附注 NOTATION:
2026-09-06，15:59 UTC+02：
慢遞員麥克傳來一張照片，照片中收件人正手持緩件號 HQL-815 的包裹內容物
COURIER MIKE sends a photo with RECEIVER holding the contents of dispatch HQL-815 in hand
2026-09-06，09:44 UTC+02：
收件人寫給慢遞員麥克
RECEIVER to COURIER MIKE：
Hello MIKE,
I will be at the performance art event today (maybe arrive a bit later, but trying my best to make it at 14.00/2pm). You can also reach me via Signal and phone under my phone number +31 6XXX4XXXX. A word of caution about the performance event though - not all the artists are that great; it will probably be a mixed bag. But still an excellent introduction into the local DIY arts scene.
I've been familiar with Harumi Hosono for 45 years - as a listener of YMO's first album (the one with the video game sound effects) at asge 12 in 1981, with my friends back in the time, although Ryuichi Sakamoto was our favorite musician in the group, because he was more affiliated to the post-punk currents of that time (that had been our angle), also with his later solo album 'B-2 Unit'.
Best,
-收件人 RECEIVER
2026-09-06, 01:50 UTC+02：
慢遞員麥克寫給收寄件人和收件人：
COURIER MIKE to SENDER and RECEIVER：
Hiii, SENDER and RECEIVER,
After moving my whole self these past two days, I feel like an express parcel being shipped fast — I arrived at a new place in an instant, but my body is still on the plane. Not on the ground, anyway. My watch is still on Beijing time. Though my body has no jet lag, I keep feeling that I have six more hours in a day than everyone else.
But after these two days, I finally have a desk I can actually use. Now that it's not that messy anymore, I started reading this mail in the morning. There are so many interesting messages in it. Forgive me if I'm being slow here — I am a close email reader.
And RECEIVER, you move so fast. I can tell you think faster than I read, haha. (Judging from the list of places you put together, of things worth visiting in Rotterdam.)
While writing this mail I happened to be listening to the radio station RECEIVER shared. Talking about mixtape — actually I have no memory of ever using one to listen to something when I was young. But I did once receive a gift made by a friend, also a mixtape. At the time I told her I wanted to hear the music of Haruomi Hosono (细野晴臣), but he has made so much music, I didn't know how to listen. Later she made me a mixtape — her idea of the best way to enter Hosono. I loved that gift. It has the property of a cassette: you press it down and it plays, press it again and it stops. Compared to a CD, it gives me a more solid feeling that /I/ am the one operating it. Because I wasn't so familiar with it, I often didn't know exactly where the play/pause position was. The unknown of opening it again next time often felt just right. It made me feel I was inside a pure and beautiful game, haha.
SENDER, I'm so glad you introduced RECEIVER and me. Just reading this mail already makes me feel there is so much to do. To be honest, when I first arrived in Rotterdam I was a bit clumsy and a bit alone — but not lonely. You also encouraged me not to be too homesick, and it actually worked. I'm happy that today I went out to watch a movie.
RECEIVER, the places you shared all look very attractive. I'm someone who loves sweets a lot. On Sunday I will probably go have a look at that performance. If you are free tomorrow around 5–6pm, I can bring you the delivery (慢递) things.
When I try to understand the atmosphere SENDER talks about, I think of a time I went exploring an abandoned place . I saw a stopped clock hanging on the wall of the hotel bar, and on the table a log book recording some work notes of the staff. Looking at that clock, a voice rose up in my head, like a sound passing through a telephone — the kind of thing you'd say to a hotel front desk: "你好，这里是清新温泉酒店前台……" ("Hello, this is the Qingxin Hot Spring Hotel front desk……")
I want to respond to what you two were discussing above. But I feel that as someone born after 2000 — I don't really have anything to be nostalgic about, so far. Which is a little strange, because I'm very curious about what you're describing. Maybe nostalgia needs something I haven't lost yet. Everything about my past is still recorded somewhere — timestamped, backed up, searchable — so there's no fog left for a "better past" to grow in. I wonder if that means I'll only understand nostalgia later, after I've actually lost something. I don't know — I don't know how to reply after this.
A few days before I was about to leave Guangzhou, I was chatting with two friends. One of them asked us: if many of the moments you've already lived through kept repeating — round and round, over and over — and you knew they were coming, would you still want to go on? She mentioned that is a question from a book of Nietzsche, My answer then was: I would. I'd want to shout out "再来一次" — one more time.
2026-09-03, 21:01：
寄件人寫給慢遞員麥克和收件人：
RECEIVER to COURIER MIKE and SENDER：
Hello SENDER and MIKE,
SENDER and I still belong to the cassette and mixtape generation! MIKE, if you are into cassette label culture, a lot of this can be found in Rotterdam in the WORM Pirate Bay archive at WORM and in the Underbelly shop associated with WORM: https://underbelly.nu/?post_type=product&s=tape ; this might interest you, too, an archive in the making about a legendary audio cassette-based participatory experimental radio program by Dutch Fluxus artist Willem de Ridder in the 1980s:
https://www.diggindemos.nl
https://www.concertzender.nl/relight-the-rise-of-dutch-cassette-culture/
Welcome, MIKE, to Rotterdam! [BTW, this Sunday there will be a food market/craft market organized by a group of Taiwanese and Japanese people, including Taiwanese stand-up comedy and Riso printing: https://ukishima.nl/pages/upcoming-events - I do not know whether this will be any good, but just got the flyer in my Taiwanese food shop around the corner. It also involves Nowhere, a Chinese diaspora bookshop from The Hague]
I live in Rotterdam East, almost on Oostplein, in a neighborhood that has a lot of upscale shops and venues run by people from East Asian diasporas (two Chinese bakeries [Round & Round - where Ying-Ting Shen, a Taiwanese designer/part of the 'Sumerie Dining' collective and friend of us is working - and Swallow Cake], the aforementioned Taiwanese vegetarian food market [Veggie Garden], one upscale rice flour cake place - NOiAA - run by a HK food designer [Adelaide Lala Tam] who's also a friend of us, etc.etc.).
In Zuid, I recommend checking out the artist-run spaces OOK, Niffo, the artist-run café and small concert venue Koffie & Ambacht, the social practice venue Gemaal op Zuid & The Social Practice Library (both founded by Jeanne van Heeswijk), and near Wolphaertstraat the artist-run spaces Available & The Rat (where Maoyi Qiu ran a reading room that also included Display Distribute publications), Varia, WET film, and the more white cube-ish spaces Rib (run by the very sympathetic Maziar Afrassiabi) and Shimmer.
Other places I recommend are WORM, Podium WegGeefWinkel (has a performance art event on Sunday: https://wgwpodium.nl/9-september-performance-art-in-wgw-6/ ), PrintRoom, KIOSK, MaMA, Roodkapje, Niteshop
Ditto.
I like the definition of nostalgia as a longing for a past that never existed. Nostalgia is interesting, because it is about desires, affect, fiction and storytelling, but also highly problematic - especially in Europe, the entire extreme right (especially in Rotterdam and the Netherlands) is completely driven by nostalgia and the longing for a completely fictitious better past. [And of course it also concerns technology, basically everything that is retro. I'm stopping myself to start rambling here, because this is a subject very close to me, also in my academic work.]
When I worked at WORM and we tried to establish a "Parallel University" there where you would get degrees for following courses like "how to become a hardcore body performance artist in only 7 days", we had the motto: "everything, including all mistakes, has already be done, but not yet by you" - with the idea that this was reason enough for things to be done all over again.
I did! It's resolved!
-收件人 RECEIVER
2026-09-03, 20:29：
寄件人寫給慢遞員麥克和收件人：
SENDER to COURIER MIKE and RECEIVER：
hallo dear RECEIVER and MIKE!
This is a 'dangerously notalgic' e-mail written while listening to the cassette mixtape that MIKE made for me for my birthday, given on the day before her departure to the Netherlands, and thus also a welcome to Holland message! We met at M+ museum to see the free entry installation of an old Janet Cardiff work I like and wanted MIKE to see/hear, just before she had to hurry off for other errands before her flight the next morning. She said she had a tiny bit of luggage space available, so I took the opportunity to pack her with a new dispatch, this HQL-815.
So to introduce the both of you before your handover meeting, MIKE is going to join DAI for the new semester, her first time studying abroad, and maybe without a lot of contacts in the Netherlands. She found a flat already though, in Rotterdam Zuid, so hopefully not too far from where RECEIVER lives.
I've now arrived to side B of the mixtape, a song that I know from Four Tet, but nicely mixed with some water sounds, from where?
The contents of the dispatch I will preface a bit here to say one is a very long overdue gift from LY before he left to the States, and the other is a gift from me from New York.
MIKE, if you start to feel lonely and would like any to meet any other people in Rotterdam, just let me know, I have a couple of good friends there still! To answer your question about why nostalgia is seen as negative, I suppose it's always about relative amounts, but the backwards-looking direction of nostalgia seems to maybe prevent people from moving forward or changing, thinking that 'it was always better before'. I don't know how RECEIVER would see this, as he is very technologically minded at the same time as being highly skeptical of the direction of platform capitalism, something we share.
My sometimes lulls into deep nostalgia are more for a lost vibe rather than real circumstances of the past, which, for better or worse, I have a tendency to not look back enough to, perhaps why i seem to repeat a lot of the same mistakes over and over again... This year is a major, non-nostalgic lull, though, so let's see what wise, new discoveries it could bring forth. Fingers crossed.
hugs to you both in the long, ending stretches of summer,
SENDER
媒體記錄 TRACKING:
Provenierswijk 區
收件人收件 RECEIVER receives
網上 WWW
「說到懷舊，我忘了在上一封email中附上這張經典的 Vaporwave 視覺圖像」 “About nostalgia, I forgot to include this classic Vaporwave visual in my previous email“
