Photography/BMC
After watching the exhibition called "This is not an exhibition" last time, a considerable number of readers and friends left their own small question marks - not an exhibition, not a novel, what is "Shanghai Capsule"? It can't really be a capsule.
Questions have been hanging around for too long and always have to be answered. There is no better place to do a tour than a curator, with a question mark after listening to the three-claw host, btr, Shen Dacheng, Lai Fei's conversation about this book, as if enlightened. "If he doesn't say it, you'll never see it." But this time, btr personally handed us the key to open the capsule.
Speaking about the Street View Map Screenshot Exhibition called "21.4 Square Meters of Pilgrimage", BTR said: "During the epidemic, this may be a very important way to travel, we can't go anywhere now, but you can still go all over the world if you open the map." In the epidemic era when travel has become an increasingly extravagant expectation, "Shanghai Capsule" as a "paper exhibition" may have the same role, turning the page, you can also be like watching the exhibition and traveling in the field, wandering in the world created by BTR.
Fiction is not VR, it is AR. A good novel will expand your sensibility and give you different perspectives.
His novels are non-linear, and you're more like looking at an exhibition. For example, if you approach an installation artwork, it's over there, and you have to go find some angles, left, right, front and back, and walk around it, and that's what you're going to do.
Everything he writes is a bit autobiographical, but this autobiography is not him at all, he is actually constantly inventing himself, and this fiction may be an image that you can see in the broken mirror and be reflected.
01.
"This is not..." series
Three-Claw: I don't know if you've ever read a brief introduction to the novel btr, it's a hard-to-define work of 19 stories, it can be said that it's a novel, it's like an exhibition on paper, and the 19 chapters are like 19 exhibition halls. As a creator, how does btr himself understand such a novel or work? First ask him to do a rough tour for us.
btr: I want to explain the topic, which is what we are going to talk about today, "This is not a novel." In this book, there are several articles that are followed by a self-questioning and self-answering session, and I once asked a question: What are your creative plans? I replied by another one, to write a seven-part process. There are seven names in the seven steps, so the first few events have appropriated one of the names as the name of the event. The American writer David Maxson wrote a book called "This Is Not a Novel", and later "This Is Not a Novel" and his other novels made a collection, called "This Is Not a Novel and Other Novels", which tells a writer who is tired of writing and begins to tell anecdotes about various writers, such as which writer fell ill and how they died, just in a short sentence. So the whole book is probably the book with the highest mortality rate in the history of literature, the writers in it are dead, they are all kinds of ways to die, it is a very special book.
Left: Cover of David Maxon's "It's Not a Novel."
Right: Jafa Panahi poster for "This Is Not a Movie."
But "This is not..." has become a sentence pattern, and one of my favorite directors, Jafa Panahi, has made a new movie called "This Is Not a Movie", which is also a very interesting movie. The Iranian authorities forbade him to make films, but he still used a simple device to shoot, hid the finished things in a USB stick, stuffed the USB stick into a cake, and smuggled the cake to Cannes for the film festival, so the film was called "This is not a movie". But how do you make movies at home? If we can tell a movie, why should we make a movie? His film is a person telling a story at home, but through the audience's imagination, he also made or told the film. So it's become a grammar that hints at something of a certain kind that I call the "This Isn't..." series.
The series, of course, goes back even further, such as Magritte's famous painting called The Rebel of the Image, or The Rebellion of the Image. It's a pipe, and underneath it says ,"This is not a pipe", a very simple painting, but the meaning is very complex, Foucault wrote a book for it, discussed a lot of questions about the relationship between images and words, about whether words can reproduce reality, etc., these things are also closely related to my writing, but also closely related to what we are going to talk about today.
Magritte's "Image Rebellion"
What do you want to talk about in this book? I don't have a linear line of thought in my head, it's a bunch of small universes that explode, so the book talks about these things, about Shanghai, and also about Hong Kong, Macau, Lisbon, Dublin, Xiamen, most of them in Shanghai. This is also based on a kind of onshore observation, and some people may pay attention to my WeChat public account, which has a lot of observations on the street.
Of course, "Shanghai Capsule" obviously has the meaning of the memory of the times, and the protagonists of many novels here are novelists and are also about novels, so it is a kind of meta-novel. Like all metafictions, it explores questions of reality and fiction. There are also some stylistic exercises, but also try different methods of fiction, explore the boundary problem of fiction, appropriate and pay tribute to a variety of things of many masters, explore the relationship between the exhibition hall and the novel, the relationship between images and text sounds, and contemporary art, which talks about many artists, some artists are real, we know, some are fake, I fiction, some exhibitions are also true, some exhibitions are also fake, these fake can also be true.
02.
Capsules that hold memories
I'll talk about the concept of capsules very simply. You know Andy Warhol's "Time Capsule", which is like a blind box, but it is a time capsule anyway. But the word capsule can also sometimes be used as a capsule for spaceships, so space capsules are also a kind of capsule. But the capsule is composed of two dimensions of time and space, so when we see the time capsule and the space capsule, we all call it a capsule, of course, we often eat, and there are Lianhua Qing plague capsules and so on, which are used for curing diseases. Today I will talk about "Shanghai Capsule", because after all, it is a title work.
Andy Warhol, "Time Capsule"
"Shanghai Capsule" is first and foremost about a sense that the more the better, and of course you hear more when you blindfold yourself. It is also based on the real experience of our daily life, the second paragraph of the novel writes about a fire in my house, that is, in November 2019, when I was almost home, I saw the aunt who collected the garbage downstairs, I said you have time to collect the garbage, she said OK, I will come up later. After a while she called me and she said come down, your house is on fire. Only then did I remember what had happened a quarter of an hour before, and I smelled a burning smell of wires, and I opened the window to smell it, but no. I wonder where might it taste? There was no smell in the corridor, so I ran to the bathroom to turn on the exhaust fan, and after opening it, the smell became stronger and stronger, and later I learned that the entire exhaust system inside the building was connected together, so when I drove it, it became more and more dense, so I rushed down, went downstairs to see a few firefighters go in, and when I ran outside, all the fire trucks were parked outside, and it turned out that it was a small fire, and it was quickly extinguished.
But why am I so nervous? Because my house is only two blocks away from the building that is on fire on Jiaozhou Road. So when something happens, we mobilize our historical and collective memory. Once bitten by a snake, I was afraid of grass ropes for ten years, so I had this extreme reaction, which I also wrote in the novel.
Speaking of "Shanghai Capsule", of course, we can't fail to mention this famous gallery, called Capsule Shanghai. Capsule Shanghai is a real gallery, it is in a lane on Anfu Road, if you walk along this lane, walk to the bottom of the lane is this gallery, on their WeChat public account you can see that the map is very similar to the water in front of us, you walk along this straw to the end is a cup-shaped gallery. It is a very beautiful gallery with a small garden outside.
This was Wang Zhiyi's exhibition "Meaning" at that time, very beautiful, very white, I especially like this exhibition, "meaning" in English pronunciation in Shanghainese is "charming", it is very "meaningful". He made a lot of stained glass. This is the self-question and answer at the end of the novel, talking about the gallerist Mr. Rico, who is also a real and very good gallerist.
Capsule Shanghai Gallery
There are often some collective memories in this, and I also use some artists' works, which are certainly not the artists in the Shanghai capsule, but I moved over to talk about it. The first article", "The Night of Red Carp Horn", talks about an artist, this is in Hong Kong, it looks similar to Shanghai, there is a person standing on the top of Hong Kong Central, this is a project where the British artist Anthony Gormley was working there, he erected a lot of statues made of his own body in many parts of the city, including rooftops, at that time, many Hong Kong citizens called the local police station, saying that there were people who wanted to jump off the building, hoping to intervene, the police arrived and found that it was a sculpture. Very close to it, Zhang Guorong once committed suicide there, and a securities dealer jumped because of the failure of the financial crisis. So the memory of many cities affects the memory of our individuals.
Let's talk about the relationship between a few exhibitions and novels. I have also done several exhibitions, of which the last text of several exhibitions appears in the book, one is "21.4 square meters of pilgrimage", 21.4 square meters is the size of Hengshan and a set of exhibition halls, I made an exhibition in it, called the Pilgrimage Road.
Although this work was not written in the epidemic era, in response to this state of isolation in the epidemic era, I used the street view map of the online map to constantly point out this street view map, along the path on the street view map, from France to the Cathedral of De Compostela. If I see anything in the street view during the walk, the street view is 360 degrees, which is no different from the real world. I would think about composition, such as this one is taken from behind, like the composition of these chairs, because people can go forward and backward a little bit, they can turn around, and in this street view, they do what is called "screenshot photography", and these screenshots along the way are written like a travel diary, but it is just an online tour.
Burgos
（42.3404032, -3.702365 ）
481 km from the destination
Burgos was a dream that came suddenly. The cathedral's beautiful dome makes it a habit to look up. The plane trees on both sides of riverside avenue magically pull up their branches and connect the arcades of trees, as if heaven and earth itself had become a huge church.
The chairs at the entrance to the monastery were staggered, as if a party had just dispersed. I wanted to use a word corresponding to "miracle" to describe such a scene.
San Juan de Ortega
（42.375969, -3.4372488 ）
502 km from the destination
Then I thought, during the pandemic, maybe this is a very important way to travel, and we can't go anywhere now, but you can still go around the world if you open the map. Once I went to Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, and when I got to the door, I found that I was stopped, because the map was after The Notre Dame Was on fire, and now I can choose several dates, I chose ten years ago, and went in smoothly, because it was not on fire at that time.
03.
AR novel, broken mirror novel
Shen Dacheng: BTR's novels are not linear. We watch a classic novel, or a classic movie, you have to go in order, you have to read the first word, the second word, and then you run the whole novel through, and when you watch the movie, you have to watch the first minute, the second minute, and you know what the movie is talking about. But his novels are non-linear, you're more like looking at an exhibition, like you're approaching an installation, it's over there, it's all in front of you, you're going to find some angles, left and right, front and back, going around it, and that's what you're going to do, not having a clue to enter linearly.
In addition, his novels have a very sense of space. One is that he actively places something in the various spaces of the novel like an exhibition, and his novel is three layers inside and three outside. There is also a theme in his novels, which is that he is exploring what is true and false, you do not know what is true and what is false, and in his novels true and false are juxtaposed and equally important. This is where his novels differ from others.
Some works that restore real life are like a mirror in which you can see a real world. But btr's novelty is a broken mirror with a lot of cracks on it, and some small mirror surfaces have broken and fallen. In a broken mirror to look again, it will appear in each fragment of an incomplete figure, this kind of figure, you can support a broken mirror, the broken mirror inside the produce a lot of deformation and incomplete impressions, but these impressions are real reflections, and at the same time will fall off some small pieces, those things that fall off are like a piece of the puzzle board missing, or a puzzle that cannot be solved.
Miss Shanghai
btr: Okay, broken mirror novel, I created a new concept. Shen Dacheng likes to ask me one thing the most: What is your view of fiction? What kind of fiction do I have? Sometimes the novel view exists for the purpose of propaganda, but if I really want to say that there is any novel view, I have an idea, the novel is not VR, it is AR.
What is a VR novel? Everyone looks at VR wearing a helmet, can't see the world in front of him, sees that person dancing with his hands, he actually sees a world that replaces the world in front of him. What is AR? AR is an amplified reality. Reality is still there, but I feel it in a different way, or with an enhanced sense of sensitivity. Just like when you sweep the word Fu, take this thing and look at it to judge whether it is a blessing word or not. It is the machine that opens the senses, and the senses of the machine become an extension of my senses. So I think a good novel will expand your sensibility and give you a different perspective.
Lai Fei: I think the metaphor of "broken mirror" is very well in place, what you see in a mirror is an image, it may be an exact, realistic image, but in a broken mirror you will see countless of yourself or writers. I think BTR's novel, everything he writes is a bit autobiographical, but this autobiography is not him at all, he is actually constantly inventing himself, and this fiction may be an image that you can see in the broken mirror and be refracted. Whether it is his creative way or his own, you will feel that he uses a very bright way to embody something that may be a little dim in reality.
Slide left and right on the paper to see the exhibition
Three-claw: These scenes you see every day, you often record them in the form of photos or in the form of fragments in the public account, how to connect them into complete works, or how many photos do you take every day, how many of them are useful, can be used for your creation, teach it?
btr: All useful. I like photos the most, I take a lot of pictures every day, I think the more photos I take, the better, see something stimulates me, I take it. Probably the only difference with everyone is that I look back after the shoot, but I don't look at it right away. I would take a bunch of pictures, and after about half a month I would look at them together to see if there was anything related or something that came to mind. Some photos are too interesting, I may have sent it that night, for example, yesterday I saw the Spring League posted by everyone on Wuyuan Road, the door was pasted with a lot of "Fu", and the result was that the next door was pasted with "Fa", they looked normal alone, but together is "Fa Fu", it is not normal, I wrote a thing to say that I saw the strangest New Year's wish on Wuyuan Road, that is, Fa Fu. Sometimes I can't help but think it's too much fun, but maybe after a while, you'll get something new.
I'm still very interested in taking pictures, and I think this stuff will always be useful. Sometimes you often regret that you didn't take a picture at that time, but this is also good, and the photos you regret not taking are also in my mind. These things will stimulate your creation.
Is this a novel?