Art Peace China Daily

In springtime 2018 I spent a few weeks inside the modern world’s dystopian dream, living under constant video surveillance and being identified by face recognition software wherever I went. The authorities aim to control everybody and everything with an ever-growing number of cameras. The daily paper informed me of whatever anomalies the omnipresent cameras recorded and also what had escaped them. Art Peace China Daily is the report of my sojourn in this country.
2018
digital print, b/w
14.8 x 10.5 cm, 72 pages
softcover, perfect bound
100 copies
16 €

Around the World in Eighty Minutes

A World Expo may have made sense a century ago but since the invention of television the idea seems obsolete. In Shanghai, China, the basic premise is to wait in lines; incredibly long lines. Occasionally, a speaker system announces three hours waiting time for this pavilion, seven hours here, five hours there. Queuing for hours to visit something I never wanted to see is not my idea of fun. Yet here I am, with a group of students I’m obliged to accompany, watching our tour guide hand out hats to make sure we look as ridiculous as every other tour group. Fortunately, it isn’t long before I lose them but what do you do in a world exhibition filled with several hundred thousand Chinese? Over a cup of coffee I forge a plan: Around the World in Eighty Minutes.
The plan is to walk around the site without entering a single pavilion. In front of each pavilion, I take a self-portrait in the style of the modern tourist: camera at arm’s length with the attraction behind me. “I was there,” the picture says. So I don my hat and begin the journey, visiting about eighty countries and spending only a minute in each without even pausing to examine the pictures. I miss a country or two, but that’s to be expected when you travel in a rush.
This book was first published in 2011. The original print-on-demand edition is discontinued and replaced by this edition.
2015
digital print, colour
14.8 x 10.5 cm, 180 pages
softcover, sewn
100 copies

Around the World in Eighty Minutes

A World Expo may have made sense a century ago but since the invention of television the idea seems obsolete. In Shanghai, China, the basic premise is to wait in lines; incredibly long lines. Occasionally, a speaker system announces three hours waiting time for this pavilion, seven hours here, five hours there. Queuing for hours to visit something I never wanted to see is not my idea of fun. Yet here I am, with a group of students I’m obliged to accompany, watching our tour guide hand out hats to make sure we look as ridiculous as every other tour group. Fortunately, it isn’t long before I lose them but what do you do in a world exhibition filled with several hundred thousand Chinese? Over a cup of coffee I forge a plan: Around the World in Eighty Minutes.
The plan is to walk around the site without entering a single pavilion. In front of each pavilion, I take a self-portrait in the style of the modern tourist: camera at arm’s length with the attraction behind me. “I was there,” the picture says. So I don my hat and begin the journey, visiting about eighty countries and spending only a minute in each without even pausing to examine the pictures. I miss a country or two, but that’s to be expected when you travel in a rush.
2011
print on demand, colour
20 x 13 cm, 178 pages
softcover, perfect bound
open edition (discontinued in 2015)