Tag: Beijing

Conceptual Youth Hostel, the text

This text, realized for the second issue of HomeShop’s Wear journal (2010), was the culmination of a series of zines I had produced in printshops around central Beijing in 2009. The approach was similar to those zines, where most of the images were found on the print shop’s hard drives or made with their software, sometimes with the help of the clerks, and assembled in one night and printed in the early hours. For this text, however, I saved my work on the computers of a specific print shop, returning there consistently over several visits. Through this text I was attempting to describe an imaginary place called “the conceptual youth hostel,” where the conversion of experiences into fixed values was suspended.

See the PDF here: Conceptual-Youth Hostel_2010_Michael-Eddy

(Cleaning out data, I recently came across another trace of this project that couldn’t be included in the printed publication, which was that in the danwei housing compound in the Tuanjiehu (团结湖, literally “Solidarity Lake”) neighbourhood of Beijing where I lived, I had posted the pages on the local notice board.)



published June 13th, 2020

 

Print shop

Series of 4 zines, edition of 10 each.
Beijing, CN, 2009

After the loneliness of my first winter in Beijing, I found the print shops, open 24 hours, to be interesting places (like timeshare studios) to have a little company late at night in the Central Business District. Following a long working day, I would stop by a print shop and produce a zine within the span of several hours, getting help from the young workers, using the word processing and office programs on their computers, and materials that had been left by other customers.

This process of red-eye writing was employed over a longer duration (by saving my document on the computers at a particular print shop and asking the non-English speaking staff for translation help) in the piece “The Conceptual Youth Hostel” for WEAR journal #2 (HomeShop, 2010).