By Xin Cheng

Offerings of ping pong and cleaning tools from a hanging wine box, in a former factory-turned artist colony, Geneva, 2014. Photo by Xin Cheng

7 drifts on the possibilities of shared spaces

XIN CHENG | Walking is slow compared to riding a bike, sitting in a car or catching the train. The slowness allows me to notice and be free to stop and see more whenever I like. While I do walk to get somewhere, I often leave extra time so it could be more of a drift: the pleasures of being lost in unexpected places…

Peter's kitchen, Auckland, New Zealand, 2006. Photo by Xin Cheng

encountering everyday resourcefulness: a drifting assemblage

XIN CHENG | It was in Peter’s kitchen that my eyes opened. A spring day in 2006, I visited Peter in the Auckland suburbs to brew a plan of making Captain Cook’s Manuka Beer (the story was that they improvised with local ingredients after surviving a long journey from England). In his rented flat, beside the cooking stove, I saw vistas of alpine prairies…

Table during the small modifications workshop I ran at Rancho Electronico, including some of the timely floating wholemeal bread. Photo by Xin Cheng

Many Other Worlds are Possible: chance encounters, gathering points, following the sweet potato rhizomes in Mexico City

XIN CHENG | A few days after listening to ‘The Danger of the Single Story’, I headed to the other side of the earth, to join the class Design for the Living World at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. Quite a change of scenery — yet the questions remain, this time through the lens of ‘solidary societies’, as we prepared for a research residency in Mexico City…

Photo by Xin Cheng

tender surrender

XIN CHENG | In Desire Armed, Landstreicher proposed desire as a creative impulse to follow one’s own inclinations, independent from the spooks of society, in relation with the specific other people around oneself. I feel, an important distinction then, is to realise the situations where I can do something…

A view from Nanji-do ecological park, Seoul, Korea, 2015. Photo by Xin Cheng

Mountain Stories

XIN CHENG | The last three months of 2015, I lived on a trash mountain. I thought I was going to an eco-park. The morning after my arrival, I walked out of where I had slept, and discovered a giant dome building, a huge chimney, trucks coming in, and a blinking board of what looked like toxic chemicals with numbers beside them…

Photo by Iris Hsieh

Rulers

XIN CHENG | Quite a few months ago, in Taiwan, I saw a carpenter’s tape measure with the scales in metric, Chinese inches and how fortuitous the length is according to fengshui…

One of the spaces the writer has rested in. Photo by Xin Cheng

some stories around ‘shelter’

XIN CHENG | One night in May 2016 in a park in Western Tokyo, I made myself comfortable in between sheets of cardboard. There were high wind in the trees above. I felt the ground move powerfully under me, like riding a giant worm…

Xin Cheng, found in the Kobe mountains, Japan, 2016

I AM…

XIN CHENG | Early 2015, I performed for MAU/Lemi Ponifasio’s I AM at Aotea Centre as part of the Auckland Arts Festival. It was an intense and transformative experience. For a start, I was grateful for having been included as a volunteer, despite being an amateur to the world of performance (I had only started getting my toes wet…