Absurdity, Allegory and China

My silence lately has everything to do with my personal project of the past seven months. I have been wandering around the east Third Ring Road photographing the CCTV construction project and the adjoining neighborhoods. Though my reasons for doing this are various, I seem to understand the underlying motivations more so than I did when I first began, quite by chance, taking photos of this site on the morning of December 4, 2007.

In that time I have taken, literally, several thousand photographs, using the rising buildings of this project as both subject of and striking backdrop to this small part of the city in the process of such dramatic transformation. That this particular area is mightily punctuated by the overarching presence of the CCTV Headquarters Building makes it more an exclamation than a simple declarative undertaking.

One of the places where I have spent a bit of time is the Hu Jia Lou residential districts to the east and north of the project, areas which I imagine will eventually be swallowed up by the Central Business District (CBD). Some of it has already disappeared and some of it is very much in the process. As of last week Hu Jia Lou Xi Li, the area immediately north of the TVCC still had 19 of the original 400 households refusing to move. Services have been cut off and what was once a lively inner city neighborhood is now a transient squat. Without utilities it is not the most pleasant place to be on a warm, breezeless day. But that was a week ago, and the speed at which visible landscapes can change here, those 19 households could already be gone. This has become a common story, one neither exclusive to Beijing nor the 21st century, though I imagine that this spate of urbanization is being conducted at a pace which I imagine is unmatched in any peace-time records. Though it has all happened before and will continue to happen - into what seems, at times, can only lead to the post-apocalyptic - it is still not easy to watch as families, neighborhoods and their recent histories are splintered and displaced to the anonymous concrete fringes, lost to the footnotes and the photographs.

This obsession of mine has seemed to have gotten some notice. A few weeks ago the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine (CAPA), Paris, contacted me to use 120 of my photos of the CCTV Headquarters project in their upcoming exhibit “Dans la ville chinoise,” which includes an exhibition on Chinese contemporary emerging architecture. The show runs from June 18 to September 19, 2008.

Shameless toot, I know, but there you go.