Ways To Wander No. 28

I was on the lookout for tours to take and, coming up a blank in my local vicinity, I thought it better to take matters into my own hand. I looked in the book Ways To Wander which is a collection of proposals for walks, the majority of which come from walking artists, whatever that term precisely means. I selected number 28 a walk written by Blake Morris. It goes like this: 

The problems began right away. As I am in China, Google Maps does not work properly. There is both an effort to block it and it is not regularly updated. When I searched for my neighborhood of Tangjia it didn't offer a clear choice and some of the options were placed in the sea. This brings up the issue of efficient mapping being a precondition for prosecuting an effective war, trade or otherwise. I heard the Chinese equivalent service Baiduu Map doesn't work properly in the US.

The places it suggested were quite definitely not the centre of Tangjia and the centre of the screen was a mountainous park next to Zhongshan University. Plan B was needed.

I switched to Baidu Map which didn't give me the satisfaction of a pin so I had to zoom in and mark a crude X on the centre of what it said was Tangjia. I studied the digital map carefully as I would not have access to the phone once I set off. It seemed to be in a place I hadn't been to before.

The walk to the centre of Tangjia was more focussed than a typical walk. Having a purpose, a destination and no phone to distract you from the here and now, is a good condition to think about how the software came up with this destination. I imagined satellites above me assisting this mapping. The moon shone brightly too, it was a clear warm night. The stars were on my side.

When I came to what I thought was the centre of the map I saw a single lane road with houses on either side of the two high walls which lined it. I walked back and forth surveying it carefully and according to my estimate the centre of Tangjia is one of two places. It is either a tree with long, green shiny leaves that hang over the once white two-meter wall or it is the hand-written sign that sits a meter or two to its left. The sign read: 美女上門 and underneath was a telephone number. It was an ad for call girls. 

I made my way along the road and weaved through a residential area till it came to a bustling evening street with shops open late and people still eating. I had to reflect that the location I was sent to was not where I would have placed the centre of Tangjia. When I saw both this lively road and the tower blocks under construction nearby, I had to reconsider: maybe the centre was indeed further south around here. 

We all seem to live in our bubbles with our own conception of the city and if this walk did one good thing it was to merge this virtual and real spaces by inviting me to view one from the perspective of the other. In doing so, I could see how the neighborhood is viewed with quite different centers of gravity. This was only reinforced as I walked back past a new live house where a local pop band were playing a long line of teenagers were waiting to get in and see their idols.

A final think that I realized when I got home is that while I hadn't looked at the phone, it had been recording my footsteps. I'm trying to walk around 10,000 a day as that is healthy. This tour didn't quite take me there but that's largely my fault for not braving the sticky sauna of daytime Zhuhai weather. I shall try a few more walks from this collection and review them here.

 

The Pink Tour of Shanghai

I wanted to take a tour of Shanghai and all the conventional ones seemed a bit boring so I decided to make my own: The Pink Tour of Shanghai.

It is quite a simple exercise, which I sometimes give my students. Choose a colour and then follow it from point to point, wherever it leads you.

I took a picture of each of the pink colored entities that was pulling me towards it.

I discovered something as I was doing this. The colour pink is mostly used in women's clothing and relatively little elsewhere.

This therefore lead me sort of by default onto the middle aged ladies of Shanghai tour. This group were queuing to try and catch a glimpse of a celebrity.

Elsewhere pink lead me to objects used by women.

One thing particular about it then was that most of the pink was mobile. Grey stays put whereas pink is on the move. I had never really thought about how mobile various colors are before.

I followed an energetic older lady but she went into building so I left her. I looked around and found a new pink target.

The delivery bike was too fast for me to catch it but it did take me a distance whereas most other pinks just took me a short way.

Sometimes the distance was quite great but as long as I remained focussed on the pink target I was good.

I finally got taken to a building but it was a building for fashion and it was closed for renovation.

I was starting to wonder if this pattern of following middle-aged ladies was going to ever break and when the right moment to stop would be.

I then got taken to another building, this time an open one.

It was a mall. I stepped inside and saw a lady with a light pink bag and followed her.

It was a bit tricky deciding what is and isn't pink; some pinks are on the edge of pink: they are too pale or are mixed with oranges and reds, not pure pink but still pink enough for me.

These flowers are one such example.

That's when I realized that the mall as a whole was pink by design.

The woman who I had followed had just walked clean through the mall without stopping, for her it was an air conditioned street. For me it was a pink paradise.

Strawberries are not red they are pink!  

 

And then the LED lighting changed colour and dropped the pink illuminating the space with a colder white light. I was left in a corner of the mall with no pink in view. It was time to stop, I had had my pink tour. This changing of colour was disconcerting and reminded me of another mall I had been in the day before which had put all the signage onto LED screens which also carried ads. If you needed to find the exit or the toilets you had to stare at ads for thirty seconds first. 

Doing this colour themed tour with a different colour would result in a very different sort of experience and lead me through a distinct set of spaces. I remember, for example, once doing this with red in China. The difficulty is really in maintaining concentration and allowing the experience to unfold rather than directing it too deliberately. It's more difficult than it looks.

The Beijing Tour of All Tours: Video Documentation

 

There is not a great deal of video documentation of The Tour of All Tours: you had to be there to see it, basically. But, over time, some bits and pieces do come together and this is one of those. This video was made for the exhibition On Holiday (CEAC Xiamen 2022) which took critical tourism and performance as its basis. The Beijing tour was reconstructed as a video for the exhibition and here, now, is that video. 

One of the things that is quite obvious is the gap between text and image. This is the result of filming the tour five years after it was made. Five years is a long time in Beijing and many changes had taken place. This gap is not so much a problem as another layer and point of interest, as far as I see it.

One of the biggest changes is that the organization that commissioned and hosted the tour, Bookworm, had left Sanlitun. There was, therefore, an element of nostalgia for the recent past.  

 

An Aquatic Themed Tour of Reclamation Street, Hong Kong

 

Reclamation Street on the Kowloon Peninsula is built on land extended into the sea and runs about one mile north to south. This performance involved walking from the southern end of the street to the northern end of it obeying one basic rule. This rule was to stop in every shop that sold water, to buy a bottle and to then empty it over yourself. I did this and very wet I quickly became, I was wet to the skin as I popped into small stores in search of yet more water. The plastic bottles were collected and deposited at the recycling centre at the northern end of the street.