Prof. Zairong Xiang’s new article “Everyone’s (a) Toilet” has been published in e-flux journal issue 155, July 2025.
Dong Guo-zi asked Zhuangzi, “Where is what you call the Dao to be found?” Zhuangzi replied, “Everywhere.” The other said, “Specify an instance of it. That will be more satisfactory.” “It is here in this ant.” “Give a lower instance.” “It is in this panic grass.” “Give me a still lower instance.” “It is in this earthenware tile.” “Surely that is the lowest instance?” “It is in the excrement [and piss].” To this Dong Guo-zi gave no reply.
—Zhuangzi
Like the museum, the toilet is often regarded as a symbol of modern civility. But since the need to defecate or urinate often comes urgently, it may be more urgent and necessary to build toilets than museums or art centers. If making art is considered universal, then making piss or shit can only be more so.
While museums conceal art’s cosmological function with its messy conditions of possibility in order to create the autonomous bourgeois subject, the “civilized” toilet masks shit to the extent that anti-odor drops are now sold to hide one’s own stink. Toilets can be luxurious or conceptual, deconstructive or ready-made, with different shapes and different politics.
Toilets were constructed in “developing” countries such as China and India as part of postcolonial modern nation-building. The issue of hygiene is profoundly entangled with the boundary-making practices of the ongoing colonial/modern legacy, where race and gender propriety reflect seemingly innocent public health concerns until a crisis triggers the old myth of the “dirty other”—the Jew, the Chinese, the Indian, the Black, the Latino, the Arab, the Neapolitan, and so forth.
Theory cannot be separated from practice. A rare instance of separation, however, was Duchamp’s urinal, from which arguably sprang the current debate on the ill-fated relationship between theory and art, curation and creation. But Fountain (1917) is an artwork only when its urinal function is deactivated.
After Joseph Beuys proclaimed that “everyone is an artist,” there is nothing scandalous in claiming that art can be anything. The complaint that “nowadays it seems everything can be art!” elevates the layperson to a critic or a theorist, a gatekeeper who determines inclusion and exclusion. “It’s not art!” might further strengthen the complainer’s otherwise precarious authority. If the complaint were made more explicit—“It’s not art! It’s shit!”—our lay critic might face a conundrum acknowledged by Piero Manzoni: it is art and it is shit, merda d’artista.
Luckily, Marcel Duchamp chose a urinal and not a toilet bowl for his fountain, saving Bruce Nauman from any potential scatology in his 1966 sculptural selfie. Spitting pee or pee-like water like a Roman fountain angel is tolerable, cute, even sexy. Spitting shit out of one’s mouth, on the other hand, would be “too much”; imagine the backlash were Andres Serrano to have used excrement instead of piss for his 1987 Piss Christ? After all, even Manzoni had to can his excrement into a Schrödinger’s cat–like superposition. Even in an age of celebrated (or loathed) anything-goes, we find a contract that is not easily breached. The ill-fated relationship between art and theory seems accompanied by scatological dis/engagement.
If bringing the urinal—and piss and shit—to the museum is artistically justifiable as a provocation against the art-historical canon and a certain museological consensus, what happens when we bring theory into the toilet? Zhuangzi seems to have an answer. In his signature Daoist provocation, he answers Dong Guo-zi’s question concerning the whereabouts of Dao (the way, the logos, the principle, Theory) by saying “in the piss and excrement” (在屎溺). Could we find a Dao to better understand the relation between artistic and theoretical practices? To find Dao-imbued piss and shit, let us start not with museums, but with the following toilets.
Louis Vuitton Toilet
Who would want a purse when you can have a Louis Vuitton toilet for your shit? The Louis Vuitton toilet belongs to a dynamic market of knockoff products grouped under the name shanzhai (or “counterfeit”). Initially a name for counterfeit mobile phones popular in China in the early 2000s, philosopher Byung-Chul Han has dedicated a book to the phenomenon of shanzhai. However, as China accelerates socioeconomic restructuring, neoliberalization, and gentrification, shanzhai’s diverse forms have become a problem to be flushed down the toilet of history. At best, this is wishful thinking. State standardization and copyright campaigns notwithstanding, shanzhai and its variants are still bourgeoning in China and across the so-called Global South, especially in poorer regions or metropolitan neighborhoods ever more impoverished by neoliberalism. Shanzhai survives with the damnés de la terre.
It is perhaps for this reason that research on shanzhai has used economic, sociological, and anthropological lenses to focus mainly on so-called “lower-end globalization,” including the manufacture and circulation of counterfeit products. When we became aware of its nature as a commodity, shanzhai loses its claim to heroism, much less “democratic hope,” as was wished for by Byung-Chul Han’s otherwise excellent philosophical treaty on shanzhai.
iFlush
Moving south by southeast, I took this photo in the toilet of a local cured meat restaurant in Qiandongnan Miao and Dong autonomous prefecture in Guizhou province, my hometown. The flush button features the logo of the US technology company Apple, which will be far more familiar than iFlush. It raises the question: Why did an apple with a bite taken out become the exclusive property of Macintosh, which reminds its consumers that its products are “designed in California, assembled in China,” as if to suggest that “assembling” as opposed to “producing” means simply putting things together without technological savvy, let alone “theory”?
“Assemble” might be the key word here. Shanzhai regresses to the past as it transforms itself into the global commodity of the present. What points to the future is the decommodified form of precisely this assemblage for survival that shanzhai shares with other precariats in the Global South.
Egyptian Toilet
Gardens of the past continue to stand in the present, forming a futuristic, surreal assemblage of the “global village”—that rosy imperial notion suddenly, terribly missed in a world caught in intensified border regimes and rising fascism. I am referring to the theme park Window of the World (世界之窗), shanzhai’s gigantic existence (or insistence) at the heart of Shenzhen, the former capital of shanzhai.
Today it still sees crowds of tourists willing to spend 220 Yuan (30 Euros) for a ticket. For many, it is still the only way to encounter the great monuments of civilization—though the question of why “world cultures” should be presented by monuments albeit in miniature form is a serious one.
Migrant workers on the assembly lines of the world’s factory who assemble (according to Apple’s famous line) global capitalism take a hard-earned day off to bring visiting relatives to see the world or visit their friends who work in the park. The world continues to flourish on the backs of laborers in factories in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Mexico, in Western metropolises by people largely from immigrant backgrounds, in China by domestic migrant workers from the countryside. The first and most obvious characteristic of the Window of the World is the cramped proximity of one monument to the other. The world is assembled without giving a shit about cartographic nor categorical propriety. Instead of mummies and papyrus, inside the pyramid is a public toilet.
Everyone’s (a) Toilet
I recently took this photo in the toilet of my uncle’s house in rural China. Let’s go from the left to the right: the flush toilet was installed when my uncle’s country house was “modernized” to add a proper toilet some years ago. Soon, it seemed that something didn’t work with the flush toilet, so a squat toilet was built right next to it, hence the two water tanks. The squat toilet’s water tank features the head of Mona Lisa, suggesting that it might have been made by Mona Lisa Ceramics from Foshan in Guangdong province. The iFlush button, however, reveals that this Mona Lisa ceramic is a shanzhai version.
The important thing here is not authenticity of branding or art-historical citation but that none of the water tanks is in use. I suspect that even if my peasant uncle is no longer too poor to afford running water, using that amount of water just to flush some shit down the drain still seems too wasteful. Therefore, a gambiarra: a tap added for the red ladle to collect a smaller amount of water to send the shit down the drain. The ladle can also be used to rinse the tiles. Towards the bottom right of the photo: instead of the jade-colored toilet paper holder behind the squat toilet, a pink plastic bag hung on the door handle within arm’s reach has been repurposed to hold the toilet paper. In this almost Duchampian installation, nothing seems like a modern household commodity. They all seem to be placed as a reminder of something.
More Shit
This article focusing on the toilet is a spinoff or knockoff of an earlier text I wrote on shanzhai that seemed to answer or bypass the question of “the relationship between artistic and theoretical practice” by way of a “theory of the South” as itself a kind of shanzhai—of theory. In the colonialist worldview, theory is at odds with the idea of the South. The impoverished Global South flourishes and cannot afford to do pure theory. In the text I wrote that, just as Brazilian gambiarra or Indian jugaad is founded on a poverty of resources, a theory of the South must arise from a mixing of overlapping histories and a practice that is orientated towards what is yet to come or yet to be known.
In this sense, the shanzhai theory of the South (or Southern theory as shanzhai theory) cannot be subject to the distinction between practice and theory—or other binary distinctions such as North-South, East-West, man-woman, secular-religious, high-low, and real-fake. This “refusing to be subject to” does not equate to resistance or destruction, but is rooted in an ordinary abundance. It is not a heroic act of rebellion but a kind of inversion, an undercurrent: the ethics internal to the theory-practice of all-things-in-connection is that of the all-permissible.
Notes
Zhuangzi, “Knowledge Rambling in the North,” trans. James Legge (1891), with author modifications. See →.
See China’s mid-twentieth-century “Patriotic Health Campaign” (爱国卫生运动), or India’s “Swachh Bharat Mission” (Clean India Mission) launched in 2014 to eliminate open defecation in rural areas.
This remained true until a “real” Louis Vuitton toilet reportedly worth a hundred thousand dollars was made, which the author discovered in his attempt to locate a better-quality image for the text than the “poor image” he collected in 2017 from the Internet Archive. See →.
Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, trans. Philippa Hurd (MIT Press, 2017). See also Lesia Prokopenko, “The Gum You Like: A Letter from the Western Borders of Shanzhai,” Syg.ma, December 23, 2021 →.
Brazilian quasi-equivalent of “shanzhai.”
Zairong Xiang, “Shanzhai: A Theory of the South?” trans. Stephen Nashef, in South of the South, no. 1 (2020) →.
