Apartment: A User’s Manual Ce Yijie

About

When we enter into the state of reading, what we read are not only words, but also material, space, and tiny moments which incubate secretly between gaps of our lives. We travel back and forth inside the parallel universes of ‘the youth’ Ce Yijie. What we gain might not be a story, perhaps, it is another life experience that we are not aware of its parallel existence.

Ce Yijie is a good friend of BeinGeneration and a practitioner which BeinGeneration admires: He always travels in the city he lives in, tell us about amazing discoveries which probably could only be spotted by him; he always travels in the room he lives in, toothbrush, bowls and chopsticks become scenery. He weaves a travelogue with words, visualized paper, images, objects, most of all, his imagination: he is all of them: king, youth, shepherd, and all of them are us.

Ce Yijie assimilates the preparation of the exhibition and the book to the long - distance running which would happen every day, lonely and inevitably arduous. BeinGeneration is a supervisor who supports him with ‘motivation’ to carry on till the end of this journey; BeinGeneration dissolves those lonely moments as well. Sometimes it shares its observations on passage, sometimes they discuss various possibilities to transform this experience.

At the same time, Ce brings encouragement to the work of BeinGeneration. He doesn’t give up curiosity towards ordinary life and the practice of self-discipline for challenges. ‘Within the boundedness of individual, let oneself burn effectively – even only for a little, this is the essence and nature of running, and a metaphor of living.’