day 22: 新乐 (xinle) = 0km

Today saw me hanging out with big brother wu. He had a friend in the leather business, so we went and checked out a manufactory:

I enjoyed the place: the colors, the light, the shade. Even the noise and the smell. Only downside was I was wearing slippers (to get some relief for my feet), so I couldn’t really dive into all the fun.

Since I was showing up with the boss, shooting went really relaxed:

Nobody even bothered.

Then we went to 东方美术学院 (Eastern College of Fine Arts), where big brother wu had friends, too:

Local art educators 董老师 (teacher dong) and 刘老师 (teacher liu) provided for some very charming and insightful conversation, covering such a broad range of Chinese cultural history that I had a hard time pretending to understand what we were talking about. Is 吕布 (lü bu) from the Story of the Three Kingdoms an unfaithful villain, or is he just a guy practicing warfare as a kind of favorite pass-time activity?

东方美术学院 has a very pretty campus. Notice the stuff on the water? That’s ice. It is definitely starting to get cold…

Since I was with the teachers, I was allowed to shoot some of the students in class:

I even had a girl pose for a picture in the hallway:

At first I was trying to wait for all the right things to come into place by themselves, but after a while I realized I would never accidentally get a person in a colorful outfit to be in that exact same spot, with no other students disrupting the scene. That’s why I picked out the pink girl and politely asked her to pose. Now this is a manipulation of reality.

But then I’ve also come to realize that my existence – a big foreign guy with a big foreign camera – itself constitutes a manipulation of reality.

Or am I part of reality?

Soundtrack: Rise Against – “Drones”

—total: 301,6km