Have you been to the zone yet? As a fan of Andrei Tarkovsky, especially his occult 1979 Stalker, my answer is a definite YES. In fact, in the past decade, I have visited the zone metaphorically, conceptually, and even physically. For Tarkovsky and his fans, of course, the zone is allegorical. However, in a more concrete sense, some of my recent published essays are also about the idea of the zone as a heterotopic
In the latest issue of Radical History Review that focuses on Photography and Work, my extended photo-essay, “Portable and Precarious: Life and Spectacle in China’s Construction Camps,” explores the relations betwen mobile cinema and the portable life of migrant workers inside China’s construction compounds. “[W]hereas shipping containers are transported between seaports and other logistic centers that are mostly devoid of humans, dormitory containers are packed with migrant bodies to be
Once the pride of the East German state, the steel plant in Eisenhüttenstadt has been downsized and privatized. The former East Germany city Eisenhüttenstadt (Ironworks City)–also known as Stalinstadt (Stalin City) prior to the de-Stalinization movement in the early 1960s–was designed to be one of the socialist model cities in the Eastern Bloc. The end of East Germany, however, has unexpectedly turned the city into another kind of model, one that could
In Taiwan, the flourishing of community temples and gods since the 1980s has been inseparable from the island’s rapid economic growth and political transformation. Today, such diverse religious cultures continue to play a crucial role for Taiwanese to negotiate their ever-evolving landscapes of cultural anxieties, geopolitical tension, and economic precarity. Seen here is a temporary altar with mechanicalized gods in an annual temple fair next to a new biotech park
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