The sediments of generations

 

Started in 2006 “Skin” is the ongoing research project of Xie Jiankun on the surphace of the city as a metaphor on the condition of urbanism. Hereby some of the thoughts that the chinese photographer shared with us. He starts with a quote of Thomas Struth: «In every city, specific individuals are responsible for what has been built, but more generally, the unconscious of the community has developed the culture in these places and it is something that you can see in every city, every day».

Urbanism is a historical stratification. “Each generation adds layers on it. People work and live within duplicated spaces, the same houses, the same apartment buildings and offices. Walking on the street, accessing the building, shopping, traveling, people live in a restricted world.” Furthermore, “the world has had many revolutions and democratic transformations. It’s a progress that people have strive for – the liberation of democracy and the freedom of life. The source of these changes is from city”. Regarding this, Jiankun has faced with interest the rise of some Asian countries: “China, for example, is untamedly overriding the world like a burning comet. I didn’t need too much imagination to see the relationship between the ideology and the visualization when I went traveling in Shanghai a year ago. About 1,000 skyscrapers have been built over the past few years in Shanghai. Pudong, the new district of south-eastern Shanghai, was planned and developed on a 522.75 km2 farmland only 17 years ago.” And he continues, “City is the furnace to melt and sublime the civilization. The urban civilization not only carries substantial modernization, but also contains complicated social structure and realistic problems. It thus gave photography abundant subject matters to put a good use. Furthermore, the complexity of urbanism presents itself more theatrically and grotesquely than other modes of living through its intensity. This complex realism required not only the documentary form of photographic record, but also the dimensional representation responded to by the photographer.” And he concludes: “When I look deeper inside, people used to talk and understand the transition of China, in this case, they have sometimes ignored the eternal unchangeable truth that would not be transformed by the substantial change of the city. These are the sediments added by generations and generations through the entire social and culture life of human beings.”

 

 

Photo:

© Courtesy of Xie Jiankun

www.xiejiankun.com

(click on the image at right for more pictures)