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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 | After a delayed flight and a long queue at the customs, I barely caught the last train, arriving at Yume Nomad some time after midnight. Opening the door was Hiro, ‘You must be Xin! Welcome!’ and gave me a big hug like an old friend. Then there was Mayumi, ‘the boss’ – as Hiro jokingly…
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…