Revisiting a de-Humanized Shanghai: Speculative Realism in Zhou Ming’s Contemporary Object-Oriented Materialist Documentary Photography

Abstract

This paper explores the cultural operations of Zhou Ming’s photography (b.1960), which was aimed at exploring the deeper changes that have gripped the unstoppable urban renewal of Shanghai. His photo-essay Shanghai: An Alternative View (2000–2005), showcases the absurd and incongruous organic and inorganic spaces devoted to new points of view about the ruins that lay behind an assortment of high inner-city density residential areas situated in the Zhabei, Huangpu, and Houkou districts. Zhou Ming’s drive to de-humanize his apparent humanist photography through everyday objects and other signage found during his walking practices, also reveals multiple surrealist metaphoric representations between the materiality of the city and a slanted exaggeration of reality. His documentary camera sets out an ontological shift vis-à-vis the incidence of the everyday ‘found objects’, in which the privilege of humans over objects disappears. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the photographer’s speculative aesthetics raises the need to redefine Chinese contemporary photography with theories linked to object-oriented ontologies and in general, to new materialism. This can be interpreted as a historical-cultural consolidation of media continuum that also embraces pre-photographic practices that can liberate objects and subjects from ‘sensitive’ content in a post-socialist reality.

Keywords:

• speculative realism
• documentary photography
• objects materialism
• (post-) socialist humanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joaquin Lopez-Mugica

Joaquin Lopez-Mugica, PhD, FHEA, is presently a lecturer in liberal arts at the University of Wenzhou-Kean in China. His teaching and research focus mainly on modern languages, comparative literature, and cultural and media studies within the contexts of China, Spain, and Latin America. He is an external member (Research fellow) of the Centre for Contemporary East Asian Cultural Studies (CEACS) at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research has appeared in the following journals: Asian Studies, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Journal of Sexuality and Culture, Journal Society & Animals, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of Chinese Sociology, Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Journal of Screenwriting, Global Media and China. [email protected].

Thomas William Whyke

Thomas William Whyke, PhD, FHEA is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, School of International Communications. He is the Director of Teaching of the School of International Communications and Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Officer. His works have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Homosexuality, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Sexuality and Culture, Animation, Global Media and China, Feminist Media Studies, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Asian Studies, Journal of Screenwriting, Creative Industries Journal, and Discourse and Communication. [email protected].