Contenu du sommaire : Ruins, Rubble, and Abandoned Places in China: Exploring Ordinary Spaces

This article offers a self-reflexive critique of ruins as method by examining side-by-side the production, circulation, and meaning-making processes around the ruin photography of ghost cities in China and the author's own production of a fieldwork archive of the same photographed spaces. The ruin is commonly understood in recent scholarship to be a deeply ideological artefact with meanings contingent on class-inflected practices of ruin appreciation. In a similar vein, photography of urban ruins has been heavily criticised for allegedly aestheticising social ruin and economic decline. The critique of ruin photography as a practice of ideological claim-making or as a form of critical engagement merits scrutiny in light of this issue's field research practices looking at ruins in China. More specifically, photography is a standard part of fieldwork, including the author's. The aim of this article, then, is to ask how and why photographs of urban ruins in China differ across image-making practices? How are fieldwork photos of ruins, the kinds of photos that generate a data archive and are used in scholarly publications, resonant with other ideological claim-making purposes of ruin photography? How might we account for the political valences of image aesthetics when photographs are a vital part of scholarly efforts?

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.

Drawing from two ethnographic studies of children, one in a former industrial neighbourhood in the process of demolition in Shanghai, and the other in a rural town in Guangdong, this article explores the relationships children form with the landscape of ruins as they wander about with the aim of identifying the opportunities these offer in terms of games, freedom, and sharing, etc. The article analyses two different dynamics in the types of ruins and the experiences associated with them: concentration and dispersion. The structural geography and qualitative demography that emerge from this are barely mentioned in Chinese public debate, in its categories (children of “migrant workers” or “left-behind” children), its problems, and its very negative representations, but whilst they underline the unequal divisions in society, they also reveal a richness of experience that is far from being necessarily unhappy.

Far from dense Chinese cities that experience fast demolition, ruination in Kouquan, a coal town in Datong, is a slower process that generates new practices and meanings. Uninhabited industrial spaces continue to produce a sense of place where large industrial corporations no longer operate and where most residents have moved away. This article brings out new perspectives on the effects of ruination in an industrial area by moving away from the lenses of the work unit, demolition, heritagisation, or decline. Based on direct observation, informal discussions with local residents from 2016 to 2019, and an online review, this article shows that ruination produces spatialised narratives and practices closely entwined with the local population's experiences, as well as with other actors' direct and indirect interactions with places: these actors reconnect to the uninhabited town through dwellings, artistic production, religious practices, or simply through their visits to Kouquan, becoming urban explorers themselves. Ruination leads remaining residents, former locals, visitors, government actors, journalists, and artists to the production of new representations of the uninhabited town.

This article evaluates the possibilities of individual agency in the case of a group of workers employed by a large garment factory in Zhejiang Province. The issue of workers' ability to exercise power is tested by two sets of facts: workers' job histories and workers' household expenses. The author argues that workers' agency is largely dependent upon gender, age, place of origin, and living arrangements. Workers' main power is the possibility to quit a job. The overall conclusion is that agency remains limited by the precariousness of workers' lives from a lifelong perspective.

During the most robust years of his career, 1949 to 1964, the artist Shi Lu 石魯 (1919-1982) frequently painted young rural women. The appearance of peasant women in the art of the early Maoist period ostensibly demonstrates the suitability of the subject for visualising state policies that promoted social transformation and women's liberation. While participating in these nation-building efforts, Shi Lu's images of peasant women were also a product of global art historical influences, namely allegorical depictions, that manifested subtle influence on the development of twentieth-century Chinese art. The identity of the artist, a Yan'an cadre who provided creative and administrative support to the official art system, reveals how artists navigated political expectations as state functionaries while simultaneously defining them through artistic exploration. Through the case study of Shi Lu and the hybridised global artistic traditions that gave rise to the subject of young peasant women in Maoist China, this article reveals the porousness of an era that has been considered isolated from global currents outside of the Soviet sphere.