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. Choose a colour and then follow it wherever it leads you.

I took a picture of each of 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 then 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 followed a lady and she went into building so I left her, looked around and found a new pink target.

The delivery bike was too fast for me 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 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, too pale or mixed with oranges and reds to be 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. 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. 

Doing this with a different colour would result in a very different sort of experience and lead me through a distinct set of spaces. 

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.