CHINA CHOCOLATE FACTORY


中国巧克力工厂
2023-2024



Artbook Box


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An original journalism photography series turned into a multi-media artbook collaboration between artists and familiy members  


In late July 2023, Pu's family along with hundreds of thousands of families were struck by a typhoon and subsequent flooding. Her mother narrowly escaped danger, her father’s ancestral suicase was destroyed, and their home was washed away. After the flood recede, Pu created a photo project about the disaster to reflect on the delayed resuce response from the Chinse officials and stories behind.

Media: Photography, non-fiction writing, comics, music cassette recordings
Creative Team:
Photography & Text (Chinese, English) : Pu Xiaoyue
Overall Design: Yin Er
Comics: mushoku_Mouse, Yan
Architectural Drawings and Harmonica Record: Pu Gang

Dimensions:
Outer Box: 22.5 × 13.2 × 6.6 cm
Folded Booklet: 15.0 × 7.0 × 1.5 cm
Plastic Box: 10.0 × 8.0 × 3.8 cm
Cassette Tape: 5.1 × 3.5 × 1.0 cm

Page Count:
Folded Booklet: 116 pages
Miniature Newspaper: 12 pages (Chinese) / 16 pages (English)

Crafts:

Outer Box: Modified ready-made product
Folded Booklet: Two-color printing, hand-folded
Plastic Box: Hand-modified ready-made product
Cassette Tape: Pre-made, custom recorded
Miniature Newspaper: Black-and-white printing on Daolin paper, hand-folded





Photography Series
"The color of the mud varies—gray-black, black, light brown, and dark brown. It covers everything in sight, turning green leaves to brown, grass to brown, and the house to black. It’s a terrifying yet aesthetically pleasing transformation, almost like a sculpture. This mud came with the flood, carrying with it the fury of the Juma River, perhaps also the pain of the Yongding River, Baigou River, and Liuli River, leaving its mark in Zhuozhou. This mud is the only physical trace the flood left behind, the purest evidence of its presence."

 (Originally published in Jiazazhi Magazine, September 2023)



Artist Note:


When I first returned to the disaster site, I saw all the houses, vehicles, trees, and roads covered in thick mud. The sludge was knee-deep, and there was no distinction between the inside and outside of the houses. So, the metaphor of "chocolate" originated from my immediate sensory experience. In the photographic collection of this project, the disaster site documentary images are ironically named after chocolate-related foods, contrasting the sweetness of these foods with the stench of the mud. But why is it called "Factory"? Because although the flood seemed like an accidental event, it revealed the underlying collapse of the social system—it’s a systemic issue, a matter of power structures. Simply mentioning chocolate is not enough; the core reflection lies in the system that produces chocolate—the factory.

Our flooded home was in Zhuozhou, Hebei, not in a designated "low-lying area for temporary flood storage," yet it was "chosen" as a temporary substitute. We received no evacuation notice until the last moment before the flood arrived, and the subsequent pathological compensation only highlighted the system behind it all. These unspoken truths reflect the "factory" that powers the entire mechanism.

Moreover, stepping back, chocolate itself is a mature consumer product, much like the fairy tale façade in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which, beneath its surface, addresses capitalist issues, class struggle, race, and power. This narrative logic greatly inspired me while writing comic scripts.




HOME SWEET HOME



HOME SWEET HOME
Edible tombstone / spiritual tablet
Dimension: 14x4x 8cm
Medium: Cocoa butter, chocolate, food coloring
Photo: PU Xiaoyue
Special thanks to LI Xiangang

In this flood disaster, both the death toll and the number of injuries were deliberately obscured in official news reports. Moreover, the reported figures were significantly lower than the actual number of deaths, and there was little mention of subsequent compensation for families or property losses. As a result, the creator used chocolate to construct tombstones for those whose casualties were hidden, aiming to connect the sweet medium of chocolate with the pain and suffering people endured in the disaster.




“I imagine a world where people no longer spend fortunes on burial plots, no longer bankrupt themselves for elaborate funerals, no longer go into debt for death rituals. Instead, they would only need to buy a chocolate tombstone or memorial tablet, to be shared and eaten. In the cloying sweetness filling their mouths, they would weep freely, then wipe their mouths clean and walk away.

I imagine my tombstone as a block of chocolate, covered in the teeth marks of many others. I imagine a world that exists solely for its endpoint, and that endpoint is this very chocolate—a life lived entirely to reach it, to obtain it, to consume it, to melt it away. And death, emotion, meaning—none of it needs to remain. What is left, I would use to forge another chocolate tombstone.”
2023.09.21



Additional Materials



Screenshots
3D models of artist’s flooded house
Photography: PU Xiaoyue
Model: FANG Zheng



Scanned documents
(Details from the artbook)
Artist’s father drawing childhood home from memories.
Drawing: PU Gang



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