產權 Property

Stolen, distorted, appropriated, spliced, translated - shanzhai T-shirt text disturbs the boundaries between public and private. Emanating from the Pearl River Delta and the foothills of the Global South, a roving écriture féminine traverses nations and seas, written from and on the body.

On garments, this ecstatic nonstandard tongue roams the streets. Exclaiming the contradictions and nonsense of hypercapitalism, shanzhai writing resists the homogenizing forces of gentrification and assimilation that flatten linguistic landscapes and threaten to drive our neighbors from their homes once again.

Shanzhai, the Chinese word for counterfeit, translates to "mountain hamlet "tying acts of mimicry and appropriation to the liberatory potential of shared, autonomous land on the margins. Airing laundry from windows and across fire escapes, shanzhai T-shirt phrases call out irreverent aspirational headlines as if from newsstands and bulletin boards. In garbled coded letters from afar, they convey the mashed-up experiences and contradictory narratives of longing, desire, exile, and estrangement.

Abrons Art Center, formerly "Arts for Living Center, has long been a bastion of multi-lingual hybridity, anti-elitist art-making, feminist discourse, fair wages advocacy, utopian housing construction, garment labor organizing -- and the connections between these projects. Abraham E. Kazan led the construction of affordable housing complexes near Abrons at the behest of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. He was inspired by the twenty-eight weavers of Rochdale who instituted a radical set of cooperative principles in 19th-century England.

A neighborhood is a loom that through tension and contact constructs a shared tapestry, we follow its threads. In the meeting of tongues, new words allow us to envision and construct new worlds. Woven from the fray, an aphorism: AIL PALACES ARETEMPORARY HALACES. 

*Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhal: Deconstruction in Chinese
**Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the text
***Susan Hiler. A Fruitful Incoherence: Dialogues with Artists on Internationalism
****Helen Westgeest, Zen in the Fifties: Interaction in Art between East and West