T PLAN - PEACE IN AND OUT

YUYUE ZHOU

The telephone booth is an inner-city space that is gradually losing its functionality.

Carpets with the Chinese words 'Go in and out safely' represent, in the Chinese context, a blessing and a wish for friends and relatives who are returning or going out. Such carpets are often found in spaces where the family is the unit, wishing for peace and safety as people 'go' and 'come'. Such objects of blessing and prayer can therefore also be considered traditional Chinese domestic religious objects.

The artist Zhou Yuyue's placement of the carpet in front of a telephone booth originated from his reflection on the repeatedly altered functional properties of telephone booths in the city of London, where many homeless people turn this small space into their 'temporary home' and their 'smallest unit of the family'. In this space, the artist finds that homeless people often leave traces of themselves or their personal belongings (such as books, urine, and cardboard as a 'floor'), and their presence is further evidence that the phone booth is 'not what it used to be'. The artist thus attempts to reinterpret the phone booth as a new field with new properties.

The notion of 'coming' and 'going' in the carpet penetrates not only the physical space of the phone booth but also a round trip in the timeline, a replacement relationship between the 'new' and the 'old'. The artist, therefore, concludes by placing a carpet on the door of the phone booth in the form of a Chinese New Year sticker, a functional transformation of an object with similar cultural attributes, making it a new landmark in the W1W 8QL area of London.