During our discussion with Dr. Arrow Saturday morning she explained that in Mandarin the New Year greeting is not really "Happy New Year" but more like "Congratulations" because the tradition refers to the Jade Emperor's decision to permit humans to continue living--they awake after their merrymaking to discover it wasn't their last night on Earth, after all.
Which makes me think a couple of things. First, that if someone told me, "This is your last night on Earth," I'd probably do pretty much exactly what I'm doing right now: sitting near the fireplace with my very dear dogs, burning Nag Champa incense, sipping two buck Chuck, and listening to Hinduesque instrumentalists while I ponder a new assemblage art project and write about it, sending words into the universe. I'd conclude my Last Evening by reading poetry aloud to the dogs. Gertrude Stein.
Second, Arrow's tale has me thinking about the "last night" of underground Chinatown, which to me is the moment the place was buried, though to the residents it must have occurred decades earlier--the original residents, at any rate. Surely some transients found the place between the 40s and 60s, made it a refuge.
What I find most liberating about the art project for our course is that it enables me to follow a different path than usual. My first inclination would be to approach this scenario solely as a researcher: identify people who might share oral histories to answer my questions. But though research continues to be an important part of the project I'm also free to imagine scenarios that, themselves, might help me better understand and interpret matters.
The underground didn't survive. At least not as a preserved historical site. As someone who has visited lots of historically preserved sites, including a number of them in Asia, I have some sense of what our own site would look like. And I must confess that I find it weirdly satisfying that I'm unable to visit a re-created or re-assembled version of the place. A part of me, at any rate, is intrigued by the opportunity to make something that visually communicates underground chinatown without looking like it.
In my minds eye I see various things that may or may not be this project but that have been bubbling up during my recently begun explorations of OKC's mythologized and abandoned underground:
* a wasp's nest with protruding bones (I can't say why I see this, but it's been a peripheral image for days, now)
* something with firecracker remnants, the red paper I swept off the streets following our weekend's lunar new year celebrations (one thing this might be suggesting is that idea that the underground didn't make it to the new year, but then it sort of did)
* bricks, possibly with that firecracker paper leaking out like mortar
-->This image is heavily influenced by an art installation I saw in Beijing last summer: Archeology of Memory by Qiu Zhijie. The artist painstakingly carves characters into large blocks, makes a single printing with them, then fills each with mortar, stacking one atop the other, sealed forever. I'm reminded of this artwork as I visualize the sealing-up of the underground, its abandonment as a part of our artifactual history--but one done carelessly, the opposite of Qui Zhijie's deliberateness and leaving virtually no trace. So what would be "inside" such a work would be, for example, the single photograph I found at the OK History Center--the portrait of the Chinese worker's wife--but an observer of the artwork would not know she was inside; her portrait would be sealed by rubble, concrete.
* something that satirizes the answer to my question, "What Would Pei Do?" by, for example, featuring a Louvre-like inverted pyramid above the the Robinson/Sheridan area with a tiny glimpse into the remains of an underground opium den and an OKC trolley tour paused nearby for the tourists to gape at the display.
The latter I like least. It's too literal, too easy, and too snarky.
* a final thought, for now, would be a view from inside underground Chinatown--sort of like the view in the photo above.
Image source: @t.
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