Zai Beijing Vi Tian Neng Zou Duoyuan
Olek Borelli
Cover of "One Day in Beijing"
We are going through a decisive phase of transformation, where all basic and absolute concepts, systems and models are gradually losing their value and are no longer appropriate to understand and represent reality: new solutions and new ways are thus required in order to substitute a pattern unable to meet the system needs with an administration more suitable and closer to the people.
This kind of transformation is everything but a simple and linear process: it faces and sometimes clashes with a society that is not always permeable and flexible towards change, colliding with a complex and tortuous bureaucracy, whose original role degenerates and looses effectiveness.
November 4th, 2003: "One day in Beijing", is a book "performed" by artists Gao Brothers (Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang) from dawn to sunset. It is a project about return the citizen to the city, about living cells reacting to any modification occurring in the system or sparked off by it, which are otherwise unable to respond effectively and adequately to the repeated transformations of the society. Making use of snapshot photography as a par exellence tool, the artists record Beijing’s perpetual evolution through its faces, shadows and buildings, vital organs of a living colossus "…whose skeleton is made of steel, concrete, electric wires and pipelines".
Black and white and color pictures witness social events, city planning challenges and new ways of thinking setting the tone for an epochal analysis of a Chinese experience disclosed by the memories of a regular day and the physical persistent marks scattered about the city.
Besides the final exquisite result, the atypical approach is most impressive: without any ornamental comments or fanciful aesthetic ambitions, Beijing reveals itself through its daily existence, while words and images’ mutual support (as in a symbiotic relation where the one wouldn’t be but with the other), creates a living piece of work which speaks and yet leaves the pleasure of going over the multifaceted shapes of this new society up to the reader.
The one and only answer to the impact with global society is the reclamation of the role of the individual: following the renovation of the two concepts of "space" and "territory", individuals are called to perform a decisive role, leading to a consideration of these newly created, non-territorial spaces while keeping touch with reality.
"One Day in Beijing" (A Performing Book) by Gao Brothers, Beijing Broadcasting Institute ed. (Beijing Guangbo Xueyuan Chubanshe), May 2004.
