Karaoke Hyperspace: Gu Xiong’s Red River as a Study of Place-making

April Liu

Gu Xiong, installation view of Red River at the Art Gallery, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

he idea for Red River, Gu Xiong’s recent solo exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, was sparked when the -based artist visited his hometown of Chongqing, China, and Tattended a friend’s karaoke party. The usual sing-along ritual did not seem extraordinary until the VCD player began playing the Chinese version of Red River Valley, a Canadian folksong that Gu had not heard since his days as a youth during the Cultural Revolution. Suddenly, vivid emotions of his “sent down” days re-emerged, bringing back memories of political fervour, hard labour, and life along the rural banks of the Qingxi River. At that time, only revolutionary songs were permitted and many Western folksongs, including Red River Valley, were criticized as romantic, bourgeois, and anti-revolutionary. However, many of these ballads of passion and uncertainty gained popularity among Chinese youth who secretly sang them in the countryside. Almost half a century later, the images on the karaoke screen in Chongqing did not show the Red River in or the Chinese countryside, but instead flashed scenes of tourists floating down the Rhine River through European cities. The misrepresentation of the Red River with images of the Rhine became a launching pad for Gu Xiong’s imagination. Moved by the “humour and twisted irony” of this experience, he developed Red River into a collection of multimedia works that explore the concept of rivers as a dynamic metaphor for global information flows and shifting notions of place and identity.1

Using river imagery from around the world, Gu manipulates conventional notions of “place” or “homeland” as stable sites of experience. Yi-fu Tuan once defined “place” as “any stable object that catches our attention,” or, in the ethological sense, “places are centers of felt value where biological

78 needs, such as those for food, water, rest, and procreation, are satisfied.”2 In other words, places are understood as spaces inscribed with meaning and desire. Playing on tensions between real, imagined, and virtual locations, Gu set up a simulated karaoke room in the gallery as the site of experimentation for these ideas. Gu, who immigrated to Canada in 1989, draws from his own personal background, and what emerges is an intimate view of cultural hybridity and Chinese diasporic experience. Gu’s exploration of the river metaphor allows for a more nuanced understanding of “displacement” and “place-making,” and Red River pushes these ideas beyond the mechanical frameworks of past/present or here/there to focus on themes of uncertainty, flux, and flow.

Upon entering the gallery, one first encounters a large painted map, Entwining Rivers. The image depicts three major rivers merging into a single terrain: the Red River of Canada, the Rhine River of Europe, and the Qingxi River, a tributary of the Yangtze in China. Immediately, the viewer is invited to consider the collapsing of geographic boundaries into a map that could function only for virtual travel. With no marker of cardinal directions or distances, major cultural sites are illustrated as if the map were a tourist’s guide to a made-up world. Blue waterways weave outward from a central waterway, resembling a tower of Gu Xiong, Entwining Rivers, 2008, acrylic and ink on paper, 254 x arteries attached to an upright spinal 96.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. column. Reminiscent of a Daoist diagram that illustrates the circulation of bodily energies, such as a Qing dynasty [内经图]neijingtu,3 Gu Xiong’s fantastic image calls up alternate ontologies of place, mapmaking, and wayfinding.

Along the floor of the gallery, simple white paper boats are placed as though floating down a river. They lead to a darkened room where the Red, Rhine, and Qingxi rivers come to life on large flickering screens. TitledRed River, the same as the exhibition, it is a four-channel video installation and simulated live karaoke room that is the exhibition centerpiece. Played on repeat is a bilingual English/Chinese karaoke video for Red River Valley, and multiple standing microphones are set up so that audiences can sing along. The video projections show footage shot by the artist along the rivers, with the sights and sounds from all three rivers blending together and creating a sense of continual flow. An incongruous overlay of song, text, and images of riverscreates a disconnection

79 Gu Xiong, Red River, 2008, view of four-channel video installation and simulated karaoke room. Courtesy of the artist. between foreground and background, and bilingual subtitles carrying the lyrics move by rapidly with the tune, forcing one’s eyes to float over the diverse river scenes. The contours of the riverbanks are thus flattened out across the screens like inaccessible quotations of the landscape. Many parts of the video show only rocking waves, which, being devoid of local signifiers, creates an overall sense of deterritorialization and disorientation. Like the white paper boats, these close-ups of the river currents become “anonymous” or “blank” references to flowing water.

On the one hand, Gu’s river imagery suggests a desire to return to the land, its natural boundaries, and the concrete sense of place it provides. By traveling to film the places referenced in the karaoke video and the Red River Valley song, it seems that Gu is trying to reclaim an intimate and physical sense of the sites that were somehow misrepresented and confused in the video. On the other hand, this effort is frustrated by, or contrasts with, the inherent flux and movement of the rivers that embody mobility and change as a fundamental feature of life. Andrew Hunter writes of Gu Xiong’s interest in rivers:

Water flows and is unstable. It is constantly shifting and in a state of flux. Unpredictable and chaotic, it can be a force of erosion and transformation, of movement and dilution. As a river, water can divide and transform. It can be a destructive or nurturing presence. The river can define a landscape and be a source of power. Blocked, it searches for release, finds another path or takes another form. This is Gu Xiong’s vision of culture.4

In Red River, this dynamic view of place is translated by karaoke and a transnational entertainment culture that packages exotic locales for sensuous consumption. Arjun Appadurai has theorized this trend in global mass media, observing how signs have become increasingly unmoored from their social signifiers: “the past is now not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory. It has become a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be taken as appropriate, depending on the movie to be made, the scene to be enacted, the hostages to be rescued.”5 With some simple software and a camcorder, users can easily create karaoke videos on their home computers and distribute them globally on the Internet. Mass video archives from around the world are used to stitch together a variety of instant fantasies. The

80 Gu Xiong, Red River, 2008, video still showing bilingual lyrics in the karaoke video installation. Courtesy of the artist. production of karaoke videos at all levels can thus be seen as a “synchronic warehouse” of musical scenarios, to be performed and consumed through live singing.

In this sense, commercially run karaoke rooms function as “hyperspaces,” or deterritorialized environments that encourage simulated experiences. Many standard karaoke bars around the world consist of dark, windowless rooms, devoid of any markers of where they are located. The focus of the room is usually the stage, where the monitors and microphones are set up, and the basic idea is for the participants to be totally immersed in song and the virtual world of karaoke music videos. In the literature on globalization, hyperspace is often used to emphasize this dislocation from the specificities of a particular locale; it describes environments such as “airports, franchise restaurants, and production sites that, detached from local reference, have monotonous universal qualities.”6 In the context of science fiction literature, hyperspace is typically used to refer to alternate universes where movement occurs at speeds faster than light. As a narrative device, it allows for time travel and access to unseen or distant realms.7 In terms of what I have called “karaoke hyperspace,” one can sing the same song at any karaoke location and be instantly transported to the “world” of the song. In this hyperspace, the imagination takes over in creating multiple fantasy scenarios, one after the other, in rapid succession.

This aspect of karaoke culture has been described in Rod Drew’s ethnographic study of karaoke bars in the United States, which unpacks the complex layers of role-playing, fantasy, and improvisation involved in performing a particular song. The creative process of choosing a song, learning to sing its lyrics, adjusting its tones to fit one’s voice, and performing it in a public setting goes beyond mere imitation of popular celebrities to illustrate an “elaborate means of articulating personal and collective identity.”8 The performance of one song reflects many choices on the part of the performers, who can act out their personal interpretations of a musical genre, favorite celebrity, and/or distant locales and cultures. Also building on this idea, Casey Man Kong Lum studies how different Chinese-American groups have used ritualized karaoke practices to maintain all levels of social relations as well as a live connection to pan-Chinese culture.9 Lum describes how these practices serve to transform a selection of individuals into a collective, providing a place and a context for diasporic individuals to coalesce and socialize around a common leisure activity. Since karaoke is highly accessible and portable, requiring only a few basic components

81 Gu Xiong, Red River #1, 2007, photograph. Courtesy of the artist. of a microphone, disc player, speakers, and monitor, it has taken on a great variety of forms and functions among specific groups and localities. Lum thus unpacks the importance of karaoke technology in maintaining cultural identities; familiar tunes and the age-old rituals of singing are grafted and reinvented within new cultural forms and contexts.

Gu’s personal history involves endless narratives of adaptation and continual movement across cultural and linguistic contexts. He was born in Chongqing in 1953, and his early life was informed by a diversity of local ethnic groups and regional dialects. With the social upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to the Daba Mountain region for “re-education” from 1972 to 1976. Along with millions of Chinese youth, Gu was forced to adapt to hard labour in a remote area with no roads or electricity. In his artist’s statement, Gu speaks of the lack of leisure in those days as well as the rigid ideological censorship: “We were only allowed to sing revolutionary songs, but in the reality of the countryside, these songs could no longer awaken our passion. Everyone liked to sing Western folk songs, and Red River Valley was one of them. The songs were filled with longing for home and spoke of uncertain futures.”10 The singing of Red River Valley thus provided an emotional outlet that represented a degree of relief in difficult times.

Over twenty of Gu’s old sketchbooks from the Cultural Revolution showing scenes of his daily life in the countryside have survived. The pencil and ink drawings are done in the socialist realist style that was then considered acceptable for propaganda by the official authorities. According to Gu, he challenged accepted norms and sought to infuse this style with personal emotion and vision. In an ink drawing done in 1974, three young men are depicted singing by a lantern light. Their large, looming shadows on the walls suggest the momentary appearance of their hidden, interior selves. The dark shapes and figures float around the light in the middle, as if summoned from another world by the singing, standing Gu Xiong, Sketchbook drawing #1, 1974, ink on paper, figure. This image of leisurely escape from 20.3 x 17.8 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

82 daily labour provides a sharp contrast to today’s commercialized karaoke singing in Red River, yet both modes of singing are part of an unofficial entertainment culture that, again, can serve to alleviate cultural isolation and displacement.

By including his sketchbooks in the reading room of the exhibition, Gu situates his personal history as only one fragment of memory within the chaotic flux of mass media culture. The seemingly nostalgic references to the past are not a focal point of the exhibit but only a point of tension to instigate further exploration. What dominates the exhibition is the plethora of river imagery and the repeated singing of Red River Valley. The song’s transformation into a digitized mass commodity may be a poignant reminder of how cultural signs continually shift from one context to another, disconnected from the personal histories associated with them. However, Gu’s works reflect a desire to chart new creative paths within the incessant displacement of cultural signs rather than challenge it. By traveling to locales that are not directly connected to his past, Gu documents a process of engaging with new places and cultures; thus, an interest in tracing one’s personal history is overshadowed by a desire to orient oneself to an evolving global culture.

In a series of panoramic river photographs also included in the exhibition, Gu shows different kinds of habitation along the Rhine, Red, and Qingxi Rivers. In contrast to the fast-flowing video images that visually merge the rivers together, the still photographs highlight defining features of locale and geography. As a group, the photos read as a sophisticated travelogue from a cultured tourist. The rivers are viewed from a distance, creating scenic, wide-angle postcard views of long river shorelines where a green stretch of terraced hills and farmers’ dwellings frame the Qingxi River in one photo, while a view of the Rhine is filled with dense rows of residential housing. In another photo, the Red River bends around a row of trees that are clearly reflected in its smooth waters, where there is no sign of human presence other than the eye of the photographer.

Simultaneously playing the role of “mapmaker, ethnographer, nomad, tourist, and immigrant,”11 the artist could be likened to a colonial explorer charting the frontier lands. The Red River Valley

Gu Xiong, Qingxi River #1, 2007, photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

83 folksong reinforces this frontier mood, which may be read as a tongue-in-cheek expression of the artist’s own cultural tourism and longing for adventure. The privileged status of the artist-as- tourist is an important subtext here. Gu’s idyllic river views suggest a romanticized relationship to the various sites. The urban developments serenely pictured along the three rivers seem to conceal certain histories of conflict and violence, including the millions of people forcibly displaced along the Yangtze, first due to the Cultural Revolution, and second due to the Three Gorges Dam, or the many old battlefields that are buried quietly beneath housing complexes along the Red and Rhine Rivers. In contrast to the disorienting sounds and sensorial aggression of the video installation, the rivers documented by the lens of the still camera appear passive and calm. In this exhibition, the artist is clearly playing on a variety of tensions created by the multiple constructs of place that Gu presents, and a central theme that emerges is how the river is treated as a multivalent site upon which “nature” is constructed to fit particular fears and desires.

Similarly, the historical evolution of the song Red River Valley shows how it was altered and translated to fit the needs of various communities. This points to a continual, global displacement of culture that has long been occurring since before our current age of “globalization.” According to folklore scholar Edith Fowke, there is strong evidence that the song originated in Canada, where its earliest versions can be traced to the time of the 1869 Northwest Rebellion, also known as the Red River Rebellion.12 At this time, the newly formed Dominion of Canada was planning to set up the province of when Louis Riel led the local Métis community to resist it by setting up a provisional Red River Government at Fort Garry. When violence erupted, the Canadian government sent in British and Canadian troops to scatter the rebels before establishing the province. Early versions of the Red River Valley song spoke of “the love of a half-breed girl for one of the British soldiers who came west to suppress the rising.”13 Fowke documents the gradual changing of the lyrics as the song traveled southward and westward across North America, eventually losing its derogatory references to a “half-breed” girl or the “dark maiden.” Transmitted through the oral and musical traditions of European settler communities and early “cowboys,” the song became a more generalized narrative of lost love and took on different song titles altogether, including Bright Mohawk Valley, The Cowboy Love Song, and Saint Regis Maiden.

It is not documented how the song eventually reached China, yet it is significantly transformed by the Chinese cultural context and language. By comparing the contemporary English and Chinese versions of Red River Valley used in Gu’s installation, one finds many layers of displaced meaning. In particular, the song’s many references to the “valley” are replaced by [村庄 ]chunzhuang (village) and [故乡] guxiang (homeland or hometown). A few of the opening stanzas show these differences as they appear in the songs; I include here my own literal English translation of the Chinese lyrics:

From this valley they say you are going (人们说你就要离开村庄/lit. trans.: From this village they say you are going) We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile For they say you are taking the sunshine That has brightened our path for awhile.

Chorus Come and sit by my side if you love me Do not hasten to bid me adieu

84 But remember the Red River Valley (要记住红河谷你的故乡/lit. trans.: Remember the Red River Valley, your homeland) And the girl who loved you so true.

Won’t you think of the valley you’re leaving (你可会想到你的故乡/lit. trans.: You may look back at your homeland ) Oh how lonely, how sad it will be Oh think of the fond heart you’re breaking And the grief you are causing me.

Although the source of these Chinese lyrics is unknown, the various translations of valley as “village” or “homeland” more accurately reflect the sentiments of millions of displaced Chinese youth during the Cultural Revolution. However, the entire name of the Red River Valley is translated in the main chorus, maintaining the reference to an exotic land and thus a foreign narrator. The “red” in Red River also speaks to a whole spectrum of Chinese cultural associations with this colour, including auspiciousness, power, national identity, Communism, the male gender, etc. Interestingly, the early and contemporary English versions of the song focus on the story of a lost love, whereas the Chinese version introduces this theme of a lost homeland. Gu’s personal history of displacement from his hometown and then from his country is thus more strongly reflected in the Chinese lyrics. By displaying these bilingual lyrics at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, near the shores of the real Red River, Gu brings the song’s history of global displacement full circle and back to the land where it first spawned. Thus the popular folksong continues to gain new life in each incarnation, providing a rich metaphor for cultural hybridity and the experiences of a displaced, transnational artist.

Instead of resting on metaphors of here/there or homeland/site of resettlement, Gu’s exhibition becomes a deep meditation on constant mobility in the physical and virtual realms of contemporary life. In her recent study of Chinese art outside China, Melissa Chiu has argued for a view of diaspora that recognizes “the location and circumstances of migration and settlement as significant factors affecting the expression of Chineseness.”14� Instead of measuring “Chineseness” by one’s connection to the homeland, Chiu suggests that one should examine it across different sites, where any given host culture is equal in standing to the homeland. Chiu thus proposes a more dynamic view of migration, where identity is understood as existing in a state of flux, informed by each new site of experience. Similarly, scholars of such as Ien Ang, Yunte Huang, and Aihwa Ong have argued for a critique of Chinese essentialism through an emphasis on positionality and the breaking down of the spatial and cultural boundaries of a geopolitical China. By asking “Can one say no to Chineseness?,” Ien Ang challenges the diasporic paradigm itself and its “debilitating obsession” with China as the center of cultural identity. Underlining the unstable nature of diaspora, Ang states:

. . . the spirit of diasporic thought, motivated as it is by notions of dispersal, mobility, and disappearance works against its consolidation as a paradigm proper. Contained in the diasporic perspective itself, therefore, are the seeds of its own destruction, which provides us with the opportunity to interrogate not just the different meanings Chinese takes on in different local contexts but, more fundamentally, the very significance and validity of Chineseness as a category of identification and analysis.15

85 Gu’s career reveals a unique approach to these issues. As one of the artists whose work was censored in the pivotal China/Avant-Garde exhibition of 1989, Gu left China, right after the Tian’anmen Square crackdown of that year. Along with canonized names such as Xu Bing, Huang Yongping, and Gu Wenda, Gu Xiong was part of the first large wave of contemporary Chinese artists to engage with “the West” during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many of these artists have tended to focus on imagery that refers directly to Chinese history, language, or tradition. This is evident in major works such as Huang Yongping’s Roulette series (1985-1988), Gu Wenda’s Pseudo-Characters series (1996–97), or Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy (1994–96). Gu can be distinguished from this group because his art followed a different trajectory in Canada, and throughout this stage of his career, one can observe a tendency that sets him apart from his contemporaries: he seems less interested in the project of deconstructing “Chineseness” through the use of distinctly Chinese imagery.

Instead, he has often turned to vernacular objects and imagery to address issues around cultural hybridity. For instance, Gu used socks and salmon sculptures in The River (1998), an installation that commented on migration and cultural adaptation through the use of local references. In Yellow River Blue Culture (2002), Gu presented photographs of everyday street life in Canada and China so that one could not distinguish one location from the other. In the exhibition Red River, the combined imagery of three major rivers from three different regions around the world creates a portrait of global culture that has become increasingly deterritorialized from conventional notions of place. Gu’s perspective is intimately informed by his life in Vancouver, a diverse port city that is surrounded by a complex system of waterways, ocean inlets, and the Fraser River delta. Cultural and physical mobility is a visible, visceral way of life in this city and a source of creative inspiration.

Gu’s Red River exhibition deals with themes that have drawn increasing attention in the contemporary art world. Since the 1990s, major art institutions and biennales have moved toward notions of nomadism and mobility in the transnational sphere. High-profile international examples include the Venice Biennale of 1993, which focused on the theme of “cultural nomadism,” the touring exhibition Cities on the Move: Urban Chaos and Global Change (1997– 2000), and the 10th International Istanbul Biennale: Optimism in the Age of Global War (2007). However, major productions like these have garnered criticism for celebrating the dissolution of political and national boundaries as a redistribution of power among marginalized communities when in fact the relationships remain exploitive. Cultural critic Nelly Richard has critically asserted that the recuperation of the marginal or the multiple has amounted to nothing more than a “simple declarative position” to promote and market new progressive images for art publishing houses, museums, galleries, cultural centres, academic art departments, etc.16 The proclaimed “crisis of the centre” and other vague postmodern slogans are thus used to legitimize and glorify these urban art institutions without actually challenging their foundations of power. Richard’s critique is a bold one, since it demystifies the very slogans that arose from efforts to empower marginal groups. As these cultural politics of difference get played out in the international art world, Chinese artists are often positioned as arbiters of Chinese culture for a foreigner’s gaze. The uneven terrain of cultural exchange produces double standards, such as the expectation for Chinese artists to represent authentic versions of “Chinese identity” while European and North American artists are perceived as speaking from more culturally neutral positions.17

However, Gu’s work responds to these issues in an indirect manner by drawing attention away from more conspicuous expressions of “Chineseness.” Instead, Gu is beginning to explore the

86 subtler sides of diasporic life: change, flow, and flux without any stable connection to identity or place. I have highlighted this notion of “hyperspace” because it captures the sense of rapid travel, imagination, and uncertainty that pervades Gu’s exhibit. By creating works that illuminate how “place” is performed, simulated, and consumed in various media, Gu emphasizes the fragile, socially constructed nature of place and its invested meanings. Karaoke cultures are useful examples of this process because they are both products of specific local contexts as well as producers of simulated locales for mass consumption. In addition, the diversity and cross- fertilization of karaoke singing practices illustrate the movement of global traffic in all geographic directions instead of in a “trickle-down” manner that aligns “globalization” with “Westernization” or “Americanization.”18 Although many consider karaoke a Japanese invention due to its name, karaoke around the world often bears little resemblance to the Japanese version, and the debate over which nation invented it has been hotly disputed by karaoke fans from China, Wales, and the Philippines. As a rapidly growing global trend, karaoke cultures have “brought about endless circulation, domestication, and recycling of objects and technologies as well as the spread, adaptation, and appropriation of cultures and ideas, which frequently offend the guardians of cultural barriers.”19 Karaoke practices thus cannot be adequately described as “authentic” or “hybrid,” but instead embody more dynamic qualities of cultural flux and synchronicity. Gu creatively brings forth these qualities with river imagery and references to his own diasporic experiences, but, more importantly, Red River calls attention to a sense of placelessness and spatial remapping that is now becoming relevant even to those who still live in their homelands.

Notes 1 Gu Xiong, “Rivers and Memories,” artist’s statement in the exhibition catalogue Gu Xiong, Red River (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2008), 2. 2 Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 161, 4. 3 For an example and description of a Qing dynasty Daoist neijingtu, see Stephen Little, Taoism and the Arts of China (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2000), 350. 4 Andrew Hunter, “Into the Flow,” in the exhibition catalogue Yellow River Blue Culture (Kamloops: Kamloops Art Gallery, 2002), 22. 5 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 30. 6 M. Kearney, “The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 553. 7 For a detailed description and scientific theory of hyperspace, see Michio Kaku,Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension (New York: Libri, 1994). 8 Rob Drew, Karaoke Nights: An Ethnographic Rhapsody (New York: Altamira Press, 2001), 52. 9 Casey Man Kong Lum, In Search of a Voice: Karaoke and the Construction of Identity in Chinese America (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996). 10 Gu Xiong, “Rivers and Memories,”1. 11 Petra Watson, “Toward the New Frontier,” in Gu Xiong, Red River. 12 For a detailed history of the song, see Edith Fowke, “’The Red River Valley’ Re-Examined,” Western Folklore (1964): 163–71. 13 Edith Fowke, “’The Red River Valley’ Re-Examined,” 164. 14 Melissa Chiu, Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China (New York and Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2006), 35–53. 15 Ien Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness” Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm” in boundary 2, Vol. 25, No. 3, Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, (Autumn 1998), 228. 16 Nelly Richard, “Postmodern Decentrednesses and Cultural Periphery: The Disalignments and Realignments of Cultural Power,” in Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. G. Mosquera (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 265. 17 For a discussion of how contemporary Chinese artists of the diaspora approach this challenge of representing Chinese identity, see Melissa Chiu’s “Chineseness as Strategy for Cultural Intervention,” in Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China (New York and Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2006), 50–53. 18 Zhou Xun and Francesca Tarocco, Karaoke: The Global Phenomenon (London: reaktion books, 2007), 7–18. 19 Zhou Xun and Francesca Tarocco, Karaoke: The Global Phenomenon, 10.

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