Shanzhai Lyric had intended on “tracing the pathway of a shanzhai T-shirt”, with visits to informal markets in South China, and the Museum of Counterfeiting in Paris, but as was the theme of 2020, “all our plans were cancelled”.
Founded by Ming Lin and Alexandra Tarkovsky in 2015, their research practice started in Beijing; where they collected “shanzhai lyrics” found on T-Shirts during their daily visits to a multi-level women’s clothing market. Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism meaning “counterfeit, replica, knock off or rip off”, describing bootleg clothing, phones, perfume, and bags; but shanzhai more precisely translates to ‘mountain hamlet’. “In reference to this enclave on the outskirts of empire, where bandits stockpile goods to redistribute among people living on those margins, or in the mountain stronghold area”, says Shanzhai Lyric.
Describing their research practice as “parasitical and responsive”, Shanzhai Lyric invented the Canal Street Research Association — a “temporary centre of operations” — in direct response to an opportunity to work from an empty retail space. They dug into how aesthetics signal what’s going on in a space, and sought to exist “ambiguously between categories”. They got to know long-time residents, passers by, and street vendors, who would come in to see their archive of poetic garments, various versions of Statue of Liberty crowns, bootleg Mickey M(ice), caricature portraits, postcards, and other collected ephemera; contribute to a photographic timeline of every building on Canal Street — adding personal anecdotes about places they recognised or once were — watch performances, film screenings or attend lessons. People would come back several times a day “checking in on us, or to drop off ephemera. Anybody who was intrigued really became a close collaborator”.
Adopting the space had been proposed to them by curators Constanza Valenzuela and Jack Radley, who had been offered it as Canal Street emptied out during the pandemic. Despite its central location, Canal Street, and particularly the strip west of the intersection with Broadway, had long resisted the kind of “upscaling” that property owners, and city bureaucrats, sought. Since an operation against counterfeit merchandise in 2008 — when Mayor Bloomberg shifted the financial liability of illicit trade onto landlords — the practice of shops operating as souvenir shops in the front, and warehousing for counterfeit goods in the back, had largely been eliminated. Spaces stood empty until the potential of ‘art as advertisement’ entered the mix, as a spatial placeholder and deliberate strategy that both allows landlords to appear generous — as if they are contributing to the arts — and in most cases, add value to their properties. ‘Artwashing’ rinsing off as gentrification. The landlords, United American Land, had been operating a pop-up model — alongside other property owners on the street — with creative agency Wallplay, which closed in early 2020, leaving many spaces unoccupied, open to interpretation, and ripe for spatial ‘subversion’. “The project has always been like an open research question of how it might be possible to take resources that are available, and redistribute them, while also attempting to subvert the very circumstances that made it possible for us to access those resources” says Shanzhai Lyric. But the CSRA ultimately became a “depressing, but also interesting” dialogue with their landlord, which concluded in them being kicked out. “[They] became the arbiter of aesthetics and art. Our aesthetics didn’t fit the scheme he’d imagined, which was a validating process for his property.”
While working from their storefront, Shanzhai Lyric continued their research into the etymology of the poetic phrasing of shanzhai garments, and found that they could chart “the evolution and disappearance of experimental English, as proportional to the homogenisation of cities”, an observation distilled by their space on Canal Street. “We both grew up nearby, and feel very connected to the block” Shanzhai Lyric tells me, “It became a chance to reflect more deeply on how the global flows and trade routes we had planned on following around the world, could actually be found on one block of Canal, between Mercer and Greene Street. We think of Canal Street as a hamlet of sorts”.
Like many places around the world, New York was — albeit, temporarily — unrecognisable during the first months of the pandemic. With lockdowns in place, offices emptied out, shops were boarded up, businesses permanently closed, advertisers went quiet; street life shifted from one shaped by consumerism and the privatisation of public space, to one where it was possible to take in the city anew. “Many people who have lived in New York for a long time remarked that during Covid the city felt in some ways more similar to a city they remembered from many years ago. Without business owners around to police and criminalise the act of gathering in front of their spaces, street life became possible again”.
Right across from their shop space was Little Senegal, where street vendors set up shop. “We met Khadim Sene, who’s a vendor, musician and teacher, and we held outdoor lessons with him. Khalifa Thiam, another vendor, who’s trained as a film maker shared hours of footage recorded on Canal Street between 2008-12. He’s captured this former era of [the street], which he considers the best years of his life in the US, because that’s when Obama was president”. After meeting street vendor Leo Liu, a caricaturist, they learnt that portrait art can be pursued without a vendors licence, as it’s covered under freedom of expression laws. “Following that line of the possibility of redistribution, we were interested in how art could be operational. How could we [mimic these strategies] of skirting legal parameters [by citing artistic expression]?”
Adopting shanzhai strategies — and knowing they were about to lose the space — the CSRA became a “store in drag”; ’ripping off’ the aesthetic language of retail — “making something shiny to cover up the real mechanisms of redistribution, and so-called theft, that might be going on”. They enjoyed a final round of adaptive ambiguity, which also functioned as an homage to the history of the neighbourhood: “of artists using retail as an experimental medium to disseminate experimental ideas to the masses”. One of the objects in their shop, as an offering and proposal of how to make use of loopholes and the privileges afforded to art objects, was a counterfeit bag: “which is technically illegal, but in this case was categorised as a ready-made art object, thereby skirting that legal parameter.”
All these interactions, relationships and adaptations happened quite naturally, a consequence of just being in one place for a long time — also a consequence of the pandemic. There was a period of several months on Canal Street that had a sense of freedom and calm, before the city worked out how to monetise outside space through permits, and hide communal life. “There had been a lot less police presence” says Shanzhai Lyric, “until around Christmas when raids started again.” Since then, police presence had increased and permanent surveillance apparatus was installed, making it dangerous to be conducting street trade. “It’s really something to think about, how the threat of genuine class mobility is what needs to be actively destroyed by the state.”
Canal Street has always been in flux, and people adapt, “strategically shape-shifting as a survival mechanism and tactic”. Although the CSRA lost it’s retail space, Shanzhai Lyric has moved up the street to an idle office, where they plan to enter the realm their collaborators operate in, “doing your work on the street, en plein air”. “We’re in the planning phases of thinking through how there could be a street school, a collaborative film crew, or market.”
Reflecting on the past year, and the time and space that opened up as commercial units became available, street life became possible and government financial support provided temporary respite from a system that characteristically lacks a safety net, Shanzhai Lyric considered how “precarity, high rent and financial anxiety make experimentation really difficult in a city”. “It begins to seem very deliberate, right, that people are too exhausted and too anxious to indulge in open exploration that’s really about time, being without a goal, and welcoming whatever happens.”
Founded by Ming Lin and Alexandra Tarkovsky in 2015, their research practice started in Beijing; where they collected “shanzhai lyrics” found on T-Shirts during their daily visits to a multi-level women’s clothing market. Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism meaning “counterfeit, replica, knock off or rip off”, describing bootleg clothing, phones, perfume, and bags; but shanzhai more precisely translates to ‘mountain hamlet’. “In reference to this enclave on the outskirts of empire, where bandits stockpile goods to redistribute among people living on those margins, or in the mountain stronghold area”, says Shanzhai Lyric.
Describing their research practice as “parasitical and responsive”, Shanzhai Lyric invented the Canal Street Research Association — a “temporary centre of operations” — in direct response to an opportunity to work from an empty retail space. They dug into how aesthetics signal what’s going on in a space, and sought to exist “ambiguously between categories”. They got to know long-time residents, passers by, and street vendors, who would come in to see their archive of poetic garments, various versions of Statue of Liberty crowns, bootleg Mickey M(ice), caricature portraits, postcards, and other collected ephemera; contribute to a photographic timeline of every building on Canal Street — adding personal anecdotes about places they recognised or once were — watch performances, film screenings or attend lessons. People would come back several times a day “checking in on us, or to drop off ephemera. Anybody who was intrigued really became a close collaborator”.
Adopting the space had been proposed to them by curators Constanza Valenzuela and Jack Radley, who had been offered it as Canal Street emptied out during the pandemic. Despite its central location, Canal Street, and particularly the strip west of the intersection with Broadway, had long resisted the kind of “upscaling” that property owners, and city bureaucrats, sought. Since an operation against counterfeit merchandise in 2008 — when Mayor Bloomberg shifted the financial liability of illicit trade onto landlords — the practice of shops operating as souvenir shops in the front, and warehousing for counterfeit goods in the back, had largely been eliminated. Spaces stood empty until the potential of ‘art as advertisement’ entered the mix, as a spatial placeholder and deliberate strategy that both allows landlords to appear generous — as if they are contributing to the arts — and in most cases, add value to their properties. ‘Artwashing’ rinsing off as gentrification. The landlords, United American Land, had been operating a pop-up model — alongside other property owners on the street — with creative agency Wallplay, which closed in early 2020, leaving many spaces unoccupied, open to interpretation, and ripe for spatial ‘subversion’. “The project has always been like an open research question of how it might be possible to take resources that are available, and redistribute them, while also attempting to subvert the very circumstances that made it possible for us to access those resources” says Shanzhai Lyric. But the CSRA ultimately became a “depressing, but also interesting” dialogue with their landlord, which concluded in them being kicked out. “[They] became the arbiter of aesthetics and art. Our aesthetics didn’t fit the scheme he’d imagined, which was a validating process for his property.”
While working from their storefront, Shanzhai Lyric continued their research into the etymology of the poetic phrasing of shanzhai garments, and found that they could chart “the evolution and disappearance of experimental English, as proportional to the homogenisation of cities”, an observation distilled by their space on Canal Street. “We both grew up nearby, and feel very connected to the block” Shanzhai Lyric tells me, “It became a chance to reflect more deeply on how the global flows and trade routes we had planned on following around the world, could actually be found on one block of Canal, between Mercer and Greene Street. We think of Canal Street as a hamlet of sorts”.
Like many places around the world, New York was — albeit, temporarily — unrecognisable during the first months of the pandemic. With lockdowns in place, offices emptied out, shops were boarded up, businesses permanently closed, advertisers went quiet; street life shifted from one shaped by consumerism and the privatisation of public space, to one where it was possible to take in the city anew. “Many people who have lived in New York for a long time remarked that during Covid the city felt in some ways more similar to a city they remembered from many years ago. Without business owners around to police and criminalise the act of gathering in front of their spaces, street life became possible again”.
Right across from their shop space was Little Senegal, where street vendors set up shop. “We met Khadim Sene, who’s a vendor, musician and teacher, and we held outdoor lessons with him. Khalifa Thiam, another vendor, who’s trained as a film maker shared hours of footage recorded on Canal Street between 2008-12. He’s captured this former era of [the street], which he considers the best years of his life in the US, because that’s when Obama was president”. After meeting street vendor Leo Liu, a caricaturist, they learnt that portrait art can be pursued without a vendors licence, as it’s covered under freedom of expression laws. “Following that line of the possibility of redistribution, we were interested in how art could be operational. How could we [mimic these strategies] of skirting legal parameters [by citing artistic expression]?”
Adopting shanzhai strategies — and knowing they were about to lose the space — the CSRA became a “store in drag”; ’ripping off’ the aesthetic language of retail — “making something shiny to cover up the real mechanisms of redistribution, and so-called theft, that might be going on”. They enjoyed a final round of adaptive ambiguity, which also functioned as an homage to the history of the neighbourhood: “of artists using retail as an experimental medium to disseminate experimental ideas to the masses”. One of the objects in their shop, as an offering and proposal of how to make use of loopholes and the privileges afforded to art objects, was a counterfeit bag: “which is technically illegal, but in this case was categorised as a ready-made art object, thereby skirting that legal parameter.”
All these interactions, relationships and adaptations happened quite naturally, a consequence of just being in one place for a long time — also a consequence of the pandemic. There was a period of several months on Canal Street that had a sense of freedom and calm, before the city worked out how to monetise outside space through permits, and hide communal life. “There had been a lot less police presence” says Shanzhai Lyric, “until around Christmas when raids started again.” Since then, police presence had increased and permanent surveillance apparatus was installed, making it dangerous to be conducting street trade. “It’s really something to think about, how the threat of genuine class mobility is what needs to be actively destroyed by the state.”
Canal Street has always been in flux, and people adapt, “strategically shape-shifting as a survival mechanism and tactic”. Although the CSRA lost it’s retail space, Shanzhai Lyric has moved up the street to an idle office, where they plan to enter the realm their collaborators operate in, “doing your work on the street, en plein air”. “We’re in the planning phases of thinking through how there could be a street school, a collaborative film crew, or market.”
Reflecting on the past year, and the time and space that opened up as commercial units became available, street life became possible and government financial support provided temporary respite from a system that characteristically lacks a safety net, Shanzhai Lyric considered how “precarity, high rent and financial anxiety make experimentation really difficult in a city”. “It begins to seem very deliberate, right, that people are too exhausted and too anxious to indulge in open exploration that’s really about time, being without a goal, and welcoming whatever happens.”