Urbanautica

A SPOTLIGHT ON CHINESE GRADUATES

by Steve Bisson

Urbanautica is a proud Blurring the Lines program partner—an international academic network boosting dialogue, fostering talent, and awarding graduations' works since 2016. The last edition had Yining He as the guest curator. As always, numerous projects from different schools around the world were awarded. Some of these talents have already been introduced with specific conversations: Vanessa Cowling, Jade Carr-Daley, and Vincent Zanni. On the feature 'Voices from the ground' we introduced a selection of talents each one a testament to the power of sustainability in shaping a brighter future. In this article, we are glad to showcase some impactful projects of the 2023 edition, coming from selected Chinese's talents of Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts and Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.

© Tong Niu, from 'Express Delivery'

The series "Express Delivery" by Tong Niu focuses on China's logistics and courier industry and their workers who leaves small and medium-sized counties to move into the big cities. It's a migration associated with the dream of modernisation. Tong Niu photographed the courier industry mainly in the Jiangsu region of China, home to couriers mostly from the northern Jiangsu and northern Anhui regions. "From the end of 2020 to the beginning of 2023, I communicated with them, entered their homes and walked back to their birthplace". Focusing on the urban scapes, the photographer gives a face to these hidden and anonymous places and manifests his quest for dignity. "Photography gives me the courage to step into reality, to shoot solemnly, and it is the only thing I can do."

© Tong Niu, from 'Express Delivery'

"My works were rooted in photography as a documentary medium, in which I discuss the topic of aging and loneliness through photography", says Haowei Zhang. From 2020, the Chines photograher began to make portraits of the elderly in the nursing home through photography. Gradually, he found that the aging of ordinary individuals is denied and hidden by the society. "Leaving their families of origin, they lived alone behind high walls, and eventually could no longer experience the "normal" connections with people and with the society". Haowei Zhang also transforms some items from the old people, since these cheap items are very diﬀerent from the modern objects of today, "I have shown these items like monuments", says the author, and marks an undeniable fact: "The present society is obsessed with economic growth, expansion, productivity, acceleration of a state of love. A futuristic attitude and the praise of youth pervades. However, the aging society is an indisputable fact. Decadence, ugliness and cheapness are muted and eliminated in the public realm. Through image making, I aim to bring the identity crises and the perceived loneliness of the elderly into public sight and possibly promote the discussion about the issue."

© Haowei Zhang, from 'The Wall'

Self-alienation of the individual is at the center of the infocracy of the new millennium, through the compulsive need to be there and to cling to a fictitious and disinterested audience to still feel part of some community. This process of performative learning put on a digital stage through videos and photos of the banal mundane has nothing to do with the search for poetry in the ordinary. It is rooted in the progress of cognitive illiteracy, which pushes individuals to surf on nothing in exchange for virtual caresses. Cuixia Sun challenges these assumptions by staging a visual symulacra of contemporary social often paranoid attitudes.

© Cuixia Sun, from Ms. Shen

The artist Cuixia Sun writes "Nowadays, we are in the tiktok era. Communication and sharing become a major theme. App, such as jitter, has been linked to the lives of every ordinary individual. Tiktok recorded my mother's "vibrate behavior" in the form of stage a photo, which triggered people's thinking about the life of the new era. Diversified video content has a variety of subtle effects on the viewer through its unique ways, which leads to a series of new individual creative behaviors, a role transformation from the guided to the re creator."

Identity without a past is invisible. Removing history, its references, erasing words from vocabulary makes people walking ghosts, dispersed in the flows of contemporaneity, prisoners of uncertainty, wanderers of the present that does not exist because every second has already passed. Rather, we are made of memory, which settles like clay at the bottom of our river-flow, and builds our river-bed on which we lie and dream. The dough of our thoughts, beliefs, rises on our tacit and intangible memories.

Hong Kong film culture at the end of the 20th century, says Chen Yuyang, was as magnificent and vital as the Iguazu Falls in the 1997 film 'Happy Together', directed by Wong Kar-wai. At that time, Hong Kong's popular culture, as represented by television (TVB), film and music, broadened the spiritual world of the people living in the southernmost part of China, and at the same time, provided the ground for each individual to develop a unique and natural temperament. This is an elegy for Hong Kong cinema whose glory has passed. I am trying to explore the common memories of locals of different ages by combining film scene reenactment with documentary.