In front of supermarkets or in shopping malls in China, there are often many vendors gathering. There are people who sell food or beg, especially in areas where The City Management Department is not so strict. In this work, Jiang Zhi begs outside a new supermarket wearing an Osama Bin Laden mask, challenging people to react to international issues. 

The simplicity of this film foregrounds how individuals in a markedly different cultural context respond to the symbolic afterlife of 9/11. The event appears not as a lived trauma but as a distant mediated image for the Chinese context. Here, its emotive force is derived less from personal memory than from global circulation. In this sense, Jiang Zhi’s intervention demonstrates the broader fragmentation of collective memory. By staging this encounter in an everyday Chinese environment, the work reveals the uneven global distribution of 9/11’s affective charge and how its imagery can appear strangely dislocated outside its American frame of reference.

At the same time, the reference to secret knowledge about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts underscores the conspiratorial dimension of 9/11’s global reception, echoing both the “premediated” anxieties of Western media discourse and the post-9/11 rise of speculative logics. The gesture becomes tongue-in-cheek, recalling the memeification of 9/11 imagery,  a phenomenon that both distances viewers and transforms trauma into spectacle. In dialogue with the other works in this program, this video offers a counterpoint to the intimate and victim focus of Herman Helle’s History of the World Part 11, while anticipating the critique of political messaging developed in Mike Nourse’s Terror, Iraq, Weapons.