偏离

Short Cuts

The project Short Cuts grew out of a return to my own experience of space. It began with a small park in Jinshan, Shanghai. By revisiting places held in memory and gathering related historical materials, I explored how personal experience takes shape, as well as the history of this industrial town. Later, in the Experience | Architecture workshop at Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, I invited participants to use writing to revisit a personal experience of space. I observed how they approached places in their memories and made sense of their relationship with space. In response, each writer brought forward a distinct personal experience, actively engaging with the ways in which individuals and the spaces around them shape one another.

The Positive Art Research Center’s (PARC) project Is “Shan Shui” Useful Today? — “Beyond Shan Shui (On-site)” offered me an opportunity to continue these responses. Taking part allowed me to look again at the varied writing produced in the workshop: the twists and turns of personal histories; the disjunctions between remembered experience and present feeling; the differences in writing methods; and even the ways some writers departed from the original prompt. Each piece seemed to open onto a distinct vantage point. These diverging perspectives brought to mind the shifting views of Chinese landscape painting, where the scene unfolds as the viewer’s viewpoint moves. Drawing on their own experiences, the writers chose different details and paths, allowing space to take on a different appearance in each account. As I read, I too moved from one position to another, entering the distinct worlds of experience each writer described.

This shifting of vantage points drew my attention to the personal circumstances behind landscape poetry and painting—lives diverted from their former paths through exile, banishment, or reclusion. The experience of landscape, too, involves a mutual shaping of person and place: we approach what we see from within our own circumstances, and are also changed by it as we travel, pause, and describe. This echoes what I learned in the workshop. Participants recognized the traces space had left in their bodies, feelings, and habits; through memory and writing, they also gave new shape to spaces remembered. The makers of landscape poems and paintings entrusted their feelings to mountains and sought refuge in waters, moving back and forth between their own circumstances and the natural world. In this process, a self displaced from its former position gradually came into view.

With these tentative thoughts, I brought six texts from the workshop to a bamboo grove in Hangzhou, where the authors’ readings accompanied visitors on a walk through the trees. As listeners followed the paths, they also entered different spaces of memory through other people’s stories. The rooms, roads, and courtyards heard in their headphones came into relation with the bamboo grove before their eyes. Another person’s past and one’s own present briefly met through the movement of footsteps, sound, and attention.

Short Cuts thus became an attempt to take a detour: to move away from habitual ways of seeing and understanding oneself by way of other people’s spatial memories, making room for relationships that have yet to be noticed.