Next Stop, Same Stop

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2021

8K

16 seconds

Screen printing on different types of Xuan papers for Chinese Couplets and Congratulatory Message

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When I was working in Beijing in the winter of 2017, I had to go to Shanghai for two consecutive months each to help my boss print pictures. After arriving at Shanghai Hongqiao Station from Beijing South Station on the Fuxing high-speed train, I noticed that the interiors of the two stations were strikingly similar. This brought me a wonderful illusion that I couldn’t tell which city I was in if the station names weren’t different as if I had returned to the same place after a journey. The same feeling of similarity occurs in the new subway stations in both cities, always with similar designs. The same tiles, the same glass, the same platforms brought me a constant sense of disorientation. In the spring of 2021, I asked two friends in China to help me shoot video clips of subway stations in Beijing and Changsha, two cities that, unsurprisingly, blend perfectly together.

 

When a busy person walks into a recognizable subway station with a different design, the surroundings might will make him feel special at the moment, and he will have a clearer sense of where he is and where he is going. Instead of being constantly enveloped in a huge, complex, mechanized, industrialized city, which makes him feel small, confused, and mediocre about himself and his life.

 

Because of its simplicity, ease, and speed, the silkscreen print has often been presented or represented as an urban, industrial, mass reproducible aesthetic, both in history and in the present. When I printed static images of subway stations in irregular colors on colorful rice paper, I wanted to give each frame an unrepeatable color in a screen print that is supposed to represent the city and the repetitive batch so that each clip in the video would be unique.

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