Zeng Li's Archeology of Modern China

Zeng Li's Archeology of Modern China
by Christopher Phillips
http://www.shanghaigalleryofart.com/en/artists_detail.asp?id=48
During the past five years, regular visitors to contemporary art group exhibitions in China have often encountered groups of large color photographs showing the facades of apparently unremarkable Beijing apartment buildings. Compared to the exuberant paintings, installations, and video works around them, these sober, factual photographs typically stand apart because of their unassuming presentation and everyday subject matter. Although credited to "Zeng Li," few visitors would think to associate them with the celebrated Beijing stage designer of the same name, whose innovative decors for the People's Art Theater and collaborations with Zhang Yimou have won world-wide recognition. I was surprised to learn, not long ago, that the stage designer and the photographer are indeed the same person. And I was astonished to discover, when I paid my first visit to Zeng Li in Beijing, that the photographs I had seen in exhibitions were only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, during the past 10 years, Zeng Li has made thousands of photographs that portray the destruction of Beijing’s hutong dwellings, the changes in residential architecture of the past five decades, the wholesale reconstruction of China’s urban centers, and the traces of China’s industrial heritage. These photographs provide a meticulous record of the changes that have taken place in the everyday urban fabric of Beijing and other cities, as the hutong lanes, the standardized apartment buildings, and the sprawling factories of the recent past have given way to soaring residential towers and glittering shopping malls. When Zeng Li speaks of desire to create a lasting visual record of an urban environment that is rapidly disappearing, it is possible to glimpse an unexpected but authentic passion. Born in 1961, Zeng Li grew up in Liuzhou, in Guangxi province in China's far south. He remembers it as a place notable for the nearby mountains and also for the newly built factories situated in the region. His family lived on the outskirts of the city, in residential quarters belonging to a chemical factory. Zeng Li stayed in Liuzhou until he finished high school and left to attend the Central Drama Institute in Beijing, where he studied stage design. Since graduating in 1987, he has been associated with the Beijing People's Art Theater, earning acclaim as one of China’s leadng stage and costume designers. He attracted wide international attention in 1997 with his stage design for Zhang Yimou's production of "Turnadot" in Florence and then Beijing, and he collaborated again with the celebrated film director on a ballet version of "Raise the Red Lantern" in 2001. Because China’s creative community is unusually close-knit, Zeng Li has also been involved in projects with the leading artists and architects of his generation. He participated, for example, in the "Bunker" group exhibition that the artist Cai Guo Qiang organized in 2004 in a complex of former Taiwanese military bunkers on Kinmen (Quemoy) island. Zeng Li’s contribution, "Fight Theater," was a performance by 20 members of the Peking Opera. On a stage in front of a map of China and Taiwan, they carried out an ironic remix of battle scenes from historic Peking Opera productions. The visual richness of Zeng Li's stage design does not prepare you for the austerity and the quiet reserve of his photographs, which reveal a very different side of his artistic temperament. It was around 1997, he recalls, that he realized that photography could be used to register the dramatic changes that were sweeping through Beijing’s historic neighborhoods as a result of the capital’s ongoing modernization campaign. At that time, he kept a painting studio some distance northwest of central Beijing, in the part of Changping district where the Ming Tombs lie in a tranquil, orchard-filled valley cradled by the Tianshou mountains. His visits to that site, where 13 of the 16 Ming emperors were buried between 1409 and 1644, sparked his historical curiosity. At that time, he recalls, only one of the tombs had been restored, and the remainder lay mostly in ruins. When the Beijing municipal government announced a plan to restore all of the tombs and to develop the area as an international tourist attraction, Zeng Li felt that he should photograph the area before it was "destroyed" by renovation. He purchased a professional camera and made some of his first photographs there; the area has remained one of his long-term photographic subjects. Traveling regularly by bus and bicycle back and forth to his studio, Zeng Li says, he could not help but observe the accelerating pace with which many of Beijing's traditional residential neighborhoods were disappearing. Gradually he began to imagine the creation of a systematic photographic record of the old sections of Beijing that were slated for destruction. This urge became even more pressing in 2001, when Beijing was chosen to host the 2008 Olympics. Zeng Li realized that many of the historic yet badly dilapidated areas of the old city would almost certainly be demolished by the municipal government, in an effort to spruce up the city’s image for the benefit of foreign visitors and the world media. The debate over urban renewal in the central districts of the capital was hardly new. Ever since the founding the People’s Republic in 1949, Beijing has witnessed a continuing struggle between the forces of urban renovation and those of preservation. In 1949, the four central districts of Beijing’s old city were filled mainly by one-story residential buildings--mostly courtyard-style houses arrayed along the narrow lanes of densely packed neighborhoods called hutongs. As the population of Beijing grew, some hutongs were torn down and replaced with new, low-rise, six-story housing. Nevertheless, until the late 1980s the main official response to the challenge of Beijing’s swelling population was to build new, standardized residential complexes on the city’s peripheries. In the long run, however, this strategy did little to protect the hutongs. Because housing maintenance was given such a low priority by the municipal government, Beijing's courtyard dwellings gradually deteriorated to a dangerous degree. By the end of the 1980s, Beijing's hutongs had won a reputation as crumbling, unhealthy quarters, and city officials increasingly described them as a blight on the reputation of the nation’s capital. In 1990, the Beijing municipal government embarked on a program of sweeping changes in the central city, adopting an ambitious master plan that aimed at the renovation of 8.2 million square meters of courtyard housing occupied by 400,000 households. The actual situation of the hutongs could, of course, be interpreted quite differently depending on one's vantage point. To city officials, they appeared as embarrassing relics of an earlier, almost feudal age, that were wholly unsuited for the capital of a powerful modern China. Such observers could see only dilapidated buildings afflicted with crumbling walls, rotting columns, leaky roofs, poor drainage, primitive toilet facilities, inadequate heat and ventilation, and lack of sunlight. Combined with the desperate overcrowding of the courtyard dwellings, where three generations of a family might share a single room, these conditions led many of Beijing’s planners to conclude that the hutongs were a national disgrace, and worthy only of destruction. For the residents of the hutongs, however, these obvious disadvantages were to a large degree offset by the lively and intimate lifestyle that these areas afforded. Thanks to their narrow lanes, originally designed to offer protection from Beijing’s notorious dust storms, hutongs were hospitable to pedestrian traffic but not easily accessible to automobiles. The very crowdedness of the courtyard dwellings encouraged a vital, constantly flowing street life. While living conditions were difficult, these neighborhoods were hardly slums; the hutong social structure was remarkably stable, most residents were employed, and public services were readily available. Most crucially, families that had lived for generations in the same hutong inevitably developed a network of close, nuanced relationships with neighboring families. The real appeal of hutong life was this extraordinarily intimate human texture, a quality impossible to re-create in the standardized apartment buildings that were Beijing's only residential alternative. The announced goal of the Beijing “housing renewal” of the 1990s was to improve the quality of life of hutong dwellers. As it was implemented by the new private real-estate developers who came to dominate Beijing’s urban-renewal process, however, renovation often amounted to the permanent relocation of hutong dwellers, who bitterly realized that they could not afford the market-rate rents that would be introduced following rehabilitation projects. As Zeng Li's interest in making a visual record of the hutongs became known, he would often receive phone calls from hutong residents or from members of preservation groups alerting him that bulldozers had been summoned to knock down a certain area. He would hurry there with his large-format camera; some of his pictures show the demolition already in progress. Most of the hutong dwellers that he encountered while photographing encouraged his project, because they realized that buildings like theirs were rapidly disappearing all over Beijing. Yet other people, Zeng Li recalls, would stop and brusquely ask him, “Why are you making these pictures? There is nothing beautiful here.” By 2000, there were increasing of photographers recording the destruction of Beijing’s hutongs. Zeng Li stands apart as one of the few photographers to expand the scope of his project beyond the hutongs, to encompass the story of the wider changes that had taken place in the housing of the capital’s inhabitants since the 1960s. He began systematically to photograph the different types of residential buildings that characterized succeeding decades. These included examples of the spartan six-story walk-up buildings of the 1960s and ‘70s, a period when the nation had scant resources to devote to housing; the 12-story midrise buildings of the 1980s, which began to appear after the state decided to allow market forces to play a role in developing the housing sector; and the soaring, ornately decorated luxury towers that began to dominate Beijing's skyline during the economic boom of the 1990s. It is characteristic of Zeng Li’s approach that he did not set out to highlight the most architecturally important or innovative buildings, but to create a visual archive of the residential structures that were the most typical of their kind. His photographs usually employ a straight-on viewpoint and avoid unusual camera angles or dramatic compositions. They did not initially elicit great enthusiasm from Beijing’s artists, who were busy exploring more theatrical and conceptual approaches to photography. Instead Zeng Li found his most appreciative audience among Chinese architects, who quickly realized that his photographs cast a revealing light on a part of China’s everyday built environment that had largely escaped serious attention. Zeng Li’s visual revelation of the unheralded yet ubiquitous buildings in which millions spent lived their lives amounted to an alternative history of the recent course of architecture in China. Another facet of Zeng Li’s fascination with Beijing’s architectural environment can be found in his series of photographs of industrial chimneys and smokestacks. He regards these as compelling symbols of China’s determination, in the 1950s and ‘60s, to achieve industrial self-sufficiency as rapidly as possible. This goal prompted the construction of factories large and small throughout the country--even in Beijing, the nation’s capital. While a few of the smokestacks in Zeng Li's photographs belong to factories that are still in operation, most now serve only to mark sites where working factories once stood. As such they are monumental reminders of China’s historic shift from an agricultural to an industrial society. Just as the small factories that once dotted Beijing are now disappearing because of environmental concerns, so the giant iron and steel factories that arose during the same era are now being closed or relocated. Among Zeng Li’s most memorable photographs are those made on the grounds of the Shougang Iron and Steel Company, which once occupied the leading ranks of China’s state enterprises. Founded in 1919 in what were then the western suburbs of Beijing, the company grew rapidly after 1949 to become one of China’s largest and most famous steel-producing establishments, employing more than 100,000 workers. Recently, as a result of Beijing’s growing alarm about the enormous pollution created by Shougang’s operations, it has been decided that the company’s steel-making facilities, which lie only 18 kilometers from Tiananmen Square, will be completely relocated to Hebei province by 2010. There have even been recent official discussions of turning the vast, 2-million-square-meter Shougang complex into an art district similar to the 798 Factory in Beijing's Dashanzi section. For Zeng Li, the conviction that such industrial enterprises form a vital part of modern China’s history eventually led him to travel to Guizhou province, in the country’s southwest, to photograph the sprawling Shuicheng Iron and Steel Works. Prior to 1949, there was virtually no industry in this mountainous region, which despite its natural resources was one of China’s poorest provinces. With the advent of the People’s Republic and the strategic decision to locate new industrial facilities deep in the country’s interior, the central government provided financing for the establishment of coal mines, chemical plants, and metallurgical plants, as well as a railway meant to connect Guizhou to its neighboring provinces. By 1960, the first regional iron and steel facility opened in Guizhou’s capital, Guiyang. The metal works that was subsequently was built in Shuicheng was one of the country’s largest steel facilities to be constructed entirely with Chinese resources, without the foreign assistance that had been common before the Sino-Soviet rift of the early 1960. The Shuicheng factory remains active today despite pollution concerns. Zeng Li relates that he was able to obtain permission to photograph there with the help of the editors at the Workers Publishing House in Beijing. He told them of his keen desire to photograph China’s historic factories, and they wrote letters on his behalf to the local authorities. Zeng Li wryly relates that even though the editors realized that he would work in his usual non-dramatic photographic style, they may have secretly hoped that he would accidentally make some beautiful pictures that could be of use to their publishing house. Overall, Zeng Li’s photographs of depopulated industrial zones, abandoned factory buildings, and shut-down blast furnaces suggest his fascination with the aftermath of the China’s epic rise to the status of industrial superpower in the course of a short half century. He shares this fascination with the filmmaker Wang Bing, whose monumental nine-hour documentary West of the Tracks (2003) explores the present-day ruins of the vast industrial complex in Shenyang, in the northeastern province of Liaoning. It is important to realize that both the photographer and the filmmaker are portraying local examples of a process that is occurring not only in China but world-wide: the decline of the labor-intensive resource-depleting industrial system that originated in the 19th century in Europe and the U.S. and then spread to the rest of the world. Today this system is under pressure everywhere, as we enter a new age of high-tech, computer-guided production and global markets. Examples of this historic process can be found in the decaying factories of the “rustbelt” in the U.S. northeast; in Russia, where the once-powerful Soviet steel industry has almost entirely withered away; and in the Ruhr Valley of Germany, once the steel-producing capital of Europe. Seen in this light, Zeng Li’s photographic project seems remarkably close in spirit to that of the German husband-and-wife team Bernd and Hilla Becher. Since the late 1950s, the Bechers have created a remarkable visual record of the vanishing traces of Europe’s former industrial culture. In their precise, objective, and purposely “non-artistic” photographs, we see an amazing array of blast furnaces, cooling towers, lime kilns, mine heads, grain elevators, and workers’ houses--all part of a vast industrial world which existed from the 1830s to the 1960s. The photographs of the Bechers, like those of the earlier German “New Objectivity” portraitist August Sander, are well known to Zeng Li. His photographs, like theirs, serve to remind us as how quickly entire social worlds, inhabited by countless millions of people, can dissolve when a new economic and technological era suddenly makes its appearance. Looking back at his photographs of the past decade, Zeng Li acknowledges that his conception of his own project has steadily expanded. Starting with the historic structures of the Ming Tombs, he enlarged his view to include the everyday architecture of China’s cities and then its historic factories. Now, he says, he intends to take his camera to the countryside, to assemble a visual record of the momentous changes that are occurring as a powerful wave of 21st-century modernization takes hold in China’s traditional agricultural regions. These photographs, it is safe to predict, will take their place in the unrivaled historical panorama of China’s transformation that Zeng Li is quietly, patiently creating.