A personal story about Chinese culture

Poetics without sentimentality

Of all things, I would like to begin my story of China with this picture of a woman carrying plum blossom twigs. It was an early morning in Guiyang. Having passed a statue of Mao Zedong, having passed a square with elderly people line-exercising and several passers-by who where walking backwards (later on I learned it’s a genuine, local technique to exercise muscles more effectively), I found myself on the bridge.

In the middle of the greyish landscape of early spring, in the middle of urban dust – there she was, passing me by, a woman with a yoke over her shoulders, a bundle of pink plum twigs at the very end, carrying this delicate load as if it were any other cargo delivered to the market – a stack of hay, or a package of lettuce. And for her it, probably, was. For me this was an astonishing concentration of beauty.

I was thinking of this woman getting up that day with the first light of the dawn, going to a garden of blossoming plum trees, still cold and wet in the early hours, approaching them frankly, without any second thought, and cutting the twigs. Fastening them together and making two bundles. The poetics of cutting the plum tree blossom, packaging it, and selling it in small portions to discrete customers to whom it will be the embodiment of vanishing beauty. It came to express the poetics of China for me.

Creative eclecticism in details

In China you can see different materials assembled in a way you could never imagine before. When going to a stylish restaurant in Shanghai, where a meal costs a month wage of a simple man, you can find elaborate wood carvings, fashionable lamps and a horde of attentive waiters. Alongside with plastic imitation of bamboo, the cheapest kind of toothpick container and a paper string of felicitations. While a topic of amusement for the first encounter, it triggers further thinking when you see this again and again. And after a while you start to see a different code of aesthetics – not the one prevailing in the western world – where plastic is as authentic as wood, and imitation of bamboo blends with a delicate interior perfectly when you don’t have preconceptions.

In the picture we see a column of the building wrapped in golden paper – and it’s not for the carnival, it’s a daily outfit of the column.

Solidarity in uniformity

There is a great sense of solidarity between people in China. It’s a fascinating feeling of possession when you stand in the middle of the crowd at the intersection of two big streets in the Shanghai centre, not far away from National Museum. And after a signal a grand mass of people charges forward swallowing the cars and bringing to a halt a stream of vehicles – unimaginable scene in any other metropolis where pedestrians have to watch and succumb to the flood of cars.