Ideal***

"Cracks in the Republic" is an ukiyo-e that spans twenty years. The entanglement between Li Qiang and Zhang Qian began on the top floor of the high school observatory at the end of the century. The first kiss, smelling of lime soda, was repeatedly traced in front of the window of the repeat class where ginkgo rain was falling, and finally condensed into charcoal lines in the morning light of the Department of Architecture. The couple spent ten years going from the campus card to the world map of the second-hand refrigerator in the shared house. The Chevron scraps piled up in the architectural model box witnessed them weaving the Utopia with the longitude of 39° north latitude, until the unopened diamond ring reflected countless opposite figures in the mirrored curtain wall of Wangjing SOHO. When the blue light of early childhood surveillance cameras replaced the projection of the starry sky classroom, and the mint mist of e-cigarettes seeped out of the annual rings of the felled century-old locust trees, their stories split into double mirror images in the virtual rain of roses rewarded by live broadcasts: architect Li Qiang repaired the latitude and longitude of time in the cracks of Dunhuang murals, and programmer Zhang Qian deciphered the fragments of the love algorithm at the digital heritage notary office. The starry sky classroom renovated from a rural primary school will eventually become an eternal coordinate for measuring the angle between ideals and reality. This work is composed of thousands of chapters. Between the blue light of mobile phones and the fragrance of locust flowers, this work interrogates the emotional phenology of the post-industrial era. When all the symptoms of the times are reduced to the mineral paint on the tip of the mural repair pen at the end of the novel, we finally see clearly—the cracks in the so-called Utopia are where the light comes in.