Shanzhai means “counterfeit” or “copy” in Mandarin; the term’s been applied to garments, bootleg iPhones, sinified Harry Potter sequels, and even language itself. The concept anchors the work of Shanzhai Lyric, the New York-based artist duo Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky, who for eleven years have been collecting garments with happy accidents and playful incidents of language, the majority of them sourced from China. Examples include t-shirts that read “DOLCE & BANANAS” or “It’s gonna be a great day actually all the things now have.” Lin and Tatarsky post their finds on Instagram, recombine them as sculptures, and have now transmuted them into the book ENDLESS GARMENT.
This book metabolizes and arranges phrases culled from Shanzhai Lyric’s archive of linguistic readymades. ENDLESS GARMENT is compact. A photo of a pile of twisted clothes wraps its front and back covers and spine. Its foil-printed title matches the one on the t-shirts the book’s publisher, Pioneer Works, made as merch. Unlike the typographic diversity of the world’s graphic tees, there’s one sans-serif font on the book’s pages. The text never directly cites its source materials, although deformed echoes occur (“THE WORLD HAS BIGGER / PROBLEMS THAN BOYS / WHO KISS BOYS AND GIRLS / WHO KISS GIRLS”; “THE VORLB HAS BIGO / PROHLEMS THANBOL / WHONCSS BOYS ANDOLG / WHO KISS GIRLS”). This patterning suggests Shanzhai Lyric’s collection might have garments with different takes on similar themes. Sequence and line-break similarly don’t index any “original.” The reader experiences both artistic choice and chance discovery; lexical meaning and mayhem accrue.
Sometimes the text is arranged something like a simple poem in stanzas. Sometimes a couple words sit in a single corner, or a few lines dead center. Sometimes several dozen words sprawl cubistly. The pages are Bible-thin. You can almost read the oncoming text, but only make out the shape. Not unlike a logo or the iconicity of a graphic tee, in these obscurant moments language becomes something more akin to image.
Whether to call these texts poems, or the whole book a single poem, or something else altogether, I’m not sure. The term “shanzhai” originally referred to strongholds for Song Dynasty Robinhood-ish bandits in mountains beyond imperial reach. While Lin and Tartarsky’s project collects these forms, their approach is far from taxonomic. This book’s slippery and playful arrangement foregrounds the shanzhai language’s beguiling, bewildering nature. And, anyway, this book is hardly mapping or revealing some hidden hamlet on a map. These contemporary shanzhai are anything but covert: they are mass-produced, ubiquitous, signs and symbols of globalization’s twisted genius. By taking an approach that is by one measure hyperlegible (collating these into a single volume) and obscure (divorcing them from their original context and recombining them into poetic masses), the artists intensify the spirit of the shanzhai as something between original and copy, fugitive and flagrant.
A table of contents divides the book or poem or poems into nine sections—“Fashion,” “Empire,” “Femalie” [sic], etc.—although these headers don’t recur in the text. You can read the book without noticing any radical shifts, but if you flip back to the index you’ll discover, for example, that “empire” starts with “POST- / EUROPE”—an inciting détournement for a motto sourced from a t-shirt.
Shanzhai Lyric approaches materials with both humor and reverence. “A hoodie / hooded sweatshirt with a hood, / often They ahood, / and (usually) usua ahood, / and front, opening, and back,” the love section begins; I assume this is a self-referential lorem ipsum glitch, a product description printed onto product like an infinity mirror. “The BEAUTIFUL / Rose / has thorns / Being protean depending on / the mood of mind / Ive never experienced such a feeling,” the next stanza goes. The definitional attitude of the first stanza carries forth from the hoodie to the rose whose thorns comprise its beauty. But! A subject emerges, someone who has never succumbed to the prickly, protean mood. Who knew a t-shirt professed such pathos?
The rose is overplayed—just ask “Gertrud stein” [sic] who’s appropriated on the following page. (SMART AND LOVELY SHAKESPEARE, for his part, appeared much earlier.) But the rose as the lede for “love” feels neither ironic nor overwrought. Creating a conceptual rhyme between the “hoodie” and “rose” texts elevates the garment-speak to the level of amorous ode, while the rose takes on the daily specialness of a favorite shirt or quotidian deflation of a garment to be tossed away. This dialectical tautness, this multipolar romance, defines the experience of ENDLESS GARMENT and the careful ridiculousness and dead-serious inauthenticity of Shanzhai Lyric’s project.
A lyric prototypically expresses a poet’s emotions or experiences; ENDLESS GARMENT might then be a lyric composed by a commercial hyperbeing, and only later arranged by Lin and Tatarsky. But to call this text a lyric, or series of lyrics, would also be to miss an important mixup. The book is titled after a garment, and the artist duo itself, adding lyric to shanzhai, is titled as if they were a poem. The authors are manifold, many, without distinct beginning or end, any of us as we get dressed and take a photo of ourselves or take to the street. Shanzhai Lyric channels this dispersed yet collective creative energy, challenging who we take to be an author and what we take to be a poem.
Flow, transition, accumulation, surprise, and space shape this book. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that the shanzhai goods’ “creativity is based on active transformation and variation.” The sheer preponderance of these commodities is part of their energy, as too are the ways they—sometimes self-consciously—introduce idiosyncrasies and mutations into commercial standards. The translation to “counterfeit” is somewhat misleading. Shanzhai objects don’t necessarily purport to be the real deal; an “iPncne” device features an intentionally worn-down logo, for example. So the shanzhai engages in a “truly Dadaist game…that not only initiates creativity but also parodically or subversively affects positions of economic power and monopolies,” Han claims. It’s “subversion and creation” at once.
Shanzhai garment texts display a destabilizing relationship to homogenization and Westernization. As European brands and the English language traverse the globe, they get unduly vaunted, but they also get mixed, altered, constituted and reconstituted by interacting systems of circulation and valorization. As much as these garments evidence English as a lingua franca, they supplant the already spurious notion of a “proper” English, doing what language users always do: wresting control from would-be monoliths to make words, in their inherent alienation and alienating force, their own.
You could say shanzhai goods are just more stuff, and you’d be right. Nothing is without end: the fantasy of signs forever stitched into an endless garment is belied by the reality of finitude, the very finitude that the propagandistic, performative endlessness of consumer production promotes much to the threat to end many species’, including our own.
ENDLESS GARMENT lays bare the incongruity of its terms; it’s an oxymoron with a utopian shimmer. It holds the tension, or, paradoxically, suspends it—in both senses of that contranym—between the shifting, unfixed movement of language and the solidity of the objects and bodies they transit upon. By removing these t-shirts and their words from their typical realm of exchange value and reconstituting them through various artistic means of authorship and non-authorship, the junk-mattering of our commercial world becomes less mystified through its anointment as art.
ENDLESS GARMENT launched with a “fashion show” at Pioneer Works in Red Hook on Saturday, March 8. Folding chairs lined a runway in the open volume of the former iron works building. At a mic stand in the center, a person read from the book. Models traversed wearing shirts with her words, wearing the sources.
These shirts were not how I’d imagined them when I read ENDLESS GARMENT. In fact, had I imagined them? No, I hadn’t conjured in my mind a garment which corresponded to these texts—I’d taken them as freefloating, the language readymades remade, an infinite chain I breezed through slantly misrecognizing, pulling meaning from the chaos as suited me, or not.
How should I know that “Life is a Struggle of” would arc over a chihuahua poking its paws from a turquoise Birkin? Or that the violet-striped shirt reading “WE SHOUL ALLB FEMINIS” would be so unflattering on any body? Or that “Crash!” “Bust!” “Disaster looming,” “Profits down” would be so fun, or indeed, so longsleeved?
As the fashion-performance continued, other performers approached the microphone, exchanged a t-shirt, and then continued the reading as the previous speaker joined the runway show. An unbroken cycle, a fluid exchange.
Walk, turn, repeat; speak, pass the book, another speaker; pass the shirt; the chain continues, the voices differ, the bodies flow; contact is the context, the body is the vehicle for language, for voice, for ideas not one’s own, that strictest personalization. “Do you think these shirts are for sale?” someone asks beside me. They once were, that’s how they got here, but no longer. With each shirt as a distinct, beloved archived item, taken away from their undifferentiated mass of clones, I understand Shanzhai Lyric’s idea of these garments as a collective, ongoing poem happening in streets and photographs and e-comm scrolls—an idea of an perpetual togetherness, the lyric that belongs to everyone and no one, a poem as a collaboration endlessly happening.