This photo-based project was made during the post-Covid period between 2020 and 2021. I traveled along the East coast line of China and mainly focused on the cities in the south, such as Shanghai, Taizhou, Shenzhen, etc. This area had experienced the outbreak of the market-oriented economy for 30 years followed by the Reform and Opening-up policy, in which the economical profits allowed the reformation of modernization to begin in these cities. Today, the process of modernization not only applies changes to the Chinese social environment but also raises questions that reveal the intertwining relationship between the new modernized China and the reemphasized, yet, faint traditional culture based China. Moreover, the process of Chinese modernization rebuilds a new order and relationship between human and nature in a mild but somehow invasive way. In the past five years, I frequently travelled back and forth between China and the U.S. I started to notice the modernization process of China, such as the new urban planning, removal of old buildings and massive constructions of repetitively designed rectangular-shape apartments, thousands of similar newly built community parks and public green areas, and the release of legal restrictions aimed to heavily polluted industries and advocation of environmental friendly activities. The question is whether the image of modernized China along these modernizing phenomena draws a hard line between the “new modernity” and “detached tradition” (or “past”). This project attempts to unfold the evidence of the cultural relics, which blended with the modernized China, through photographs, which were taken in the status of “now”. The concrete construction of historical evidence might be faint, but what remains on the land still contains the spirit as part of the ancient memory.
See more of the this artist's work: yipanyi.com
