‘Enter the Solemnity’: Social Space in the High-Rise Apartment

Abstract

Outside the inner city of Beijing, outside the second traffic ring, most of the residential places are built up in the form of high-rise apartments. A friend of mine, who is a photographer from England, after seeing these high-rise apartments, told me: ‘I feel like each of the windows in the high-rise is like a small TV screen. The owner of that room is playing his own life story behind the screen, and the whole building is like a multiscreen television’. That is extremely true. The TV programmes differ from window to window. They never interfere with each other. One’s story has nothing to do with the one living next to him. All their stories are isolated from one another, even though they are physically close to each other. This way of life is different from Hutong in many ways. If I were to use the same metaphor, I would describe Hutong life in this way: a TV series playing with almost a hundred characters involving one big screen. All of the households form one screen, and each of these families plays different roles in the story. If the life in Hutong is played on a big widescreen TV, then life in the high-rise is like in a multiwindow screen TV. The audience is also different in each case. The multiwindow TV is usually displayed in a public space so that every passer-by will be able to watch it. Usually, the actor or actress has no idea who their audiences are: it could be those living in the same compound, and it could be some random people just passing their building. The way that the actors or actresses decorate their windows could reflect how their personality is, which could be easily read by the audience.