China Quick-Fix

Abstract

China Quick-Fix introduces and explores a photographic archive of improvised repairs made in China. It reframes the quick-fix by putting aside the negative connotations that come with the term and understands quick-fixes in a more sympathetic light. It looks at how they represent a creative practice that generates environmentally sustainable personal geographies in increasingly alienated urban environments and it looks at how quick-fixes offer a valuable method with which to view contemporary Chinese society as a whole. Rather than looking at the city from a top down point of view, China Quick-Fix offers a street level view of the everyday problems people face and the solutions they arrive at. These solutions cover a range from the ingenious to the inadequate and they are rarely celebrated or even noticed; they represent an unselfconscious aesthetic that is antithetical to the state aesthetic which promotes power, modernity and unity. China quick-fix makes a case for understanding the seeming opposites of the grand project and the quick-fix as having a symbiotic relationship to one another. By looking at how sites of political and economic power are themselves often designed to serve shifting political exigencies and how, once opened, are maintained through an army of quick-fixers, it is clear that the quick-fix is not only the work of the left behind but is also an unofficial state aesthetic. While the quick-fix is commonly understood as resulting from economic necessity, within this body of know-how there exist a great many useful skills and principles that could and should be more fully recognised. Quite specifically, they offer a precise understanding of the real local economy, they promote recycling and on a psychological level stimulate creativity, active citizenship and greater connectivity to place.