Shopping Utopia

Shopping Utopia is a hypothesis constructed as a hexagonal shopping mall. It has a total of 10 storeys, and comprises elements within its vertical structure to highly enrich modern-day city living: specialty shops, beauty salons, real estate agencies, supermarkets, playgrounds, amusement-park horror houses, food centres... Yet, it is certainly not spotless, and just like this city, there are sinister secret cloisters despite the sparkling cleanliness of the high-rise building: damp cellers, dark alleys, locked washrooms... This shining “Shopping Utopia ®” is the city's lighthouse, with its dazzling central quadrangle teeming like a vibrant kaleidoscope of life.  However, "once you leave, all there is out there is the endless night... "

The novel situates itself within a shop in this “Shopping Utopia ®”, and through a multitude of narratives, it describes a day in the life of this shopping complex.  It weaves together significant events occurring to 10 individuals in various spaces within the shopping mall. They come from different parts of China and possess disparate social backgrounds. Each of them have different motives and emotions. They interact with one another on this one particular day within the same place, and then are propelled separately into each of their own unknown future. Together, they form a multi-voiced structure – and it is only in the collective consciousness that is the shopping mall, in this sole remaining public space that has gradually substituted the city's public square, that such a narrative can take place.

After Exercises in Sensation: Theory and Practice, Shopping Utopia uses the background of a shopping space as a means of “sensing reality”, to investigate how we construct sensory reality in contemporary times.