An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris by Georges Perec

Artwork by Zhou Yu

Before I started to read "An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris," I noticed a news article about a Jeju Air passenger jet carrying 181 people from Bangkok that sped off the runway and burst into flames on December 29th. 179 people died in this accident. As the book discusses, "What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extraordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines." It’s fascinating, so I decided to use the first image to describe the air crash.

When I started reading the book at home, my cat jumped up on the table and kissed my face to attract my attention and play with him. When you have a cat, it’s not so easy to concentrate on work. It’s part of my daily life, so why not create an image about this? It must be very interesting.

When I chose to read this book, the first thing I did was find the Place Saint-Sulpice location on Google Maps. I traveled to Paris at the beginning of 2024, and if I had passed this place before, it would have been very interesting. Unfortunately, I didn’t go there. Well, it's lucky that I’m writing this note at the end of this year. I'm not very familiar with Paris, and I'm also not very familiar with the city I live in now. I moved to Chongqing in July, and I thought it would be interesting to document life in a Chinese city. So, I decided to go downtown to watch the city, waiting for my husband to finish his work, and buy some food to have hot pot tonight and celebrate the new year.