Tai Po Barbershop

Medium: Video Installation | Solid Wood Cabinet, Embedded Screen, Stereo Speakers, Variable Dimensions
Part of the long-term ongoing project Bye Sick Zone.

Tai Po Barbershop is a pivotal work of methodological progression within the creative lineage of Bye Sick Zone. Launched in 2012, the Bye Sick Zone series adopts soundscape archaeology as its core working methodology, regarding Baishizhou as a paradigmatic specimen of China’s rapid urbanization and migrant population mobility. Earlier works collected the diffused collective soundscapes of the site, constructing memory vessels from discarded mailboxes to document the fading public experiences of migrant communities amid spatial disintegration. Centered on place, collective groups and auditory archives, these works deploy sound as a medium to resist the erasure of grassroots memory imposed by the grand narrative of modernization.

In contrast to the distant capture of collective acoustic fields in prior works, Tai Po Barbershop realizes two crucial shifts: the observational focus narrows from collective settlements to an individual person, and the creative practice transitions from external soundscape recording to a quiet ritual embodied through physical co-presence. The work centers on Master Zheng, a barber from Tai Po, Meizhou, amid the demolition ruins of Baishizhou. After the entire community disintegrated and residents scattered, the septuagenarian Master Zheng remained in the emptied buildings, carrying on the vernacular craft of haircutting, face shaving and ear cleansing. With red paint, he handwrote his shop name on construction hoardings and remnant walls, inscribing the identity coordinates of an underprivileged migrant individual within the continuously cleared and disciplined ruinous space.

In terms of fieldwork methodology, the work critically reflects on the inherent power structures embedded in documentary practice: conventional oral interviews naturally create a hierarchy between the observer and the interviewee, readily reducing lived human experience into interpretable sociological samples. To address this, the artist abandons verbal questioning and reconfigures fieldwork ethics: entering the barbershop, the artist undergoes the complete haircut ritual in silence. Human interaction escapes verbal dominance, surrendered instead to physical touch, the friction of tools, the vibration of breath and ambient sound, forming an equitable bodily ritual. Filming was conducted on a mobile phone to remove the gaze and coercion associated with professional filming equipment. The finished work retains raw footage and on-site sound, omitting voiceover and commentary to suspend the artist’s subjective narrative intervention.

Continuing the series’ core motif of the “memory vessel”, the installation adopts a sealed solid wood cabinet as its carrier, with an embedded screen and stereo speakers looping the video and original soundscape. The cabinet forms a physical barrier, drawing a boundary between viewers and the filmed scene, and metaphorically embodying the persistent rift between dominant urban narratives and the lived experiences of migrant individuals.