Through this week's materials, the MCA's Urban China: Informal Cities, the MoCP's Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai and Its Contemporary Material Culture, excerpts from Contemporary Chinese Art, and three short video clips, two on Tiananmen Square and one on China's Ghost Cities and Malls, an issues arises regarding the clash between the government's ideals and the people's needs.
Though I'm sure Tiananmen Square is not an unknown event to most people, it is important that we are still able to take a step back and understand how and why these events happened as they did. This is crucial especially today because of the current turmoil in Egypt and Lybia. Though China is attempting to portray itself as a thriving, exponentially growing economy and country, this must not be accepted at surface level. Perhaps the best example of this would to look at the Australian Dateline clip China's Ghost Cities and Malls. China is building city after city, huge metropolises set to house twelve million people or more, and they don't appear to be stopping anytime soon. These massive cities that are being constructed would seem to prove that China's economy and market are thriving more than anyone could imagine. However, upon closer look, one can see that these cities are empty. In some of these huge centers, over 70% remains unoccupied and newly built giant malls only house a small handful of shops that are somehow still in business. The high rise residential buildings are at maybe 25% capacity, but most buildings remain devoid of life; yet China keeps building. So how is it that this is possible? The government controls where and how funds are spent and they are set up to spend a certain amount per year. The easiest way to spend this money? Build. Build a lot. However, these structures, specifically the residential ones, are basically built for failure. The prices that they are set at are not even within a dream's reach for millions of people living in China. Not only can nobody afford to move into these luxurious places, but the land that these buildings are constructed upon used to be where small neighborhoods sat. Though we can sort of see this happening in the US, even in Chicago (as gentrification...sort of. Well, Cabrini Green may be a good example, as a Target is set to go up in its place. Or New Orleans, where people were moved out because of the hurricane, and houses in low income places were torn down even though there was no damage to them), it is happening nowhere near as fast as in China. The urbanization in China seems almost instantaneous: a neighborhood is torn down, luxury high rises are put up. One real estate agent from the Ghost Cities clip even said that the people in the torn down neighborhoods would then just live in the new buildings. Pipe dream? You bet.
Though China seems to still be contained within its booming financial bubble, it will eventually pop. At this time, millions will have been displaced from their homes, expected to find some other place to live, and the government will more than likely be seen as the main player in this displacement. Unfortunately, the government's control and the people's desire for liberalization and political change was what spurred the Tiananmen Square protests, and history tends to repeat itself.
The MCA's "brochure" on Urban China: Informal Cities gave a bit more detail as to how a lot of this urbanization started (although the translation was horrible and made it quite frustrating to read). In the 1970s there was not any funding left for further education for many students in the cities. So, students began to move to the rural areas. This movement out of the cities is known as rural urbanization. As small rural towns became larger rural towns, these larger rural towns then became small cities, which became large cities. These large cities had no relation to their original small rural villages.
This process of displacing those that originally lived in the area (gentrification still doesn't seem like the perfect word, but for lack of a better one, I'll use it), naturally spurred artists to make art about this process. Xu Xixian had photographed Shanghai in different places, and, 20 years later, went back with his son, Xu Jianrong, and rephotographed the same locations to show just how much had changed with urbanization and modernization of the Chinese metropolis. Zhan Wang would go to the sites of mostly demolished buildings and fix up some pieces that were left standing. At one site, there was a red pillar and a partial white doorway. He brushed off both and repainted them, then cleaned up some tiles and brushed away the dirt and dust. He came back later and it was all demolished.
The one project that fascinated me the most was by Chen Shaoxiong. Understanding photography in its most basic purpose, to document things, Chen set out to photograph every detail of the streets of Guangzhou. He photographed rubbish bins, stop signs, people, trees, cars, sidewalks...everything. He would then print these things to scale in a miniature version of the street (so that everything in the miniature version is to scale with everything else in the miniature version, even compensating for distance within the "frame" of this model), and place them on a flat board in a recreation of the street. In doing this, he believes that he is encompassing something beyond photography. Whereas photography can only include a singular moment in time, and only does so within a specified frame, these collages are pieces of these brief moments, but merged into one scene. So that The woman with the buckets and the street vendor can exist in the same moment in the collage where they could not in the street. In essence, it is a still version of a moving picture, but not a photograph.
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| Chen Shaoxiong |
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| Chen Shaoxiong |
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