For those of you who happen to travel far east, you might want to see a double photo exhibition in Shanghai:

m97 Gallery Shanghai presents the work of Lu Jun and Sun Ji (*1981).

Especially interesting for the architectural point of view is the latter, Shanghai-based artist Sun Ji’s “Memory City”. Yet both artists comment on the urban developments in Shanghai/China more or less obviously.

m97 Gallery is one of the first galleries in Shanghai dedicated to exhibiting contemporary and fine art photography. They want to present ” the most interesting and innovative photography work in China, across all genres of the medium.”

Sun Ji, Memory City II, #2, 2008

Sun Ji, Memory City I, #2, 2005

“The works in Sun Ji’s “Memory City” are architectural collages that speak of urban transformation as destruction and displacement of the old must make way for the new; memories recreated that are both meant to be forgotten and remembered. In his first body of work “Memory City I”, Sun Ji uses his camera to create hyperrealist collages of industrial landscapes, factory facades, water towers, smoke stacks and abandoned buildings that result in works of striking scale and formality. Recreating impressions and memories from his childhood, the young Shanghainese artist began in 2005 by carefully assembling single portraits of buildings to create massive black and white compositions that surpass the physical limits of possibility but in the viewer’s imagination renders an almost plausible behemoth construction, alive yet forever a part of Shanghai’s history. In “Memory City II”, the smoke stacks and metal pipes are replaced by low-rise facades and elements of Shanghai’s lane life as the young artist’s focus shifts to the ubiquitous Shanghai urban landscape phenomenon of partially torn down residential buildings. The resulting compositions become dense, layered mountains of neighborhoods stacked one atop the other as if waiting to be leveled.” (Ouote m97 press release)

Sun Ji himself comments on his work as follows:

All these photos are about the familiar Shanghai in my memory. When I was still a child, these types of old factories and buildings were everywhere, alive and full of vigor. However, what I used to be so familiar with has literally disappeared in front of my eyes. Being ruthless is part of human nature and so is being nostalgic. While all kinds of old things are being destroyed boldly, we are irrepressibly reluctant to part with the past. I wonder whether architectural remains from past industrial times or whether life in the old lanes of Shanghai can be completely forgotten. But Memory City is about my personal memory of Shanghai, which is real yet also full of fantasy and becoming more faint by the day.  (read more…)

Lu Jun, China Real Estate Dream, No. 6, 2006

The other part of the exhibition is devoted to Lu Jun, whose large-scale photography works use the three fundamental elements of Chinese landscape painting – water, ink, and paper – combined with techniques of modern photography to create poetic landscapes that flow in both form and color. Thus he reinterprets the most iconic forms of traditional Chinese painting.

His earlier series “Chinese Real Estate Dream” (2006) is inspired by the real estate boom in Zhuhai (Guangdong Province) of the early 1990s:  lyrical, loose brush strokes lead the viewer’s eye downward through what appears to be an idyllic landscape. Yet upon closer examination we see that perched atop the splotches of ink resembling mountaintops sit photographs of suburban villas and modern office high-rises, a depiction of an ever rapidly urbanizing countryside.

The exhibition also presents some of his most recent works showing more abstract landscapes of ink, water, paper and photography.

Multiple City presents global urbanistic concepts since 1908 until 2008.

(Info cited from self-description, cf. link:) Megacities and shrinking cities, “highspeed urbanism” and “slow cities” – the global cities are changing. The difference between town and countryside dissolves, everthing becomes city in differend spatial and structural forms. New forms of cities, new urban landscapes, new global and local spatial networks emerge.

The exhibition opposes and combines historic and present urban concepts – illustrated by white and grey backgrounds of the presentation walls – and makes thus visible the complex developments of urbanism.  The shown scopes range from Modern Garden City Movement to postwar-”International Style” concepts to presentday “urban landscapes”, from the  “New Towns” of the 1960s to the new foundations in China and the VAE, and looks into the ideas of a mobile city, of a digital “telepolis”, and how consumerism leads to the idea of urban branding: city as trademark.

Today’s urban phenomenons are heterogenous: Multiple City.

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Multiple City – Stadtkonzepte 1908|2008
bis 01.03.2009

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