JIAZAZHI 假杂志

Until Death Do Us Part [双喜] focuses on the unexpected role cigarettes play in Chinese weddings.

As a token of appreciation, it is customary for the bride to light a cigarette for each and every man invited. The bride and the groom are then invited to play some cigarette-smoking games of an unprecedented ingenuousness. This publication pays homage to a tradition in which love and death walk hand in hand.

These photos come from Thomas Sauvin's Beijing Silvermine project - an archive of half a million negatives salvaged over the years from a recycling plant on the outskirts of Beijing.

More on Beijing Silvermine and Thomas Sauvin

3rd Edition

Product Dimensions: 53 x 83 x 21mm

Material: Paperback, in original cigarette box, 108 pages

Publisher: Jiazazhi Press

Mountain River Jump! is an artist duo founded in 2016 by twin sisters Huang Shan and Huang He. The duo has a variety of creative formats in art, often applying “divination consulting” as a performance to examine the potential of such art medium, and to interact with the audience at the intrinsic level. They have chosen 49 Chinese animal idioms frequently used in daily China, then illustrated for them and made them into 49 divinatory cards.

Through these 49 divinatory cards, we can see how Chinese ancestors described human's situation through animal idioms. This kind of metaphors can also be found in Zhou Yi. These 49 cards can be distributed into 7 groups, from 0 The Dragon's Nine Distinguished Sons to 48 Time Flies like A Golden Crow and Runs like A Jade Rabbit, including different stages of personal growth. For example, some of the cards are telling stories about newborn, development, fights, reflections, and rebirth.

In China, there is a long history of divination. Mountain River Jump! is using Cards of Chinese Animal Idioms to see what will come out when eastern cultural genes mix with fortunetelling in the context of the contemporary world. Meanwhile, they have strong curiosity towards human psychology and individual's narration. With their studies into Oriental mysticism and folklore, the artists pry open the topics of identity politics, labor issues, feminism, life politics, modernity and others.