I just spoke quite quickly, I have compressed the time, let me waste a song's time, I sing a song called "No one can remember you".
In fact, I have been writing songs all these years, this song represents my heart, at that time I really felt that no one remembered me, but I did not expect that a seat later called me.
▲ Joe Knife "No one can remember you" a live version
Thank you, thank you Shanghai, thank you for a seat.
Clip 丨 FH
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