WANG MINGYI

I-916
Hotel-based participatory project
Yunnan, China
2021
In this project, participants were invited to stay for one night in hotel room 916 at Jialize Hotel, Kunming city, Yunnan province, China. During the stay, they were asked to outline their bodies with a black maker on bed sheets, duvet covers, poillow cases, and sofa covers, and write down anything they wanted to say on the side.
The title of the project, in the format of 'I and place', responds to Edward Casey's concept of 'body-place', which is considered the basic unit of human existence in the world (Casey, 2000, p. 265). The contoured lines on the sheets preserve the posture of the guests. It shows that they used to curl up, or lie down, or sit on the edge of the bed. The overlapping lines imply that they occupied the space at different times.
Time, space and body are the main subjects of this project, they are not independent, but linked together in hyphenation into different combinations: time-space, time-body, body-space, etc. The contoured lines of posture signify that this space retains the past event, which are compressed in the present into a plane - a bed sheet. The lines on the sheets do not belong to the body nor to the space; they are 'something' between the body and the space that is revealed only through the means of visualisation.
The form of this work resembles the chalk outline of a corpse at a crime scene. The corpse has been removed, but the chalk lines represent the position of the corpse, thus creating a place where the body is absent. One guest said on checking out, 'I felt creeped out in this room, the lines made me feel like someone was there staring at me'.





At the end of the project, the drawn bedding was hung out in a communal garden, mixed in with the clothes and bedding of the residents.



