51 Tan is a commissioned record of the Shanghai street vendors that Cao Feile, one of the 51 Personae, took notice of and made observation of from 2016 to early 2017. Initially published as a series of social media posts on the 11th Shanghai Biennale’s WeChat platform in the form of Lianhuanhua, or Chinese pulp comics, the record outlines a collection of itinerant peddlers she took efforts to approach, get close to, and interact with. The details are vivid, subtle, and warmly human—the way the peddlers decorate their places, the logic with which they make construction, the materials they use, the spatial strategies they develop, and the way they communicate with pedestrians through these strategies. The 39 stories (instead of the expected 51) were eventually compiled into a book designed by Wu Jiayin in 2019 and printed on thin, unadorned paper. At this time, many peddlers in the book have already vanished from the streets. Peddlers build their businesses on the trust, however fleeting, of people passing by, but they themselves make the easiest targets for urban governance—they are seen as problems to be solved and when they are “solved” the effect is most visible. After making this study of peddlers as a professional architect, the author of this book, Cao Feile, stopped and withdrew from her previous job as a commercial architect (involved in urban renewal and development) and have turned to a kind of architectural practice that is more fundamental and critically engaged.

(Chen Yun, English translated by bob) Photo courtesy of Cao Feilei on Winter Solstice of 2019 at the balcony of her home in Shanghai.