On a first visit to Suzhou, years ago, I was looking forward to seeing this city of historic canals and gardens. Arriving at night, I wasn’t prepared for the long approach to the CBD, down a boulevard lined with massive buildings, or the skyscrapers that dominated the skyline. I wasn’t prepared, but I should have been. The experience is roughly the same upon entering any big Chinese city – and Suzhou, with a population of 6.7 million, is bigger than Sydney.
The current show at the White Rabbit Gallery brings together works that engage with the mind-boggling urbanisation which has transformed life in China within two generations. The title, A Blueprint for Ruins, reveals the dark side of a boom the Chinese would like us to see as one of the country’s finest achievements.
The first work one encounters is a grim, grey painting by Zhou Dong, called Exist (2018-19). It features the concrete façade of a deserted building that was once a music school – a combination of artistic aspiration and material ugliness not unusual in China. In a statement, Zhou admits to feeling nostalgic about this concrete box, which has since been replaced by high-rise apartments. For him it will always recall those faint traces of music that fired his chlildhood imagination.
The show is steeped in nostalgia for a simpler world. In Illumination (2011) Bai Yiluo has collected 905 antique oil lamp stands, dating back to a time before electrification. They are relics of a slower kind of life that had not yet severed its ties with the past.
On the adjoining wall, Ouyang Chun has brought together 960 small sculptures, each cast in bronze from a clay model. This teeming installation, called Volcanic Ash (2013), imagines an archaeological dig in a post-apocalyptic era, poring over the many things that defined our daily lives. Anticipating the end of the world is the flip side of Zhou and Bai’s nostalgia for lost worlds. Both are symptoms of a deep unhappiness with the present day.
This melancholy feeling gives the lie to the forced postivity that has been the rule in modern China from the days of Mao to the present. Whatever happens, it’s all for the best. The government will look after you, like a stern but benevolent parent. Just remember, father is always right.
If impressive statistics are cause for celebration, one can only be wowed by China’s transformation from a largely rural country to a nation of city-dwellers. Today, roughly two-thirds of the Chinese population lives in cities. In 1976, when the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong, died, the percentage was 17.6. In a single generation, China matched the level of urbanisation achieved by the United States over the course of a century – a rate previously thought to be rapid. There are 113 cities in China that are home to more than a million people. The United States has ten such cities. Seventeen of these Chinese metropolises are “megacities”, with populations in excess of 10 million.
While this has been unfolding, an estimated 300 million people have been lifted out of poverty, which is perhaps the main reason the Chinese will tolerate hardships and restrictions that would have westerners marching in the streets. They remember how bad things used to be, and cling jealously to the progress that has been made.
This is not necessarily the case for a younger generation who have grown up during and after Deng Xiaoping’s era of reforms. These generations have never known a China without advertising or a free market, let alone a time when everyone wore the same drab outfits and waved the Little Red Book. This disconnection is dramatised in Chen Wei’s The Drunken Dance Hall (2015), a large installation that occupies most of the first floor. It’s a full-size model of a nightclub when the crowds have gone home – or perhaps never arrived. Concrete floors and walls are illuminated in lurid shades of pink and blue, empty bottles stand in corners. A few shiny disco balls have been lowered to the floor.
It’s one of those amazing presentations we’ve come to expect from White Rabbit, but in the service of a sad metaphor: the party’s over. We can interpret this as a comment on the human condition, or on the dispiriting atmosphere of a repressive political regime and an economy that has hit the wall.
Perhaps the greatest sign that the party is over is the spectacular failure of Evergrande, the Chinese property giant which was the most valuable real estate company in the world in 2018. After running up debts in the vicinity of US$300 billion, it was liquidated in January this year.
With the Chinese building boom, speed of construction has become more important than quality or longevity, with many high-rise apartment blocks displaying cracks as soon as they’re finished. The developers, the workers, and even the residents, have come to expect that a new 20-storey building will be knocked down and replaced by a 40 or 60-storey building within a decade. Why waste time and money on details?
This attitude is mocked in a typically oblique fashion by works such as He Chi’s Goodle (2019), an installation of hundreds of porcelain cups from the Ming and Qing dynasties that have accidentally bonded in the kiln, becoming dysfunctional. It’s an irony that these cups, which never served any useful purpose, have been buried and disinterred, and hundreds of years later, accepted as works of art. Many of the huge buildings erected in China over the past 25 years are destined to disappear without a trace.
A similar play with the monumental and the disposable, is to be found in Hu Quingyan’s immaculate marble sculptures of cardboard boxes and plastic crates. These things we throw away without a thought have been transformed into objets d’art worthy of a plinth in a museum. The painstaking, handmade precision is an essential factor. It wouldn’t be the same if these pieces were laser-cut in a factory.
In Zhou Jie’s CBD (2010), urbanisation is portrayed as an insidious virus, in a porcelain model of the Beijing CBD where every building is covered in organic growth, like fungus or coral. It’s another apocalyptic vision of nature reclaiming ground that has been covered in ugly, modern high-rise.
Nature may yet have her revenge on us all, and the Chinese will bear a heavy responsibility. As Thomas J. Campanella put it in his rivetting book on China’s urban revolution, The Concrete Dragon (2008), “China is trying to run a marathon at a sprinter’s pace,” and all that progress comes at a cost.
China is the world’s biggest polluter, allegedly approving two new coal-fired power plants every week. On the other hand, China is also the world’s biggest green economy, with investments in solar power and electric vehicles that leave the rest of the world far behind. How do they live with these two extremes? It’s all in the name of economic progress. When power is cheaper and more plentiful from renewable sources they’ll give up on coal. In the meantime, they need it like a revhead needs petrol, to keep racing at top speed. It may seem as if energy policy is pulling in two opposing directions, but all those years of Marxism has imbued capitalist-communist China with a genius for reconciling contradictions.
A Blueprint for Ruins
White Rabbit Gallery, 20 December 2023 – 12 May 2024
Published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 2 March, 2024