Dukkha Tower

“Dukkha Tower” is a project that attempts to relocate the global chain of Apple products geographically to illustrate the contradictions and tensions hidden in the landscape of today's global capital activities. The narrative initiates with a fictional eyewitness testimony filed at the police station by a security guard working at the Apple Store on the ground floor of the Empire State Building in New York City. After the security guard had suffered from hallucinations for a long time, he discovered the hidden world inside the Empire State Building, and “Dukkha Tower” is a section drawing according to his eyewitness account. The representation (hand-drawing, folds, format) of the section persuades the viewers to accept the authenticity of a reconstructed world. However, the contents of the pagoda are organized according to the logic of the Four Truths of Buddhism (Suffering, Concentration, Destruction, and Dao), assuming the fictional quality. It is ironic to the so-called “reality” of the real world. By placing Dongguan on the upper floors and the Apple store on the ground level, the project visually juxtaposes the production and consumption chains that are usually separate from each other in the real world. The juxtaposition is a revelation and interrogation of the violence implicit in the highly integrated world economy. Such violence is the powerful driving force behind the urbanization process in the Third World. The region it erodes is a crucial yet hidden part of the capitalist chain, a heterotopia bounded and indoctrinated by imperial borders, a ghost of the East that appears and disappears in the transparent glass facade of Apple.

Project Information Project Type: Drawing Project Location: Princeton Principal Artist: Zigeng Wang Design Period: 2014 Design Team: Tanli Liu, Han Zheng, Wen Zhao Dimension: 1700x700mm Commission: School of Architecture, Princeton University