From Mount Huan to Sheshan Mountain, (Galleri Tranströmmer, Kunming , 2009)
Exhibition opening, book release of A Taikonauts Journey, and have your portrait taken as a taikonaut.

Of tales told
I have made a book
With time
And my love of hoarding
The matter sent me by friends
From the four corners
Has grown into a pile

- Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese studio, 1740

I traveled to Yuan Yang expecting the astonishing scenery of the Hani rice terraces. But wherever I went, fog and mist surrounded me. But when standing, staring into the whiteness sometimes suddenly a wind created an opening and landscape and distant villages suddenly pop up around me. I recalled the story of Mountain City by Pu Songling in which suddenly one day a whole city appear on the distant top of mount Huan, where there shouldn’t be a single house. But just as it appeared it suddenly shrinks and disappears. Songling wrote his tales in the transition between the Ming and Qing dynasty, In such chaotic times with many changes, fast development and break with traditions points of references are lost. In such mental weightlessness the rhetoric of journalism, storytelling, science and the fantastical, intertwine and the stories of contemporary life sometimes seems strange. The science fiction genre was also born out of such a time, in the British industrialization of big changes, belief in progress and future values. Now, the economy of the future is often believed to be tourism. And Yuan Yuang is also no longer only a rice farming community, the terraces has become big works of land art, monuments that thousands of tourists visit every year. Together with thousands of tourists I also went to Sheshan mountain to have the longest possible experience of a total solar eclipse. Ten minutes of total blackness. When I came back to Kunming a couple of weeks later the city had transformed; new buildings, trees and streets, where before there had only been holes in the ground.