Categories
in china

china’s “me” generation

Survey young, urban Chinese today, and you will find them drinking Starbucks, wearing Nikes and blogging obsessively. But you will detect little interest in demanding voting rights, let alone overthrowing the country’s communist rulers. “On their wish list,” says Hong Huang, a publisher of several lifestyle magazines, “a Nintendo Wii comes way ahead of democracy.”

a very accurate portrait of today’s “Me generation” in China, the children of the one-child policy. its power and what it represents for the future of this country, on Time magazine.

Categories
links and ideas

we cannot not change the world.


“We cannot not change the world. Isn’t that odd?

We are used to believing the opposite, that we cannot change the world, being the humble individuals we are. However, we either reinforce or change the way things are around us with every little thing we do. We establish and change the social world we live in every day. We call that social design.

We as people cannot escape acting in relation to other people. Even if we choose to live alone on a deserted island, that is design of our social reality. The social world is created as a result of the dynamics of all our individual actions.
We cannot not be social. We cannot not design. We cannot not change the world.”

from the social design site.

social design site is a place filled with projects that sparkle curiosity and deserve our attention, for one reason or another. they are catalogued as intriguing, web, cultural or art based, related to social philosophies, social experiment, systems for living or modern artifacts. they make us reflect on our surroundings, on the way people connect with each other and with the world.

and now, postcrossing is there too, side by side with names like treehugger, we are what we do, free hugs or miniature earth. and that makes me really proud. :)

Categories
in the netherlands links and ideas

down by the sea

“every year on the small dutch island ‘texel’ there is a poetry competition, the best two poems are carved into truck tyres (by hand) and the poems are then written in letterpress all over the beach during the summer…”

the image and text are from mestudio.info and you can check out the rest of the pictures there. the whole idea is so cool!
the last few days the sky has actually been pretty blue for most of the time, making me dream of nivea, a sunny beach and my tanned skin a bit salty by the end of the day.
probably, the nightmare of any chinese girl. eheh… speaking of seaside…

threadless has teamed with blik to transform a few of their winning designs into wall graphics. they are looking mighty good. i guess that’s the bad side of this life of rented houses – not much creativity ends up on the walls. maybe one day, we can buy a lighthouse in new zealand and use this pirate infested waters print on the bedroom. that would be neat!

Categories
links and ideas

you can all take a lesson from Rem Koolhaas

dear architects, i am sick of your shit is an open letter by annie choi to her architect friends, which is great to read (please use your sense of humor if you’re an architect!).
here’s a little excerpt:

Architects love to discuss how much sleep they have gotten. One will say how he was at the studio until five in the morning, only to return again two hours later. Then another will say, oh that is nothing. I haven’t slept in a week. And then another will say, guess what, I have never slept ever. My dear architects, the measure of how hard you’ve worked and how much you’ve accomplished is not related to the number of hours you have not slept. Have you heard of Rem Koolhaas? He is a famous architect. I know this because you tell me he is a famous architect. I hear that Rem Koolhaas is always sleeping. He is, I presume, sleeping right now. And I hear he gets shit done. And I also hear that in a stunning move, he is making a building that looks not like a glass cock, but like a concrete vagina. When you sleep more, you get vagina. You can all take a lesson from Rem Koolhaas.

apparently it was writen a year ago, and she even received some positive comment from Rem Koolhaas himself. how cool is that?

(seen on a barriga de um arquitecto)

ps – here’s a link to annie’s blog.

Categories
in china

god save the queen


we went to hong kong, a couple of months ago or so. hong kong is so different from shanghai that on the way back we realized that we were actually a bit disappointed to return “home”, to shanghai, and china. our experience is as biased as it gets, since we were only there for a single day (most of which was spent inside cafés, trying not to melt or get soaked up outside, on the inconstant spurts of rain). what follows is a gathering of random thoughts from that day. they are going to sound rough, i know, but that was exactly how i felt when i came back: angry and bitter at all the potential that this city has and that is currently being wasted.

so, we arrived in hong kong in the evening, took a shuttle to the city center, crashed in a small hostel and the next morning, by 8:30 we were queuing at the chinese administrative services doorstep, waiting for our turn. when it opened, we delivered the forms and our passports and were told to return around three o’clock in the afternoon. which we did, everything was ready, we picked our passports and strolled around a bit longer, window shopping and dodging the rain.

while we were at it, it rained a lot – not the kind of plum rain we see in shanghai. really pouring down cats and dogs, as i wish it would around here more often. maybe for once this city would be cleaner, maybe we could even see the skies more than once a month.

it seemed pretty bilingual to us, everybody we spoke to seemed to speak english. the people queued and gave way in the escalators, the buses were all double decks (an eye-blink from far away london), the metro stations had this tiny colorful tiles that made them gorgeous. the sidewalks seemed decent (not the chinese version of sidewalks, irregular patches of tiles and cement). we didn’t see any beggars or stumbled upon fake dvds stands, yet we stared in awe to the happy mesh of signs and neons in the narrow streets.
and then there’s disneyland (and not some fake imitation, like in the mainland). all banks can issue their own version of the hong kong dollars bills, which can be confusing but also colorfully fun and original. coffee franchises were everywhere (something i’m beginning to find quite reassuring) and we spent some hours on one of them, while i introduced p. to scrabble. no one (not even a single one of the 20 employees of the café where we had lunch) screamed “qing guoling!”* to welcome us.

there’s a quiet sense of normality, there are so many foreigners in this fast paced city that no one really cares (or stares) anymore. the driver that took us to the airport actually drove slowly, the whole way, letting us enjoy the ride and the view. and what a view! hong kong is beautiful. the geography of the place, with its bays, islands and peninsulas, hills and waterfronts…

anyway, as soon as we had set foot outside pudong’s international airport in shanghai, late night that day, there were hoards of taxi drivers trying to lure us into their taxis. we choose the shuttle back to the city – the bus dangerously (and disappointingly) sped all the way to the city center, where we leaped into a taxi and went home, feeling tired and sad.

an indian friend once told me that if britain hadn’t colonized india years ago, they’d still be in the middle ages – and ironically, that’s the exact same feeling i have about hong kong vs. china. hurray for british colonies and their civilized manners.

now, knowing the portuguese record on this field, i’m curious about macau…

* i don’t know if that’s exactly what they say. sounds like that and it should mean “welcome”. you can’t go inside any restaurant around here without having at least a dozen of waitresses screaming it in unison to your ears… quite literally, i’m afraid.

hong kong image by J.Yip, on flickr.