HANXIAO

我从小喜欢做剪贴报。那时候我们都用台历，365天每一天撕一页。我们家买的台历要么印着菜谱，要么印着百科，有时候逢实用的菜谱和有趣的知识，我们就会裁下来，用胶水贴在硬面抄上。外公是个做剪贴报的狂热爱好者，他收集奇闻怪谈、菜谱、图片、以及各种边边角角的生活小贴士，还十分讲究排版。有一次过新年（隐约记得是2002年，我七岁的时候），外公把他的四大册剪贴本每册各复印了两份，纸张质量很好，黑白印刷，天蓝色的硬壳封装，送给我妈妈和舅舅两家人收藏；四册书叠放起来比《新华字典》还要厚，我如获至宝。如今想起来，这些剪贴报竟是我的启蒙读物。

我念高中的时候，住在重庆的一间出租屋里。我那时候喜欢看《外滩画报》周刊和《氧气生活》月刊，我父母来看望我的时候也会给我带诸如《三联生活周刊》和《看天下》这一类杂志。杂志越堆越多，我念想着“毕业之后肯定塞不进行李，丢了又怪可惜”，便重拾了做剪贴报的习惯，好的文章单独陈列，气派的广告也要裁剪下来，漂亮的图片要匀称地贴在专门的素描本上。

除了杂志上的玩意儿，我的剪贴册里面也会专门收纳金属罐头和玻璃瓶子上的标签，这一类商品多为食品和酒水。

I have been fond of making collage booklets since a very young age. When I was a kid, my family always kept a desk calendar, and we had to tear up a page to update every morning. The desk calendar is usually printed with a “recipe of the day” or a “random fact of the day”. We saved the interesting pages in a hard-cover notebook. My grandfather was an avid collage maker… he collected funny news, recipes, pictures and all kind of tricks and tips, and laid out those items artistically in his notebook. He once copied 4 volumes of his books of collages, thicker than my Chinese dictionary, as new year gifts for my mother and uncle… I still remember the copies were delicately printed in black and white, with a light blue cardboard as the cover. The 4 volumes of collages, with such rich contents and resulted from my grandfather’s creativity, are probably the first several books I read in my life.

When I went for high school in Chongqing, a city roughly 200 km away from my hometown, I lived in a small rental apartment and subscribed a lot of magazines. Concerned about the impossibility to carry those magazines back to my hometown after graduation, I picked up the hobby of making collage booklets: I archived articles in a specific folder, organized the fine advertisements by category (jewellery, perfume, accessory, flight company, hotel, etc.), and glued the lovely pictures in a sketchbook.

Besides images, I also have separate books to collect labels, ranging from a Finnish pea soup can to a Dolce & Gabbana wine bottle.