Farmers House in Xiaoshan, 2020Contesting a Simulacrum: Speculations upon Hyperrealistic Domestic Spaces within 21st Century China
The domestic space is a porous and perforated environment. Perhaps not as invincible as Gaston Bachelard’s description a ‘protective shelter’ 1, its porosity allows for an absorption of emittance of the society. It is a machine which in return digests and regurgitate back to the source of consumption. The Chinese domestic setting of the 21st Century is the space where consumerist values of rapid expanding economies consolidates. It is processed and shuttered into pieces of symbols and signs, hence reflected upon architectural components.
The contemporary Chinese ‘home’ is a reflectance of a nebulous identity, battling to grasp fragments of indication. The means of culture and a sense of belonging becomes a compositional choice among singular subjectivities. The selective and formulated nature of the contemporary Chinese identity stimulates productions of spatial and ornamental simulacra within the domestic space. The notion of ‘authenticity’ seems no longer a relevant question in opposition to a proliferated hyperrealistic reality. When contesting the domestic space among a macro to microscale, the Chinese household seeks to obtain a singular uniformity against the context of a conformed virtual community.
It is a curious interest of the studio to keep researching, documenting and writing about domestic spaces in contemporary China that are forming a sense of zeitgeist identity. We hope to learn from it, reflect from it and develop design in response to this unique cultural phenomenon.
Photographs by Nettie Ni, 2019
1. Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics of Space,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 86-89.