Contenu de l'article

Titre The Yellow Leaves of a Building: Urban Exploration in China and the Cooling Plan Photography Project
Auteur Annabella Massey
Mir@bel Revue China perspectives
Numéro no 2021/4 Ruins, Rubble, and Abandoned Places in China: Exploring Ordinary Spaces
Rubrique / Thématique
Special Feature
Page 21-29
Résumé anglais Ruins and rubble have become a ubiquitous feature of the urbanising Chinese landscape. They have also become key motifs in Chinese visual culture, and artists have used the ruin image to critically comment on post-reform urban development. This article, however, seeks to bring an overlooked dimension of ruin representation to light: the creative culture of China's “urban explorers,” who infiltrate obsolete architecture for their own recreational purposes. It shows how the derelict spaces portrayed by the explorers' visual and textual accounts have a ludic potency of their own, with the urban ruin depicted as a site of embodied and aesthetic pleasure. The article ends by discussing the example of urban explorer Zhao Yang and his Cooling Plan photography project, which frames the ruin as a creative retreat from the pressures of the lived city.
Source : Éditeur (via OpenEdition Journals)
Article en ligne http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/12865