Abandoned negatives, Themeless Parks: images of contemporary China in two photographic projects

Abstract

This article juxtaposes two photographic projects to illustrate ways of perceiving everyday space in contemporary China: on the one hand, ‘Silvermine Project’ (2009–2013), by French collector and editor Thomas Sauvin, recycles a vast collection of abandoned film negatives from the 1980s to the early 2000s, and subsequently ‘curates’ these amateur images into the frame of a quasi-ethnographic approach. On the other hand, Hong Kong photographer Dustin Shum’s ‘Themeless Parks’ (2008) presents a series images of public parks in Chinese cities and towns. The two projects propose different readings of the ‘postsocialist’ condition in contemporary China. While the domestic shots curated by Sauvin actively mobilise individual and national identities in private and public spaces, Shum’s compositions of shape, colour and architectural density reveal a highly orchestrated ‘China’ that pre-empts the emergence of an individual identity. This paper analyses the textual articulations of individuality, space, and temporality in the two projects.

Keywords:

• Photography
• Chinese visual culture
• contemporary China
• end of history
• Hong Kong art
• Chinese urban space

Notes

1. See Chakrabarty (2000). Similarly, see discussions on Chakrabarty in, for example, Vukovich (2012).

2. Dustin Shum, interview by the author, The Salt Yard, Hong Kong, March 9, 2014.

3. Ibid.

4. The inaccessibility of Chinese to parks in the foreign concessions in China, such as illustrated in the famous story of the plague, which is hung on the wall of an entrance in an early 20th century Shanghai Park. This sign read that no Chinese and dogs are allowed to enter, which has long circulated among Chinese structures of national identity in a highly patriotic framework.

5. Shum, interview by the author, Salt Yard ,Hong Kong, March 9, 2014.

6. Sauvin mentioned in the interview that he was unsatisfied with how foreign photographers usually represented China. ‘Regardless whether they like China or not, their perspectives are very narrow.’ My own translation.