Born at Night

深 夜 里 诞 生

In 2016-2017, in the context of a research fellowship organised by M+/Design Trust, Space Caviar relocated to Huaqiangbei, a neighbourhood of Shenzhen most widely known as home to the world’s largest electronics marketplace. Arriving there at the peak of the international media’s fascination with Shenzhen as “global factory” in which ideas supposedly conceived elsewhere are manufactured before being shipped to market, they set out to study the city on its own terms. Setting aside conventional notions of authorship, and with it the typecast view of Shenzhen as an economy reliant on imitation, they observed the city as a networked ecology in which a new definition of design is taking form.