闪 Shine

The Shanzhai Lyric mini publications are published by Display Distribute and each represent the culmination of a particular body of research by Ming Lin and Alexandra Tatarsky, the duo behind Shanzhai Lyric.

Shine describes a gleam that both obscures and reveals. In the Shanzhai Lyric, 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, refracting its light towards the insight of an interlingual gleam. Poems collected from Zoo Market, a multi-level clothing market in Beijing. Printed on the occasion of“The Shanzhai Lyric: However you want to describe the trend, it’s time to shine”at Wujin, Beijing.

Shanzhai Lyric is a body of research focusing on radical logistics and linguistics through the prism of technological aberration and nonofficial cultures. The project takes inspiration from the experimental English of shanzhai t-shirts made in China and proliferating across the globe to examine how the language of counterfeit uses mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies. Through an ever-growing archive of poetry-garments, Shanzhai Lyric explores the potential of mis-translation and nonsense as utopian world-making (breaking) and has previously taken the form of poetry-lecture, essay, and installation.

2015, Chinese/English
Author: Ming Lin and Alexandra Tatarsky
Published by: Display Distribute (Hong Kong)
Softcover, 210 x 297 mm, b+w on color paper