Trapped in That Summer: Notes on Chinese Weirdcore Aesthetics
有些图像的恐怖，并不来自鬼，也不来自怪物。它只是把一个太熟悉的地方摆在你面前：一条没有人的老式居民楼夹道，一台泛着蓝紫色光的旧电脑，一个塑料儿童摇摇车，几栋像被时间晒褪色的筒子楼。画面很糊，透视不对，颜色像坏掉的显示器，字句也暧昧得像梦里的提示框。它没有告诉你“危险来了”，但你知道自己不该久留。
这大概就是中国式怪核美学最迷人的地方。它表面上是互联网亚文化，是 dreamcore、weirdcore、liminal space 在中文网络里的本土变体；但再往里看，它其实不是一种单纯的“怪”，而是一代人在高速发展之后，回头望向童年空间时产生的晕眩。它像一张被压缩过无数次的旧照片，颗粒、噪点、色偏都还在，清晰度却刚好不够让你确认：那到底是记忆，还是记忆被互联网重新加工后的幽灵。
Some images are frightening not because they contain ghosts or monsters, but because they show us a place that is almost too familiar: an empty alley between old apartment blocks, a blue-purple glow from an outdated computer screen, a plastic coin-operated kiddie ride, or concrete buildings faded by time. The picture is blurry, the perspective feels wrong, the colors look like a broken monitor, and the words appear like a prompt from a dream. Nothing says “danger,” yet you know you should not stay there for too long.
This is where Chinese weirdcore becomes fascinating. On the surface, it is an internet subculture, a localized branch of dreamcore, weirdcore, and liminal-space aesthetics. But beneath the style, it is less about “strangeness” itself than about the dizziness of looking back at childhood after decades of rapid development. It resembles an old photo compressed too many times: grain, noise, and color distortion remain, while the image is never clear enough for us to decide whether we are seeing memory itself or a ghost of memory remade by the internet.
一、阈限空间：站在“已经不是”和“还没有”的中间
“阈限空间”这个词最早来自人类学语境，指仪式中夹在旧身份和新身份之间的过渡状态。一个人已经离开原来的位置，却还没有抵达新的位置；秩序暂时松动，身份悬而未决。后来这个概念被艺术、电影、心理学和互联网视觉文化不断借用，逐渐从“人生阶段的中间地带”变成了“空间经验的中间地带”。
在怪核图像里，这种“中间”很具体。走廊像是通向某处，却永远没有尽头；游乐场像是曾经热闹过，却已经散场太久；教室、商场、楼梯间、地下通道，都处在一种尴尬的非功能状态。它们不是废墟，因为它们还太完整；也不是生活现场，因为人已经消失。它们像被从正常叙事里剪掉的一帧，只剩空间本身继续亮着。
中文网络里的阈限空间尤其有意思，因为它并不只是照搬 Backrooms 那种黄色墙纸、荧光灯、无限办公迷宫的母题。它会把这种“夹在中间”的感觉放进中国城市化的日常材料里：老小区、单元楼、楼下小卖部、褪色广告牌、儿童乐园、城中村巷道、学校走廊、县城宾馆、CRT 显示器和早期网页。这些东西不必解释，中国观众常常一眼就懂。那不是“某个虚构世界”，而是“我好像真的去过那里”。
The idea of liminality originally comes from anthropology, where it describes a transitional state in ritual: one has left an old identity but has not yet arrived at a new one. Order loosens; identity becomes suspended. Later, the concept moved into art, film, psychology, and internet visual culture, shifting from a middle stage in life to a middle state of space.
In weirdcore images, this “in-between” quality becomes concrete. A corridor seems to lead somewhere but never ends. A playground looks as if it used to be lively but has been empty for too long. Classrooms, malls, stairwells, and underground passages all enter a nonfunctional state. They are not quite ruins, because they remain too complete; they are not living spaces either, because people have vanished. They feel like a single frame cut out from normal narrative, leaving only space itself still lit.
Chinese liminal space is especially interesting because it does not merely copy the Backrooms formula of yellow wallpaper, fluorescent lights, and endless office-like mazes. Instead, it places liminality inside the ordinary materials of Chinese urban life: old residential compounds, stairwell units, corner shops, faded signs, children’s playgrounds, urban-village alleys, school corridors, county hotels, CRT monitors, and early web pages. These images do not require much explanation for Chinese viewers. They are not simply “fictional worlds”; they feel like places one may actually have visited.
二、怪核的“不安”：熟悉之物突然失去上下文
弗洛伊德谈“诡异”时，核心并不是陌生，而是熟悉之物以陌生的方式返回。真正让人不安的，不是我们完全没见过的东西，而是那些本该属于日常、本该被妥善安放在记忆里的东西，突然脱离了语境，重新站到我们面前。一个旧楼道，如果有人推门、有人做饭、有人吵架，它就是生活；但当它空无一人，灯光过曝，墙皮发黄，时间像停在下午四点半，它就开始变得诡异。
所以怪核不是恐怖片意义上的恐怖。它不把恐惧塞进观众嘴里，而是把观众放回某种“半认识”的状态：你知道这里像哪里，但你说不出它到底是哪；你知道自己经历过类似的光线、墙面和空气，但记忆没有完整证据。这种体验很像梦。梦里的空间往往不是凭空生成的，而是由现实碎片拼贴而成：小学的楼梯接到外婆家的客厅，商场的扶梯通向一条小时候走过的巷子。逻辑坏了，但情绪是真的。
阈限空间、梦核、怪核、创伤核这些视觉类型，之所以能让人不断观看，恰恰因为它们触碰的是潜意识。它们不讲完整故事，而是提供一个空场，让观众自己的记忆去填。画面越空，投射越强；叙事越少，个人经验越容易涌上来。
When Freud discusses the uncanny, the key is not pure unfamiliarity but the return of the familiar in an unfamiliar form. What unsettles us is not something we have never seen, but something that should belong to daily life and memory, suddenly removed from its proper context and placed before us again. An old stairwell, when filled with neighbors, cooking smells, and arguments behind doors, is simply life. But when it is empty, overexposed, yellowed, and frozen at what feels like 4:30 in the afternoon, it becomes uncanny.
This means weirdcore is not horror in the usual cinematic sense. It does not force fear into the viewer. Instead, it returns the viewer to a state of half-recognition: you know this place resembles somewhere, but you cannot name it; you know you have experienced this kind of light, wall, and air, but memory offers no complete proof. The feeling resembles a dream. Dream spaces are rarely created from nothing. They are collages of reality: the staircase of a primary school connects to a grandmother’s living room; a mall escalator opens into a childhood alley. Logic is broken, but the emotion is real.
Liminal space, dreamcore, weirdcore, and traumacore continue to attract viewers because they touch the subconscious. They do not tell complete stories. They provide empty scenes and allow the viewer’s own memory to fill them. The emptier the image, the stronger the projection; the thinner the narrative, the more easily personal experience rises to the surface.
三、中国式怪核：高速发展之后，童年变成了异乡
如果说西方怪核常常处理的是个人化的怀旧、抽象的梦境和早期互联网经验，那么中国式怪核更容易滑向一种集体性的时代感。它当然也有个人经验，但个人经验背后总是站着一整套社会空间：拆迁、扩建、改造、城市更新、老小区翻新、学校搬迁、商场倒闭、县城街景消失。童年的地方并不只是“过去了”，它常常是真的不在了。
这使中国式怪核带着一种特殊的后劲。它不是简单地说“小时候真好”，也不是沉迷于退回过去。它更像是在承认：我们这一代人的成长发生在一个变化速度极快的空间里。楼房、街道、商店、游乐设施、电脑界面和网络语言，都在短短二十年里被替换了一轮又一轮。于是，当一个 2000 年代风格的画面重新出现时，它不仅召回私人童年，也召回一种发展过程中的失重感。
这种失重感很“中国”。不是因为它只属于中国，而是因为它在中国现代化经验里格外密集。很多人小时候生活过的场景，长大后已经被新的商业综合体、地铁站、封闭小区、玻璃幕墙和标准化街区覆盖。过去没有自然地老去，而是被快速更新吞掉了。怪核图像里的老楼、摇摇车、CRT、劣质塑料、发灰天空、过曝阳光，因此不只是怀旧符号，也是发展留下的心理残影。
If Western weirdcore often deals with individualized nostalgia, abstract dream states, and early internet memory, Chinese weirdcore more easily slides toward a collective historical feeling. It still contains personal experience, but behind the individual stands a whole social landscape: demolition, expansion, renovation, urban renewal, old residential compounds, school relocation, closed shopping malls, and disappearing county-town streets. Childhood places have not merely “passed”; many of them have physically disappeared.
This gives Chinese weirdcore a special aftertaste. It does not simply say, “childhood was better,” nor does it fully desire to return to the past. Rather, it admits that this generation grew up inside rapidly changing space. Buildings, streets, shops, playground equipment, computer interfaces, and internet language have all been replaced again and again within two decades. When a 2000s-style image returns, it recalls not only private childhood but also the weightlessness of development itself.
That weightlessness feels distinctly Chinese, not because it belongs only to China, but because it appears with unusual density in China’s modernization experience. Many childhood scenes have now been covered by commercial complexes, subway stations, gated communities, glass facades, and standardized streets. The past did not simply age; it was swallowed by speed. Therefore, old apartment blocks, kiddie rides, CRT screens, cheap plastic, gray skies, and overexposed sunlight in Chinese weirdcore are not just nostalgic symbols. They are psychological afterimages left by development.
四、为什么是老小区、摇摇车和 CRT？
中式怪核最有辨识度的材料，往往不是宏大的历史景观，而是极小、极旧、极廉价的日常物。比如老式电动儿童摇摇车。它通常摆在小卖部门口、超市旁边或居民楼下，投币后会播放循环音乐，涂装鲜艳却粗糙，形象像盗版动画角色。小时候它代表快乐，长大后再看，却有一种说不出的空洞：它还在摇，但坐在上面的人已经不见了；音乐还在响，但童年不再回来。
再比如 CRT 显示器和早期电脑界面。它们在中文怪核里常常承担“技术怀旧”的功能。那种蓝紫色荧光、粗糙像素、Windows 画图窗口、错误提示框、低分辨率网页，会把人带回互联网还没有彻底移动化、平台化、算法化之前的时代。那时网络像一间杂乱的房间，有入口，有角落，有坏掉的链接，也有突然闯入的神秘感。今天的互联网更光滑、更高效，也更封闭；怪核于是把旧互联网的粗糙重新变成一种审美资源。
老小区则是另一个关键。它们常常不是严格意义上的“废墟”，仍然有人居住，仍然有晾衣杆、防盗窗、单元门和褪色瓷砖。但在怪核图像里，这些生活痕迹被抽空了。它们留下的是一种“人刚刚离开”或“人永远不会回来”的感觉。中国观众看到它，不只是在看建筑，而是在看一种从前的社会组织方式：邻里、院坝、小卖部、放学路、夏天傍晚、楼道里的回声。这些东西一旦被放进失真的滤镜，就从生活变成了梦的遗址。
The most recognizable materials in Chinese weirdcore are often not grand historical scenes, but small, old, cheap everyday objects. Consider the coin-operated kiddie ride. It usually sits outside a corner shop, beside a supermarket, or below a residential building. After a coin is inserted, it plays looping music. Its colors are bright but crude; its characters often resemble bootleg cartoons. In childhood, it meant joy. Seen again as an adult, it feels strangely hollow: it still rocks, but the child is gone; the music still plays, but childhood does not return.
CRT monitors and early computer interfaces function as technological nostalgia. Blue-purple glow, rough pixels, Windows Paint windows, error prompts, and low-resolution webpages bring viewers back to an internet before total mobilization, platformization, and algorithmic smoothing. The old internet felt like a messy room: it had doors, corners, broken links, and sudden mystery. Today’s internet is smoother, faster, and more enclosed. Weirdcore turns the roughness of the earlier web into an aesthetic resource.
Old residential compounds form another key material. They are not ruins in the strict sense. People may still live there; there are laundry poles, security bars, unit doors, and faded tiles. But in weirdcore images, these traces of life are emptied out. What remains is the feeling that people have just left, or that they will never return. For Chinese viewers, such images are not only architecture. They evoke a former mode of social life: neighbors, courtyards, corner shops, the route home from school, summer evenings, and echoes in stairwells. Once placed under distorted filters, these things turn from life into the ruins of a dream.
五、中文网络的怪核，不只是“丧”
很容易把怪核理解成一种“丧文化”：低饱和、空旷、孤独、压抑，好像只是年轻人又一次表达精神疲惫。但中国式怪核更复杂。它的情绪并不纯粹消极，甚至有时很温柔。很多作品并不是要诅咒现实，也不是要永远困在过去，而是把怀旧当成一种必须经过的创伤。所谓“我好像永远被困在那个夏天”，听起来像逃避，其实也像告别。只有承认自己被困过，才有可能知道自己已经离开。
这也是它和许多西方怪核作品的差异。西方图像常常偏向个人意识、抽象梦境、无名的心理空间；中国图像则更容易带出社会关系和具体年代。它不是单独一个人在空房间里做梦，而是一代人同时意识到：我们曾经共享过某些视觉材料、某些城市空间、某些童年设施、某些粗糙的互联网界面。怪核把这些共同经验压缩成一张图，像把整个年代封进一块坏掉的屏幕。
所以，它的重点不是“过去更好”，而是“过去为什么会以这种方式回来”。当我们被一张老小区照片击中，真正击中的也许不是老小区本身，而是我们终于意识到，自己和那个空间之间的关系已经断裂。我们无法再自然地住回那里，无法再用童年的眼睛理解那里，也无法把它彻底丢掉。于是它变成阈限空间：既不是家，也不是陌生地；既不是过去，也不是现在。
It is easy to read weirdcore as another form of depressive youth culture: desaturated, empty, lonely, and oppressive. But Chinese weirdcore is more complicated. Its emotion is not purely negative; at times, it can even be gentle. Many works do not curse reality or demand eternal return to the past. They treat nostalgia as a trauma one must pass through. The phrase “I seem to be forever trapped in that summer” sounds like escape, but it can also sound like farewell. Only by admitting that one was once trapped can one begin to know that one has left.
This marks a difference from many Western weirdcore images. Western works often lean toward individual consciousness, abstract dreams, and unnamed psychological spaces. Chinese works more easily reveal social relations and specific historical periods. It is not only one person dreaming in an empty room. It is a generation realizing that it once shared certain visual materials, urban spaces, childhood facilities, and rough internet interfaces. Weirdcore compresses these shared experiences into a single image, as if sealing an entire era inside a broken screen.
The point, then, is not that “the past was better.” The point is to ask why the past returns in this form. When a photo of an old residential compound hits us, what strikes us may not be the building itself, but the recognition that our relationship with that space has broken. We cannot naturally live there again; we cannot understand it with childhood eyes; we cannot completely discard it either. It becomes liminal: neither home nor foreign place, neither past nor present.
六、怪核作为一种地方记忆
王超关于阈限空间的研究里有一个很适合放在这里的思路：阈限空间美学包含“从记忆到地方”和“从地方到记忆”的双向运动。也就是说，不是先有一个客观空间，然后我们再给它加上情绪；也不是先有一段纯粹记忆，然后随便找个图像承载它。地方和记忆互相生成。我们因为空间而想起过去，又因为过去而重新看见空间。
中国式怪核正是这种“地方记忆”的互联网版本。它把现实中的地方打散、滤镜化、低清化、梦境化，再重新投放到屏幕上。于是，一个老小区不再只是老小区，它变成童年、发展、拆迁、夏天、家庭、县城、早期网络、代际情绪的交汇点。它越具体，越容易通向集体；越地方，越能成为一代人的共同入口。
这也是为什么怪核图像经常不需要复杂叙事。一个场景就够了。一个提示框就够了。一句“是否返回？”就够了。因为观众并不是在等待作者把故事讲完，观众是在用自己的生活经验补全那张图。怪核真正的作者，某种意义上不是制图者，而是观看者的记忆。
Chao Wang’s study of liminal-space aesthetics offers a useful idea here: liminal space involves a two-way movement from memory to place and from place to memory. In other words, there is not first an objective space to which we later add emotion, nor is there first a pure memory that can be attached to any image. Place and memory generate each other. We remember the past because of space, and we see space differently because of the past.
Chinese weirdcore is the internet version of this “memory of place.” It breaks real places apart, filters them, lowers their resolution, dreamifies them, and sends them back onto the screen. An old residential compound is no longer merely an old compound. It becomes an intersection of childhood, development, demolition, summer, family, county-town life, early internet culture, and generational emotion. The more specific it is, the more easily it becomes collective; the more local it is, the more powerfully it opens a shared entrance for a generation.
This is also why weirdcore images often do not need complex narrative. One scene is enough. One prompt box is enough. One sentence such as “Do you want to return?” is enough. The viewer is not waiting for the artist to finish the story. The viewer completes the image through lived experience. In this sense, the true author of weirdcore is not only the image-maker, but the viewer’s memory.
七、结语：我们为什么还要回头看？
中国式怪核最动人的地方，在于它没有把怀旧处理成柔软的糖水。它知道过去并不总是美好的，童年也不总是安全的。它让旧空间带着一点脏、一点廉价、一点粗糙、一点失真地回来。也正因为如此，它比精修过的复古更诚实。真正的记忆本来就不是高清的，它常常有噪点、断帧、错位和莫名其妙的情绪残留。
在高速发展的叙事里，空间总是被要求向前：更高、更亮、更快、更商业、更现代。但怪核偏偏让我们看那些被甩在后面的东西。它让楼道、旧电脑、摇摇车、破网页、县城街景重新发光，哪怕那光是病态的、过曝的、像坏屏幕一样闪烁。它提醒我们：发展改变的不只是城市外观，也改变了人和地方之间的情感接口。
所以，中国式怪核不是简单的网络怪图，也不是廉价的恐怖审美。它是一种关于代际记忆的视觉方言，一种把童年、城市化、早期互联网和潜意识揉在一起的图像写作。它问的问题并不复杂，却很难回答：当我们说自己怀念过去时，我们到底在怀念什么？是某个真实存在过的地方，还是那个还没有意识到会失去它的自己？
也许这就是为什么我们会反复点开那些模糊、怪异、空无一人的图像。我们不是想回到过去。我们只是想确认，那个过去确实曾经存在；而那个曾经站在旧楼道、旧屏幕、旧夏天里的自己，也不是幻觉。
The most moving quality of Chinese weirdcore is that it does not turn nostalgia into soft syrup. It knows that the past was not always beautiful, and childhood was not always safe. It allows old spaces to return with dirt, cheapness, roughness, and distortion. For that reason, it feels more honest than polished retro aesthetics. Real memory is never fully high-definition. It contains noise, missing frames, misalignment, and strange emotional residue.
In narratives of rapid development, space is always asked to move forward: taller, brighter, faster, more commercial, more modern. Weirdcore turns our eyes toward what has been left behind. It makes stairwells, old computers, kiddie rides, broken webpages, and county-town streets glow again, even if the glow is sickly, overexposed, and flickering like a damaged screen. It reminds us that development changes not only the appearance of cities, but also the emotional interface between people and places.
Chinese weirdcore, then, is not merely a collection of strange internet images, nor is it cheap horror aesthetics. It is a visual dialect of generational memory, a form of image-writing that blends childhood, urbanization, early internet culture, and the subconscious. Its question is simple but difficult to answer: when we say we miss the past, what exactly are we missing? A place that truly existed, or the version of ourselves that had not yet realized it would be lost?
Perhaps this is why we keep clicking on those blurry, strange, empty images. We do not necessarily want to return to the past. We only want to confirm that the past really existed, and that the self who once stood inside the old stairwell, the old screen, and the old summer was not an illusion.
参考脉络 / Reference Threads
- Backus Tao, “Liminal Space Art in China: Memory of Childhood and Trauma in Fast Development”, ENGCMP 200 coursework, Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute, 2024.
- Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”, originally published 1919.
- Chao Wang, “Uncanny Places: A Study of Liminal Space Aesthetics”, 2024.
- Haoxing Wu, “Lost items and exposed shame – dreamcore’s inheritance and transcendence of liminal space and defamiliarization”, 2022.
- Claudia Schnugg, “Spaces In-Between: Liminality”, 2019.
- Huang S. and Liu X., “Creating ‘dreams’: The practice of Chinese dream core from a technological nostalgia perspective”, 2024.
- Bilibili video case discussed in the coursework: “I Seem to Be Forever Trapped in That Summer”, 2023.
