FREEDON (and On and On) Exhibition Catalog

“FREEDON echoes freedom, but it has lost one line. The alternation of ‘M’ into ‘N’ in the moments of manufacture reveals the hollowness of the word, hobbling along, missing something. Taking delight in nonstandard English, FREEDON offers an ethics of error, valorizing a ‘broken’ English for its ability to astutely and humorously comment upon a contemporary life that in many ways feels broken. In its half-hearted imitation of the English ‘freedom,’ FREEDON is at once a poor copy, where something seems to have gone awry, and a demonstration of joyous abandon: the FREEDON to circulate freely, to don whatever and disregard the rules.” —FREEDON, (and On and On) Exhibition Catalog

Featuring interviews with respondents Aurelia Guo, Silvia Bombardini and Joni Zhu alongside an accumulating set of traces and interventions residing in the slippery space between high and low, original and counterfeit, consumer and producer—often occupying the “non-serious” sites of accessory, textile, glitch, and theft. Published on the occasion of the exhibition and archive in residence at the Women's Art Library, Goldsmiths (UK).

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.

2019, Chinese/English
Author: Ming Lin and Alexandra Tatarsky
Published by: Display Distribute (Hong Kong)
Softcover, 8” x 5.5”, b+w with full color gloss covers