閃 Shine

Shine, 閃亮 (shan liang), is made up of 閃 (flash) and 亮 (bright). It describes a glare that is at once attention-grabbing and blinding. Shine both obscures and reveals the inner workings of its production. In these phrases, shine is made literal, emblazoned in alphabets. A poetics of shine allows for a multi-faceted, scintillating view of consumerist culture in place of a dichotomy of good and bad. How might we develop a method of reading that would shift the angle of shine, refracting light towards the insight of an interlingual gleam?

Upon encountering this fashion text, what at first might appear to confirm the codes of commodity fetishism instead comes to complicate them.

The words remain committed to articulating an illustrious existence while their aberrations exhibit a flippancy or resistance towards the language of luxury from which they have been spawned. The metaphysical claims of fashion copy have been checked by their imposition on the very fiber of the fashion object itself. The result is an honest cloth that utters its condition without shame, so loudly and brazenly as to admit a joy in this wildly disjunctive existence.

The phrases attain an aphoristic quality as highly distilled wisdoms in an age of information and material overload. If fashion is "the space the body makes as it cuts across the empire,* the plastic text offers a chance to reflect upon the detritus.

*Caroline Busta, What Can Be Done to a Body?" Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years.

For this iteration of the project, Ming Lin and Alexandra Tatarsky have researched the garbled English texts found on garments of Chinese manufacture.

Second edition of 500 printed July 2020