China Quick-Fix is an artistic research project that explores the phenomenon of the ‘quick-fixes’ that can be seen widely on the streets and in homes across China. It consists of a photographic archive, some of which is available on the project’s blog, exhibitions, talks, a workshop and a forthcoming publication. Together, these offer a unique and holistic way of viewing contemporary Chinese society that jumps across fields connecting documentary photography to craft techniques, generational politics, decision making processes, the status of public space, wealth distribution and recycling, to name but a few of the directions this project shoots out in.
The general tone of China Quick-Fix is sympathetic to both the quick-fixes and those who perform them whilst not forgetting the reasons that necessitate them in the first place. It makes visible a hugely creative side of the culture that is normally sidelined and also provides a ground level view of China during its current period of rapid urbanisation and modernisation. Rather than automatically rejecting these improvised solutions, it looks at their deeper logic and tries to learn something from them.
The journal Performance Research published the article China Quick-Fix which introduces the archive with a particular focus on the pandemic:
China Quick-Fix introduces and explores a photographic archive of improvised repairs made in China. It reframes the quick-fix by putting aside the negative connotations that come with the term and understands quick-fixes in a more sympathetic light. It looks at how they represent a creative practice that generates environmentally sustainable personal geographies in increasingly alienated urban environments and it looks at how quick-fixes offer a valuable method with which to view contemporary Chinese society as a whole.
Rather than looking at the city from a top down point of view, China Quick-Fix offers a street level view of the everyday problems people face and the solutions they arrive at. These solutions cover a range from the ingenious to the inadequate and they are rarely celebrated or even noticed; they represent an unselfconscious aesthetic that is antithetical to the state aesthetic which promotes power, modernity and unity.
China Quick-Fix has been presented as a solo exhibition in Moment Art Space (Zhuhai), AMNUA Fine Art Museum (Nanjing), H-Space (Shenzhen), Ex-Libris Gallery (Newcastle), Green Wave Art (Hong Kong), Nothing Gallery (Xiamen) and Rich-Mix (London) as well as featuring in several group shows. The talk has been given at the leading sinology centre China Institute (SOAS University of London), Cambridge University and Edinburgh University, among others.
Exhibition review and interview (in Chinese)