小陈上一次见到长颈鹿

publishing fourbeethree
Nov 24, 2025
6 min read

Updated: May 5

The last time xiaochen saw a giraffe was back then. The first time I saw Liu Guangli was in the morning.

More than a decade before this morning took shape, Chickling and I became inexplicably close friends. We were teenagers and impressively stupid. Chickling later opened a lovely bookshop in Paris, which is quite far from stupidity. I sat in Chickling’s bookshop and waited.

A few months before this morning, in Outside Art Space’s previous life at Caochangdi, Chu Yun told me the artist was called Liu Guangli. I said oh I’d heard the name. He said, oh wow. I say things like this a lot—often it’s because I’ve mixed one name up with another. No, I really had seen Liu Guangli at Jimei-Arles, drawing dinosaurs for his son—and then forgotten it more thoroughly than the extinction of dinosaurs themselves. I watched Antimony Capital News multiple times, and then—exerting more effort than I ever do promoting in my salary job ~~(if I ever do that at all)~~—I told people everywhere: this artist is unbelievably good, this Liu Guangli.

And so there was this morning. It was easy to divide us into me and them. They kept talking about the COVID years, fervent and emotional, simultaneously distancing themselves from it and clinging to it. I was soaked in that very reality, so I didn’t think too hard. My smooth brain retains very little. What I remember is this: unlike the French and Lengshuijiang dialect in his films, Liu Guangli speaks impeccable, broadcaster-grade Mandarin. He likes to keep up with whatever dull, obscure new gossip is circulating in the Chinese art world; by doing so he sheds one part of himself. He’s interested in nineteenth-century Chinese electrical systems, gender discrimination, individual memories of the Khmer Rouge, and techno-religion. Those AI scenarios shed yet another part of him—or so I thought at the time. What a trickster. You’ll see it at Okra-Homa Projects.

If you insist on being strict, Liu Guangli—the darling of many, many film festivals—hasn’t been a “proper” artist for very long. Fortunately, for someone who works primarily with moving image, this means his finances are still passable (no one’s responsible for this statement, by the way). If you are being more amicable, hear this—Liu Guangli just wants to make something better today than he did yesterday.

Yesterday, I walked into Liu Xiaodong’s exhibition and couldn’t find my reality in it. I walked out. Outside, workers building new high-rises in the CBD were sitting and lying along the road, basking in the sun. Takeout meals in plastic bags sprawled crookedly along the pavement, mingling with green, pleated construction netting. I couldn’t find my reality there either. I followed the crumpling green toward the subway station and, unusually, felt a bit blue.

In Liu Guangli’s game, what I have to do is nothing more than locate my position in reality: WASD, ← ↑ ↓ →. I always lose. I stubbornly insist that I’m better at open-world games, that Liu Guangli’s rules are too rigid. Things with decades of history are like this: they trap players inside barely rendered textures, single pixels, cursor zones, individual Chinese characters. I ALWAYS lose. I declare this to be Liu Guangli’s hegemony, so I write this tedious piece to oppose him.

Liu Guangli has made too many hi-tech things. He’s also stored some very low—so low they sink into the anti-static flooring—low-tech junk for us. Within the Second Ring, tech can’t be too high, you know. A few days after the opening, the playback software refused to work, stubbornly. One mouse broke and was later replaced with a laser gaming model. As some things went missing others forced their way in. While playing Snake and biting my own tail for the fourth time, I remembered that between 2020 and 2022—time viscous, memory slippery—I’d written down many stories. One of them went like this. This story is authentic.

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The last time xiaochen saw a giraffe was back then.

People always talk about the past like this. “Back then” sounds like a very, very long time ago—but it could just as well have been last Wednesday.

Back then she was twenty-eight, renting a studio in Xuhui District for five thousand a month. Her pillowcases smelled of cooking oil.

As everyone knows, Shanghai paused for a while. How long, no one can quite say now. Officially, it was one month.

Thankfully the neighbourhood offices in Xuhui were steady and reliable. Supplies were distributed eighteen times, and some subdistricts earned 4.9-star ratings on review apps. Everyone was delighted. Stickers flew everywhere.

On the fifteenth—or maybe the sixteenth—distribution, xiaochen received a long segment of vertebrae, lodged in a plastic bag like a sugarcane stalk. She asked in her neibourhood’s group chat what it was. People said it seemed to be lamb spine, spine from Beijing. “Like cures like,” someone added.

Southern-born xiaochen didn’t know how to cook spine—it wouldn’t fit in the fridge either. At a loss, she was. An abrupt spine is indeed a difficult thing. This wasn’t xiaochen’s fault, nor the neighbourhood office’s, nor Beijing’s.

The problem began with vocabulary. First came tentative disc bulges like “test everyone who should be tested,” “static management.” Then there was no going back. People learned to converse fluently using “spatiotemporal close contacts,” “society-level transmission,” “dynamic zero-COVID,” “five tubes screened.” They could distinguish between lockdown, controlled, and precautionary.

This was the centennial return of the vernacular language movement. A minority’s lexical innovations spread through aerosols, finally dispersing between everyone’s tongues and teeth. Words clung together awkwardly, gradually fibrosed, lost all elasticity, became indisputable. Many editors and writers began to feel depressed.

Cervical spondylosis, they stuttered. It’s cervical spondylosis.

Meanwhile, elevators carried twenty million people loosely sliding along the spinal columns of buildings. After briefly surrendering their nasal cavities and throats to the tents below, people regrouped tightly around the spine, living stacked together. Moving up and down became the only freedom. Before long, animals tiptoed into metro stations and plazas.

Xiaochen placed the vertebrae in a large glass vase. She counted from top to bottom: seven segments, perfectly aligned. So long, yet only seven—just like a human neck.

As everyone knows, giraffes have only seven cervical vertebrae. While each one is disproportionately elongated, there are no extra bones. Few people know this: the longer a giraffe’s neck, the more likely it is to fracture its bones when fighting. From this one can deduce that elongation of the cervical spine is useless and absurd. The giraffe is the paradox of the giraffe itself.

Xiaochen sat on the sofa, watching the towering spinal bonsai. On television she saw giraffes fighting in front of Plaza 66. Words burst from their worn intervertebral discs. The signifier of language shifts endlessly, while the signified remains blocked, waiting for instructions from leadership.

What xiaochen received was lamb spine—we knew it was. That day the compound was full of steaming warmth as the thudding of cleavers striking bone intertwined with thick aromas. Not a single spine was wasted.

Later—but still back then—they busied themselves deleting the pause mark. Along with it, they conveniently deleted some redundant, incomprehensible things. Giraffes were among them.

There were no more giraffes on television. People no longer dreamed of giraffes.

After the fracture healed, Shanghai developed a temporal hyperplasia, colloquially known as the SH Month. This extra SH Month compensated for the disappearance of the pause mark and the giraffe.

SH Month is a form of intersubjectivity. Like linguistic bulging, it exists without leaving a trace.

As everyone knows, there were originally no July or August in the world until Caesar and Augustus. The emergence of SH Month follows the same logic. Reportedly, SH Month lasts for a vague 32 days each year. A few people who couldn’t stand it sold their apartments and moved abroad. Those who stayed were soaked in dense nostalgia and profoundly grateful. During every SH Month, people zoned out at home in an orderly fashion, did group exercises, banged pots, cooked carrots.

I go to the West Bund Art & Design every November. I’ve never caught an SH Month, but somehow November in Shanghai feels colder each year. I asked xiaochen whether she ever ate the lamb spine. She equivocated. Stories beyond Chaoyang District aren’t mine to tell, to be frank—but I know that the next time xiaochen sees a giraffe will be tomorrow.