After the flooding

On the third day after I returned home, it rained heavily throughout the night. The rain spread across the entire city and this tourist city known as the “Spring City” was mercilessly submerged in a mixture of urban sewage, rainwater, and human waste. The city’s drainage system seemed like a gigantic pump, bringing back to the surface a dirty force that had been buried underground and was never supposed to see the light of day. This force once again began to churn and occupy every street and building. There was something cruel and indescribably beautiful about it. Everyone knew that the water would recede very soon - perhaps in two hours, perhaps by midnight, perhaps not until tomorrow. It was like a temporary piece of evidence, a brief and tense demonstration of the foundations and the “core” of the city.

I was riding an electric motorcycle through the flooded streets. The murky water had just reached the edge of the footboard, and I had to lift my shoes and trousers, even though they were already completely soaked, as if I could somehow prevent something else from entering my body. Countless people had gathered along the higher ground of the sidewalks, watching with a mixture of curiosity and anxiety as people made their way through the water. I was one of those people in the water. Everyone took out their phones and started filming. I secretly felt excited by the thought that perhaps I might “luckily” appear on someone’s social media and receive a lot of likes, expressions of amazement, or even be laughed at. At that moment, I imagined myself as perhaps one of many Odysseuses, or one of many Noahs.

More than half of the human body is made of water. There are also all kinds of metabolic by-products and waste inside us, certain acids, sterols and so on. Perhaps, at that very moment, there was some indescribably intimate connection between me and the filthy water that had submerged the city. I was part of it. Water is always cruel and fascinating. For me, perhaps it is even more fascinating than that. One phenomenon I have always been interested in is the way water acts upon space when it appears within it. This is something that I think Tarkovsky’s Stalker captures particularly well. One of my favorite scenes is when the three protagonists enter the Zone and lie down in the wet trenches, beside the water and the openings of the drainage tunnels. I can imagine the distortion and discomfort of lying on that wet ground while wearing heavy winter clothes. A German Sheperd walks through the water, leaving behind those sharp slapping sounds. There is another scene when the three of them approach the center of the Zone, walking through enormous, damp pipes. The sounds of water dripping and flowing across the ground are exaggerated almost infinitely, transformed into something suffocating and mysterious. The sound of leather shoes stepping into puddles is concrete. It has a shape. It is roaring. I thought about all of these things while I was standing in the bathroom and taking a shower. I have always thought about my work while taking a shower. I don’t know why, but a shower is always accompanied by a strangely exciting sense of space. The steam fills the entire small bathroom, and somehow it is only within an environment like this that I can think about my work and about myself. I photographed some plastic bottles. They contained all kinds of drinks and liquids, and at that particular moment they seemed to me like perhaps the best works and the best evidence: lightweight, movable, full of a kind of vitality, and completely ordinary. After returning from Germany to China, I have once again started throwing plastic bottles away casually. In Germany, I would keep them and return them for the deposit money. And now, once again, it has started to rain heavily.