Gao Ruiying, who has lived in Nanting for over a year, shared her rental life and a creative project in the interview. Since her sophomore year, she has rented houses, finding them always “temporary”: landlords prioritize renting over livability (e.g., odd triangular toilets, broken doors), while tenants “make do” instead of fixing issues, knowing they won’t stay long.
Inspired, she filmed a rental life video but felt it lacked impact. Thus, she rented a small ground-floor space to exhibit it, as the location matched the “rental vibe.” She also held a 2-day Nanjing event: offering free house cleaning to film others’ rentals. However, most people, especially the elderly, were distrustful—questioning if they did charity. Only a few agreed, like a Guangdong student (living there 5-6 years) and a restaurant owner (letting them clean vacant staff dorms). She mostly connected with non-locals; the only local was the absent landlord, who only visited occasionally to collect rent.
When asked who she’d farewell if leaving, she named a Northeast-accented breakfast aunt (warm greetings, shared regional ties) and a cigarette shop owner. Her work, rooted in daily life, used only snippets of the cleaning footage.
Wu Yutong, a GAFA artist, primarily interacted with Nanting villagers through daily commerce, notably at a specific convenience store run by a friendly female老板 (boss). While these interactions were cordial and sometimes involved small gifts like sharing homemade beef balls, they remained superficial. She feels a conscious distance from older local Cantonese residents, citing negative past experiences where her appearance was critiqued in dialect, making her feel like an outsider. This wariness influences her artistic practice; her work is intensely personal and introspective, focusing on self-exploration or broader online social phenomena rather than her immediate Nanting environment, which she perceives as ordinary, not a source of artistic novelty. For her, Nanting is simply a lived-in space, not a subject for art. If forced to leave, she would prioritize saying goodbye to a close university friend with whom she shares a profound memory of singing in the rain, not any local villagers.
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