#Issue 20: Digitizing the Chinese writing + Temporarily Censored Home, and More
Hi there,
This is Beimeng, Yan, and Charlotte.
In this issue, we follow the long, complicated courtship between Chinese characters and global technology, and join artist Guanyu Xu as he reclaims his childhood home. Then we take a look at Guangzhou’s vanishing garment district that once embodied the success of “Made in China”.
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Digitizing Chinese Characters
How do you fit thousands of Chinese characters onto a keyboard? How do you explain Chinese characters to computers that are designed for Latin alphabets? As an ideograph-based language, written Chinese faced many challenges when encountering global information technologies such as the telegram, the typewriter and digital typefaces. Generations of linguists, designers, and bureaucrats in China, Japan, and the US spent decades trying to adapt systems built for letters to handle Chinese characters.
One of these efforts was the invention of Chinese typefaces. This explainer video, produced by Sixth Tone’s Holly Xue, tells the fascinating tale of how Chinese characters were transformed, standardized as typefaces, and brought into the digital world.
Meanwhile, Hetongxue 何同学, a wildly influential tech vlogger with more than 10 million followers on Bilibili (who famously interviewed Tim Cook two years ago while still a university student), released a viral video (at almost 10 million views), in which he and his team spent months trying to recreate a one-of-a-kind Chinese typewriter.
The MingKwai Chinese Typewriter was invented by Chinese literature all-rounder Lin Yutang 76 years ago. The machine was crazy dope: just slightly bigger than an English typewriter, it could type as many as 90,000 Chinese characters. But it was so expensive to produce that it never went into production.
Spoiler alert: Lin’s one and only prototype ended up in a dumpster, and in the video, Hetongxue’s remake attempt fails too. But the video tells the story of how the literature giant dedicated his lifetime to the invention. If you ask us, it deserves to be made into a blockbuster movie — hopefully one that doesn’t involve bullshit heroes fanning nationalist flames.
Temporarily Censored Home
Guanyu Xu grew up closeted in a conservative family in 1990s Beijing, and spent his formative years in the U.S. Today, he works with photography and installation to interrogate topics such as identity, temporality and representation.
In Temporarily Censored Home, Xu transforms his childhood home by installing photos from family albums, childhood magazine cutouts, as well as images taken of him and other men all over the rooms. Without his parents’ knowledge, he had to do all this while they were out at work. The resulting photos become a reconstructed reality in which Xu could freely express himself, albeit briefly.
With a similar approach, Xu developed a project called “Resident Aliens” in Chicago, photographing the homes of people with various precarious immigration status. The immigration process flattens individual experience into stacks of documents, and photography is generally restricted to being a means of official identification. Xu’s project does not photograph the people directly but invites the viewer to see them through the space they live in and the objects they possess. The way of seeing differs significantly from that of an immigration officer at the border, acknowledging the storied life each person lives. Ultimately, it asks what citizenship entails in this interconnected world.
Check out Xu’s work on his website and read more about Temporarily Censored Home on British Journal of Photography.
Other highlights:
China's economic success was based on two things: cheap but skilled labor, and a diverse and highly segmented manufacturing ecosystem largely made up of tiny workshops in unregistered buildings. Guangzhou’s Kangle-Lujiang garment district used to house tens of thousands of small workshops and employ more than 150,000 migrant workers. But shortly after this year’s Spring Festival, the local government announced plans to clean up illegal buildings in the urban villages. They declared that they will execute with “the spirit of the zero-covid campaign” — at all costs. Many workshop owners are taking buyouts, while other cities in Guangdong province are trying to lure skilled workers over. This probably spells an end to a manufacturing ecosystem whose success was built on a concentration of workshops and labors.
View the story here.
In case you missed it, Chinese photographer Weimin Chu’s “Faint Light in the Unfinished Building” recently won an honorable mention in the regional category of the 2023 World Press Photo Contest.
Here’s the background of this series, as explained on WPP’s website: “These simple, quiet images tell a complex story of the suffering that the real estate market crisis has caused for ordinary people. Chinese households invest up to 70 percent of their wealth into real estate. Demand for home ownership has created a decades-long boom in residential property construction and financing. However, a presale system led to a debt crisis for housing developers. Financing developments became more difficult and construction on many homes was halted. Although they ended up owning homes that may never be completed, these buyers still need to repay their mortgages. The fallout from this crisis has rippled through the domestic banking sector and the world’s markets.”
What do you think of this year’s awards? Let us know in the comment!
Who we are:
Yan Cong is formerly a photojournalist currently pursuing a research MA in new media and digital culture in Amsterdam.
Beimeng Fu is a video journalist based in Shanghai. She is a lover of languages and documentaries.
Ye Charlotte Ming is a journalist and visual editor covering stories about culture, history, and identity. She’s based in Berlin.
Writers: Beimeng Fu, Yan Cong; Editor: Charlotte Ming; Copy editor: David Cohen
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