On June 9th about 30-40 students from Parsons and Tsinghua played the HouHai’d ‘n’ Seek urban game we’ve been working on with Leanne. Gaming lasted anywhere from a couple hours to the roaming raging of team “BU YAO” who played until well after midnight. This added a new dimension to many of the challenges, which were planned to be played mostly in daylight, but haunting Beijing hutongs at night is always good fun.

[Download the HouHai’d ‘n’ Seek map and guide to exploring Beijing and “learning more about Beijing culture”.]

Challenge hosts Uncle Ke and Auntie Li taught students how to wrap Beijing-style dumplings, which seemed to cause surprise and/or envy among other neighbours who were surprised to see the “deaf mutes” engaging in such a lively, social activity. Big brother Gao came by to critique everyone’s dumplings (“That’s good, but today we’re making dumplings, not buns. Try again.”) and give a long, carousing account of his reasons why one should not do drugs but how smoking cigarrettes and drinking alcohol are a necessary and integral part of Beijing 老百姓 laobaixing (common people) life.

After the game, Parsons Design & Technology student Robyn Girard popped by to chat with Uncle Ke and Auntie Li, and where we were wondering about the logistics of translation, they ended up barely needing translation help at all. Robyn cannot hear either, and although Chinese sign language is different from English sign language, there was enough intersection and the know-how of reading gestures to maintain a two-hour long conversation about signing and life in Beijing versus New York.

Amidst busy hands though, the freshly made dumplings got cold…

(Big thank yous to Uncle Ke and Auntie Li, Alessandro, and Robyn and her translator! This project was created by Leanne Wagner and Qu Yizhen, Ouyang Xiao and Elaine W. Ho at HomeShop.)

This month, HomeShop embarks on a series of exercises in “cultural exchange”. As some of us have been already thinking about this question in relation to a Swiss-Chinese cultural exchange project, we wonder where ‘coming closer together’ begins and ‘exclusivity’ takes over. What is being learned in this process could be a mere mocking, or composed accidents and collisions in repeat formation. The guise of cultural exchange offers ample opportunity, through the cloudy difficulties of language, to easily binarise one another, see the you as you-all and make hit-and-run types of meeting that can’t help but feel colonialistic, too strategic. What could be “natural” in this case? How long does it take, or what kind of ‘serious events’ (to the extremity of Bataille?) should occur to ‘naturalise’ a new kind of community?

Reading 1: “Friendship, Assymetry, Sacrifice: Bataille and Blanchot” by Patrick ffrench [download PDF, 320kb]

Exercise 1: Zhang Shuo (aka Bobby) and Fotini (aka Fontini, Fotina, Fontina,
Fortini, Fotimi, Finito, Fotoni, Foutini, Fontine, Fontino, Fontani and Fontana) engage in a Beijing-Berlin video web chat, commencing in a series of language exercises in “Name This Object”, including ‘书 book’, ‘脚 foot’ and ‘猴子 monkey’. Running out of objects within arm and vocabulary’s reach, they resort to physical exercises, including Jumping on One Foot, Laying Back in Relaxed Fashion and Walking on Hands and Feet Together Like Slow Animal.

Coming up next week: Twist, Xiao and Elaine at HomeShop will work with Re:Activism co-creator Leanne Wagner to develop an urban game to be played in the streets of B-town among students of Parsons School of Design in New York and Beijing’s Tsinghua University. If you are located anywhere around the 后海 HouHai/鼓楼 Gulou/景山 Jingshan areas of the city and you would like to participate, please e-mail us at lianxi[at]homeshop[dot]org[dot]cn.