Chinese Archimage Phenomena

CAIP co-founder Fei Wang gave a l ecture , "Three Heterogeneity Studies of China, between the 18th Century and Contemporary" at Chinese Designers' Region (CDR) , London, in June 25th, 2009. Thanks for William Chen's invitation and nice discussions! [This is old news. Due to China's Great Fire Wall, blogspot is blocked as always. Sorry for the late update.]

Someone found out a residential building in Chonging like a face, and very popular Chinese character 囧 (jiǒng). from wikipedia : "Jiong (Chinese: 囧; variant: 冏; Hanyu Pinyin : jiong3; British Cantonese : Gwing) is a Chinese character meaning a "patterned window" or "as bright as the light peering from outside the window". The character is now rarely used in this sense. Internet emoticon usage The character for "Jiong" is nowadays more widely used on the Internet as an ideographic emoticon representing a range of moods, as it resembles a person's face. It is commonly used to express ideas or feelings such as annoyance, shock, embarrassment, awkwardness, scorn or the internet meme "DO NOT WANT". The use of Jiong as an emoticon can be traced to 2005 or earlier; it was referenced on 20 January 2005 in a Chinese-language article on orz . [1] The character is sometimes used in conjunction with orz, OTZ or its other variants to form ...

Ju Chun, a renowned Taiwanese sculptor, created this breathtaking Zipper Lotus Pond for the Juming Museum , located just outside Taipei, Taiwan. [via toxel ]

Bei Da Xue Yuan High school, Dongguan, Guangdong Province This is fake Beijing University gate in Dongguan, Guangdong (Canton) Province, which was is a local high school and called the coolest (niu) school gate by bloggers. This school advertises itself in relation with Beijing University and graduates from this school can go to Beijing University directly with exemption of college entry exams. The title of the school is “Bei Da Xue Yuan”, in which there are 3 same characters from Beijing University famous gate, “Bei Jing Da Xue”. Even the calligraphy is totally copied from the Beijing Univ. Beijing University, Beijing [via 163 and picasa ]

This is the cover from The Economist , titled "How China Sees the World," which has similar connotation and technique of Saul Steinberg's early work "How New Yorker Sees the World."

This is the headquarter of one the most famous Jiu , Chinese alcoholic beverages , Wu Liang Ye , in Yibin , Sichuan Province. All buildings there are very iconic (as bottle, package, company icon, etc), including the gate, factory, administrative buildings, etc. [via abbs ]