urban | Investigations and Research from My China Days

Shanghai Awakes: White+ on The Bund

Apr 19, 2012 | Music, Urban

This is a bit of an oddity. I would go so far as to call it an accidental music video. Last September I ended up on The Bund at dawn in Shanghai. This should happen at least once in your lifetime. Ostensibly I was there to photograph a performance by the talented and capable Olek, whose crocheted work I first encountered in New York City this past summer. After she failed to initiate a crocheting enterprise, thanks to the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, I stuck around and watched the sun rise in all its glory over the imposing Pudong skyline. Slowly but surely the entire city awoke around me. My favorite part are the old guys walking backwards for exercise. I find their physicality a strangely fitting metaphor for the urban development occurring around them. It was a beautiful sight. I mashed up the video from that morning with a live performance of White+ recorded at the now defunct D-22. Check out the results below.

An Empty Chinese Metropolis in Conde Nast Traveler

Mar 13, 2012 | Architecture, Clippings

One of my photographs from the amazingly ridiculous Kangbashi district in Ordos was featured in Conde Nast Traveler this past month. The building shown is the Ordos Museum designed by MAD architects, one of the preeminent Chinese architecture firms founded by Ma Yansong who previously toiled as a project designer for Zaha Hadid Architects. The building itself remains a wonder to behold as its irregular shape clashes with the geometrical grid that binds the rest of the newfangled district. Whether or not it will see any use is the real question now that it finally opened. The municipal government can barely get people to stay put in the Kangbashi residential developments, let alone consistently fill up over 40,000 square meters of exhibition space. The flagship cultural center of Ordos will probably accumulate more sand from the Gobi desert than actual visitors. Anyway, I will be featuring more photographs of MAD buildings in the near future thanks to my first assignment with The New York Times Magazine. In the meantime, you can check out some extra photographs I took of the unfinished interior.

Domus Mixtapes: The Sound of Beijing

Dec 15, 2011 | Music

I just completed a Domus Mixtape for Beijing. You can hear it over at Domus or on SoundCloud. I drew exclusively from Maybe Mars and Modern Sky for the music as well as a live recording of Zhang Shouwang/张守望 of White+ and Carsick Cars fame. There is a lot more music out there in China, of course, but this is definitely some of my favorite material. Sort of the soundtrack to my life over the past four years. Below is the accompanying text, track list and some portraits of the performers included on the mixtape from Sound Kapital:

The hardest part of the day in Beijing is getting out of bed. Gazing across a smoggy skyline and watching the hectic traffic below is reason enough to hide under the covers for a few more hours. It is a dystopia – maybe even a nightmare. That is why I embrace the night. The sky remains a muted black, and I can seek out sparks of life in the darker recesses of the city. Beijing’s mutating urban landscape can only be matched by its shifting artistic climate, especially in the realm of sound. Desperation breeds discontent, and voices are emerging to express it. Every weekend features full billings at a growing number of performance spaces across Beijing: dive bars near the universities, small coffee houses hidden amongst the hutongs, larger concert halls in defunct government buildings, or experimental enclaves adjoining fish farms on the outer edges of the city. Beijing’s erratic social landscape is now molded by the Internet and mobile phones instead of more closely controlled media channels such as television and radio. Those with idiosyncratic tastes readily connect with each other and access an exponentially broader realm of music from both home and abroad as they continue to pick apart the past fifty years of western pop, rock, jazz, punk, electronic, and experimental music with increased vigor. The performers on this mixtape constitute a formidable new wave of artists striving to expand their creative limits in an autonomous and compelling fashion. Even though it is too early to tell what may come of the innovative strides made by these musicians, there is no doubt that they will continue to break ground within Beijing’s nascent artistic landscape, helping to push the boundaries of an already expanding realm of independent thought and musical expression in China. In the end the city resists description. Outside the smoke-choked bars everything is layered in a fine coat of dust. Whole neighborhoods disappear and find their way deep into your lungs. That’s the problem. The city gets inside you – fills you to the brim – consumed by a monstrous flow of people and infrastructure. It’s savage but enticing. Six million people flocked here over the past ten years and half a million are expected each year for the foreseeable future. The implosion is just beginning. The nebulous heart of the middle kingdom skips along to ever irregular beats.

Tracks:

01. My Great Location – Rebuilding the Rights of Statues/重塑雕像的权利

02. Some Surprises Come Too Soon – P.K. 14

03. No. 6 Space Ship – AV Okubo/AV大久保

04. Sand Hammer – Hedgehog/刺猬

05. Sunday Girl – Ourself Beside Me

06. Flu – Snapline

07. You Can Listen You Can Talk – Carsick Cars

08. Golden Gate – Duck Fight Goose/鸭打鹅乐队

09. This Side Down – The Offset Spectacle/憬观：像同叠

10. To Die – Soviet Pop/苏维埃·波普

11. The Earthquake – 24 Hour/24小时

12. Hospital – Guai Li/怪力

13. Beijing is Not My Home – Demerit/过失

14. Intro/Outro/Transitions – Zhang Shouwang/张守望 live at D-22 on November 22, 2011

Thames Town: A Quaint Corner of Shanghai

Oct 7, 2011 | Counterfeit Paradises, Development, Society

This place is well documented, but fits into my Counterfeit Paradises series as Shanghai remains one of the fastest growing cities on the planet. In order to keep up with demand, the municipal government must supply housing for up to 400,000 new residents every year. In an effort to provide a bit of flash and diversity to the monotony of Chinese urban sprawl, developers broke ground on Songjiang New City which included nine satellite villages utilizing design elements from various European countries. Thames Town, modeled after quaint English hamlets, was the centerpiece and eventually the largest debacle after failing to attract permanent residents. The English-themed restaurants and stores remain shuttered while the streets only see the passing of young couples posing for wedding photographs. Far from the hustle and bustle of downtown Shanghai, the Thames Town Church seems poised to continue without a congregation for the foreseeable future.

The Ordos Real Estate Bubble: An Empty Chinese Metropolis

Sep 3, 2011 | Architecture, Counterfeit Paradises, Development

The arid landscape around Ordos was never a forgiving place. Its remoteness and lack of ground water always kept growth in check. Now the Inner Mongolian mining center produces a third of China’s coal and the municipal government decided to use the extra revenues to literally build an entire new city. Located 25 kilometers west of the old town, the Kangbashi/康巴什 new district sports a museum, opera house, library, cultural center, sculpture parks, malls and endless rows of megablock housing. Designed to accomodate a population upwards to a million people, only 30,000 have decided to make the move into the newfangled developments. For now the strange new city that popped out of the sands remains largely deserted. Only a handful of locals walk amidst the abstract shapes and glass-covered malls of Kangbashi. It is one of many locations in China that point to a real estate bubble just waiting to pop.

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