No-tier aesthetics can hardly be broken down into a curatorial brief - they are the aesthetics of a past too recent and have no place in any future perfect. No-tier aesthetics are only revealed in difference, layered against the undecipherable stratigraphy of contingent belonging. No-tier aesthetics expand in socio-cultural voids, as the echoes of media flows radiating from global capitals combine with population displacements, industrial runoffs and single-use materialities.
No-tier aesthetics sink into the abandoned outposts of forced development, blossoming into semio-chemical compounds graced with a semblance of agency by the stillness of the nothing-in-betweens from which they emerge.
The nothing-in-between demolition and construction: the reactionary past to be eternally outrun, and the technocapital future always too fast to catch up with; after too many revolutions, a displacement of matter and affects along the nation's fractal veins of high-speed railways and information networks.
The nothing-in-between city and countryside: conurbations growing like slime molds, from construction site straight to ruin; from desiccated villages to rotting malls and high rises, there is nowhere near enough ground to afford any underground.
The nothing-in-between manufacturing hinterlands and service-oriented coastal areas: the industrial hollowing-out of city belts, the aborted ecologization of urban-rural interzones; relocated residents barely living under the shimmer of distant speculative bubbles.
As everything-under-the-heavens becomes an aspect of the city, the tianxia is pinned down through occult metrologies. Arbitrary and unofficial divisions of conurbations into a variable number of tiers segment aspiration, business, civilization, distinction and education into a hidden governmental sociometric deployed as developmental placebo.
Are you a child of the Bei-Shang-Guang-Shen Tier 1, a statistical peak blessed by geolocational luck? Unofficial interpretations emerge as folksonomies of desire and epistemologies of judgment. All your friends migrated to a Tier 3 city, while you only made to a Tier 5 one? What degree of advancement can you aspire to, and how can you navigate the no-tier wastelands in search of civilizing upgrades?
The setting of no-tier aesthetics could be anywhere, given the necessary scale of temporal and spatial flows. Today, it is China – the Big China of Big Business and Big Data, where cities are larger than countries and internal migrations threaten to drive authoritarian systems to the brink of disruption.
In the nothing-in-between segmented citizenships and city tiers, cultural materials rot before their non-recyclable packaging is ripped open, and deadstocked goods clog the supply chains that tie undocumented migrants to techno-nationalist dreams. In satellite towns and urban villages where neo-China has never arrived, synthetic drugs are brewed next to digital waste processing plants, and bitcoin mines are installed in abandoned hydroelectric power stations.
In the intergrounds and underzones of no-tier aesthetics, the discontinuous spaces violently shaped by infrastructural terraforming and haphazardly coated by sedimented layers of bleached junk, advertisement, soft power ad propaganda decompose into nostalgia before their message can be even considered.