May 35
May 35 places a cleaning trolley into the exhibition through augmented reality. The viewer scans a QR code and sees the object appear in the room through the lens of a phone. The trolley is mundane, functional, and immediately recognizable, yet its configuration of buckets, handles, brushes, wheels, warning signs, and bright industrial colours gives it an unexpected sculptural clarity. It is a small architecture of maintenance. The title refers to an internet phrase used by netizens to speak around censorship of June 4, 1989, by extending the previous month beyond its official calendar. The work is not a representation of that historical tragedy. It focuses instead on the inventive linguistic and visual strategies that emerge under censorship. “May 35” becomes a compressed act of imagination: a date that does not exist, created so that memory can continue to circulate. Within ZhouKe, the cleaning trolley carries a double charge. It belongs to the character’s duty of cleaning, order, maintenance, and removal, while also pointing to the “cleaning” of the internet itself. The instance holds this tension without resolving it. Through AR, the object is both present and absent, placed in real space through a mediated device. Like ZhouKe herself, it exists through a lens, occupying the unstable territory between physical encounter, digital projection, and cultural memory.