In the streets of Beijing, we observed that the government uses red banners with white Chinese characters to communicate to the public, and these are hung all over the city. Many of these banners are slogans that are related to recent policies. The majority of these slogans tell the citizens how they should behave: campaigns such as, for a “Civilized Beijing”, to improve traffic situations, or “learn from the hero Leifeng”. We decided to make our own banner that would send a nice message, one that was less serious. Like a breath of fresh air confronting the usual dull messages found on these banners. To realize this project, we went out at night to take down banners; bringing them home, we cut them and tried to find new phrases with the characters that we had. With the help of our Chinese friends, we found a sentence “从每一天开始生活” that can be translated as “each day starts a new life”. We sent the new sentence to be sewn together and the next morning very early in the day, we hung the banner on a pedestrian bridge that passes over the third ring road.
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