China #2: T-shirt
Sep. 30th, 2004 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petronia(Alternate subject line: ALEXANDER BERKMAN WOULD SMACK THE SHIT OUT OF YOU)
Computer issue is fixed. OTOH I've been too sleepy in the evenings to accomplish anything other than desultorily read doujinshi, so there are no photos of The T-Shirt to go with this entry. But there will be.
The T-Shirt comes from the Samuel & Kevin line of Baleno (cheap youth-oriented casual-wear brand, but not cheap like Wal-Mart cheap, or the s00per-f0bby mainland Chinese functional equivalents thereof; more like Garage or Limited cheap). Who are Samuel and Kevin? No clue. Maybe they're the designers. Maybe they're the two pop-idoru-cute boy models plastered all over the in-store advertising, who may or may not represent an idealised version of the designers (as surely that's not really them), or maybe I'm reading the semiotics entirely wrong. Maybe Samuel and Kevin aren't supposed to exist, and there are only names there because someone looked at Occidental cultural product and realised that name-like words are supposed to go in logos, all sign and no meaning. Which sounds intelligence-insulting, except that's really what Engrish is. The Japanese and Chinese don't bother to understand those words anymore than Americans teens bother to understand the random (and WRONG, AWFULLY WRONG) hiragana and kanji printed on their clubbing wear, or should I reverse that sentence for impact? Anyway. I was in the Baleno super-boutique on Huaihai Rd. going through the marked-down pile; while I was there all the stores were cycling out their summer wares and bringing in the autumn line, rather to my profit as each item in the bin was going for 18RMB aka 3$CAN. Though I wasn't really expecting to find anything, because most of S&K is boywear and plastered over with Engrish at that - I'd made a private rule not to buy anything emblazoned with Engrish unless it was particularly brilliant. I mean, there's only so much I can lug back to Montreal in one suitcase.
However, then I dug into the pile and came up with a T-shirt (neutral brown, with a picture of a technical cross-section of an airplane) that said in overlaid capital letters:
DECONSTRUCTION IS THE BEGINNING OF CONSTRUCTION
So I bought it. (Actually I bought a couple: there's a pink one with an image of little pixellated people carrying boxes up and down stairs in a cross-sectioned house, that says WORKING IS THE MEANING OF LEARNING.) Insert your own analysis. Some anarchist-leaning designer subverting the dominant (capitalist! let's mince no words) paradigm from the Guangzhou side of the border? That's a lot of postmodern sophistication for mainland China, which is running as hard as it can just to keep up with the dominant paradigm, craning its neck to get a good look at the thing. Or is it seriously just Engrish? You have to take the model plane apart before you can put it together again - does it even aspire to that much meaning? And that's leaving aside the fact that Berkman is quite a different cultural marker in a purported Communist country than he is in America... or is he? If you read Nana you know the Japanese are apt to use punk as fino clay for molding chindogu. Why not the Chinese?
But yeah. You can tell I'm an outsider because I have to use this language to make sense of what I see.
[EDIT -- Okay, I get it, I get it! I've figured it out! They're F4 members! F4 endorses Samuel & Kevin! Geez, should I be congratulated for remaining untarnished by pop culture or what? >_>
Strangely enough I'd recognized them in their Pepsi ads. But, well, it would've been hard not to.]
Computer issue is fixed. OTOH I've been too sleepy in the evenings to accomplish anything other than desultorily read doujinshi, so there are no photos of The T-Shirt to go with this entry. But there will be.
The T-Shirt comes from the Samuel & Kevin line of Baleno (cheap youth-oriented casual-wear brand, but not cheap like Wal-Mart cheap, or the s00per-f0bby mainland Chinese functional equivalents thereof; more like Garage or Limited cheap). Who are Samuel and Kevin? No clue. Maybe they're the designers. Maybe they're the two pop-idoru-cute boy models plastered all over the in-store advertising, who may or may not represent an idealised version of the designers (as surely that's not really them), or maybe I'm reading the semiotics entirely wrong. Maybe Samuel and Kevin aren't supposed to exist, and there are only names there because someone looked at Occidental cultural product and realised that name-like words are supposed to go in logos, all sign and no meaning. Which sounds intelligence-insulting, except that's really what Engrish is. The Japanese and Chinese don't bother to understand those words anymore than Americans teens bother to understand the random (and WRONG, AWFULLY WRONG) hiragana and kanji printed on their clubbing wear, or should I reverse that sentence for impact? Anyway. I was in the Baleno super-boutique on Huaihai Rd. going through the marked-down pile; while I was there all the stores were cycling out their summer wares and bringing in the autumn line, rather to my profit as each item in the bin was going for 18RMB aka 3$CAN. Though I wasn't really expecting to find anything, because most of S&K is boywear and plastered over with Engrish at that - I'd made a private rule not to buy anything emblazoned with Engrish unless it was particularly brilliant. I mean, there's only so much I can lug back to Montreal in one suitcase.
However, then I dug into the pile and came up with a T-shirt (neutral brown, with a picture of a technical cross-section of an airplane) that said in overlaid capital letters:
DECONSTRUCTION IS THE BEGINNING OF CONSTRUCTION
So I bought it. (Actually I bought a couple: there's a pink one with an image of little pixellated people carrying boxes up and down stairs in a cross-sectioned house, that says WORKING IS THE MEANING OF LEARNING.) Insert your own analysis. Some anarchist-leaning designer subverting the dominant (capitalist! let's mince no words) paradigm from the Guangzhou side of the border? That's a lot of postmodern sophistication for mainland China, which is running as hard as it can just to keep up with the dominant paradigm, craning its neck to get a good look at the thing. Or is it seriously just Engrish? You have to take the model plane apart before you can put it together again - does it even aspire to that much meaning? And that's leaving aside the fact that Berkman is quite a different cultural marker in a purported Communist country than he is in America... or is he? If you read Nana you know the Japanese are apt to use punk as fino clay for molding chindogu. Why not the Chinese?
But yeah. You can tell I'm an outsider because I have to use this language to make sense of what I see.
[EDIT -- Okay, I get it, I get it! I've figured it out! They're F4 members! F4 endorses Samuel & Kevin! Geez, should I be congratulated for remaining untarnished by pop culture or what? >_>
Strangely enough I'd recognized them in their Pepsi ads. But, well, it would've been hard not to.]
