Old Walls, New Surveillance, and Global Anxieties
The ruins of this advanced warning radar station make us think of another Cold War ruins seven thousand kilometers away… >>> READ MORE >>>
A Dialogue between Landscapes
Today is the last day of my exhibition at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, one of Berlin’s state museums. This five month exhibition has been an innovative and experimential project in that my photographs of China’s post-socialist urban transformation are in dialogue with several traditional-style Chinese landscape paintings from the 1960s. Among other things, the exhibition shows contrasting landscapes, media forms, early/postsocialist modernity, and utopian/dystopian visions. Here are the links
When Art Meets Scholarship in the Age of Digital Production
In a recent interview with Dissertation Reviews, I chat about my various visual art ventures and how they interact with my scholarship… >>> READ MORE >>>
Debris of Fake History
Here are some images about the manufacturing of military spectacle ahead of China’s V-Day military parade. Hidden in the mountains of Hebei is this defunct PLA military base that has recently been turned into movie props for an anti-Japanese propaganda film. The site, which contains fake war ruins as well as real military ruins, is now a post-production ruin.
Berlin to Beijing and Back Again
Near the northeastern edge of Berlin, in what was once part of East Germany (aka the German Democratic Republic or GDR), is a place called Mörderberg (Killer Mountain), which contains a cluster of derelict buildings. Abandoned since the 1990s, they were once the barracks of the GDR’s Volkspolizei-Bereitschaft (People’s Police on Standby), which was under the command of that now-extinct country’s fearful Interior Ministry. During the final weeks of the