I AM MAKING PARADISE.

New York must have struck Duchamp as a spectacle from the future. From Otis elevators and skyscrapers to ultra-modern bathrooms and steel combs, "all the great modern things", as Andy Warhol was to call them, were already in place in America in 1915 while Europe was still struggling free of its ancien régimes. It must be this translation to the future that gave Duchamp his unparalleled intellectual freedom, an alienated liberation familiar to travellers. He sought the estrangement to which his readymades are eerie monuments.

The Chinese year of the Pig is almost consumed.

Two more nights before the Mickey year begins.

His name could be Frosty or maybe his name is Xiao Bing.
He stands on a street corner in Shanghai. He is white, all white in this dirty weather.
Is he Chinese or a ‘foreigner’, like me? Was his nose sold at the vegetable market on Jianguo Lu or was it wrapped in plastic, weighed and priced at the Parkson’s supermarket on Huai Hai Lu? That’s where I buy ‘bio’ carrots to feed my Philips juicer, every morning.

Hey Frosty, today I just look like you! I have my thick white coat on! But take care my friend, tomorrow the cold might be gone.

I went to Parkson’s today. I bought fruits and vegetables, muesli and wine.
But before I reach the ‘horn of plenty’, I walk past a man, a beggar, a monster.
Fire has licked his nose, eaten his fingers. Ears and hair have disappeared.
He sits on the pavement in Shanghai.

And hey Xiao Bing, he looks like you! No ears, no fingers; a subtraction of the senses.
Phew, sometimes… the world seems closely connected.

Can everything be disarranged
and still be in place?