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Hi! I'm Cui. I've been in London for 6 years now.
I first came here to do an undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology...
...and I've been working in theatre and multi-disciplinary art since then; I mostly produce...
... and I'm currently at Goldsmiths College doing an MA in Arts Administration & Cultural Policy.
Em, and my project partner Hanqing is not here today. I'll explain why later.
She, as far as I know, has been in London for two years now. She's a Fine Art student at Central Saint Martins and...
... she has red hair. And the question she finds hardest to answer is " What sort of art do you do?"
So, the reason she isn't here is extremely linked to the project that we are doing.
The project that we are doing is called Renji, which... em two Chinese words: Ren means person or human; Ji means print or mark or tracing. So it actually means tracing of human lives, of a human life.
And we decided that we were not going to meet up at all over the course of the project...
... until we got together to prepare for the exhibition that opens on the 31st of May.
And what Renji entails is actually an ongoing documentation of our daily lives as we choose to curate it online.
We're not allowed to initiate conversations and meetings with each other, but we follow each other's lives on Facebook.
We've both set up blogs where everyone can access what we do and we're supposed to post entries at least once a day, although some days we lapse because we're too tired and e.t.c.
And we also sort of follow each other more consistently or passively via an iPhone application called Path. P A T H...
... where you can share what you are listening to, the places you are at, so you can check-in kinda like 4square, you can share thoughts..
... and it is very, it's quite intrusive because we also share the time we go to bed and the time we wake up. And we share photos and everything, but we don't really interact.
At most we like each other's posts or we put a smiley face or a sad face and things like that.
So what we are trying to explore is kind of long distance friendship and how it unfolds or develops over the internet without genuine interaction, but at the same time, it's also about how as individuals we...
... leave trails online and across the places that we go to...
... and how we choose to curate that to people around us or people who are able to access our blogs. So that's why you don't see her here. Em yea.