China has come a long way. A culture steeped in history and rich in natural beauty, but as a leading Asian nation surging to the front of the pack of late, its landscape is a curious and awkward juxtaposition of old and new. The roads often segregate the city in the most bizarre manner - red clay roofs on the left, shiny shimmering glass on the right; dilapidated slums on the left, burgeoning city centres on the right. The roads even divide the Chinese population - the young and ambitious flood into the city, and the old and frail… well, they will soon be forgotten, just like the great nature, taken over by the insatiable desire to expand, develop and gentrify. Yes, this is progress.

Photographs by Shen Wei.

Every now and again, my parents relate their childhood experiences to me. They lived in a remote village in Malaysia. Farmers by trade, my grandparents relied on their offspring to manage the household and occasionally plough the fields. Financially humble, my grandparents had no access to modern amenities and tools we take for granted today. Firewood stoves were lit to prepare every meal, leftover food was reheated after dinner and stored in stark pantries, soaps were hand-made with organic compounds… Old newspapers were even used as substitutes for feminine products! Such is the simple yet tough life of days long gone…

And these are the times I realise I was indeed born with a silver spoon in my mouth…

View more of Adou’s work here.

Dong Cheng, in China, is a village where every commercial activity turns around the reproduction of… famous sculptures. The creators of these “fakes” assume a marginal position and then almost disappear behind the “real” authors that they copy… [But] what is “fake”? Couldn’t we define these people [as] “artists”? Aren’t the hands and the craft of these living sculptors, who are fullfilling a very physical and tangible job, making these objects?

Introductory text sourced from Artist’s Statement. Please visit Goia’s site to view more work.

Although I grew up in a developing nation, I have been fortunate enough to live in residential areas far away from industrial sites for my entire life. I remember, when I was young, the television was inundated with commercials depicting the bright future of a fully-industrialised nation - how lives are made so much easier with the latest technology and infrastructure. That may be true, but the journey towards it is often not quite as glorious. Ian Teh’s series, titled Dark Clouds, is “an intimate journey into some of China’s most industrialized cities; an exploration of the darker side of the economy’s bright, shiny facade. It portrays the bleak landscape and daily lives of people living within the country’s coal industry. Here, humanity has become the anonymous cogs that work this great industrial machine in order to perpetuate the ambitions of a Chinese nation. This is a glimpse of another life and another world rarely seen.”

A thick layer of grey ash covers the road leading to an industrial site. The air in the city is acrid and dense. Industrial plants and factories loom out of the haze and disappear once more as one travels beyond the city. Further into the mountains, there are sounds of explosions as workers use dynamite to extract limestone for the steel plants. In another valley, not too far away, miners go deep into a pit shaft in the early hours of the morning.

Images and additional text by Ian Teh. Please visit his website to view more of his work.

I heard of an altercation between man and animal over the radio the other day. This man, acting on his impulses to be at one with nature, built his house in the mountains. To protect himself from the wildlife that inevitably pay him a visit in search of food, he installed traps around his property. Strong and instinctive as they are, animals are no match for the well-developed brain of man, nor do they possess technology that rival ours. As are the endings of other similar incidences, the animal kingdom loses yet again to our rapid encroaching on their territory. What happens to them? Do we take our natural resources for granted? Does nature heal itself?

“Deserts now cover 18% of China, and a quarter of them were caused by ecologically damaging human activities. Overexploitation of arable land, overgrazing and increasingly deep drilling for water are at the root of what has become the Chinese dust bowl - a phenomenon the likeness of which has not been seen since the 1930’s, when the American Midwest and Canadian Prairies suffered from a devastating drought. China’s situation is quickly becoming the world’s most massive and rapid conversion of arable land into barren sand dunes. The resulting dust is picked up by the wind and transported, in the form of giant sandstorms, all over China and into Japan and Korea - even all the way to North America. In an effort to reverse the situation, the Chinese government has initiated the largest environmental restoration initiative the world has ever seen, and has begun a mass exodus of “environmental refugees,” displaced by the advancing sand.”

Perhaps nature can heal itself. And perhaps it does so with a vengeance…

Please go to Benoît Aquin’s site to view more of his work.

Feng Zhengjie paints striking contemporary women. With their coloured hair, richly hued clothes and luscious, expressive lips, the women appear irresistibly dazzling. And yet, the wandering expressions in their eyes render them elusive and enigmatic. Reminiscent of Warhol’s screen printed celebrities, Feng’s paintings reflect a vision of futuristic pop. His generic portraits of women are influenced by promotional imagery: their exotic colours, electrified auras, and wind machine hair exude the glamour aesthetic of commodified desire. Feng appropriates these staples of western kitsch as a readymade lingo for a duplicity of ideology. His work is often discussed as capitalist critique, his empty eyed models posing as frivolous and vacant signifiers. Neither western nor Chinese in appearance, Feng’s femmes fatales are a super-hybrid of commercial beauty, a science fiction product of globalisation.

Painted in massive scale, Feng’s canvases replicate the billboards from which they were inspired. Without text, or accompanying products, Feng’s paintings streamline their hard-sell ethos. Removing all distraction, he exposes the essence of temptation, magnifying the sex appeal of fantasy lifestyle and its gulf of intangibility. Transposing these disposable sentiments through his highly refined painting technique, Feng glorifies the allure of advertising as epic, enduring, and numbingly empty.

Text sourced from Saatchi Gallery.

When I was young, I practiced painting. It was a natural extension from Chinese calligraphy. I remember being fascinated with beautifully “watery” paintings of landscapes, wildlife and buildings produced by ancient Chinese masters, and I certainly tried very hard to mimic the natural flow of brush strokes common in many Chinese paintings, but often with mixed results. It was very easy to convey movement in a picture if one had good control of the brush. It did not help that the watercolour paints were, more often than not, diluted excessively to achieve that soft, faint “watery” look. So, of course, when I came across Wu HuaFeng’s works, I was somewhat taken aback. They allude to ancient China, yet are done with thick oil paints and very short, harsh strokes, ultimately imparting a rather European aesthetic to otherwise distinctly oriental structures…

Delicate and elegant as they are, ancient costumes have alwways been a symbol of Chinese cultural tradition, as clearly witnessed in the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony. But as time passes by, that materialism and consumerisn gradually change the Chinese culture - Western style attire substitute traditional ones. By making a contrast between modernism and traditionalism, Beijing-based painter Peng Wei attempts to search for the Chinese cultural myth in today’s society.

As one of the younger generation of Chinese contemporary artists who have taken a decidedly modern approach to the use of classical techniques, Peng Wei’s work displays a profound knowledge of the Chinese ink painting tradition, which she insists is still alive and constantly changing. While Chinese robes may have become remnants of a bygone era, they appear in Peng Wei’s paintings charged with fresh narratives and contexts - an indication of the artist’s self-confessed fascination with the ‘lost and beautiful’ items of the past.

Text adapted from Plum Blossom.

I often hear of negative impressions of life in China. Many people not only bad-mouth China’s current and past political landscape, but ridicule contemporary Chinese art, business practices, and indeed, mentality! A lot of these impressions are based on hearsay and so-called “documentaries” seemingly peppered with personal vendetta; these people have never actually stepped foot on China’s soil before, much less lived there. Isn’t the point of a documentary to be utterly on-the-fence? It is journalism - it is only fair that the viewer forms his/her own conclusions and opinions. But it is encouraging that there are people out there who still understand the role of a documentary - people like Nadav Kander - people who actually go to China and try to understand the people there and their lives. And most importantly, he understands that he is an outsider looking in, and offers little opinions of his own:

The Yangtze River, which forms the premise to this body of work, is the main artery that flows 4100miles (6500km) across china, travelling from its furthest westerly point in Qinghai Province to Shanghai in the east. The river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese, even for those who live thousands of miles from the river. It plays a significant role in both the spiritual and physical life of the people. More people live along its banks than live in the USA - one in every eighteen people on the planet.

After several trips to different parts of the river, it became clear that what I was responding to and how I felt whilst being in china was permeating into my pictures; a formalness and unease, a country that feels both at the beginning of a new era and at odds with itself. China is a nation that appears to be severing its roots by destroying its past in the wake of the sheer force of its moving “forward” at such an astounding and unnatural pace. A people scarring their country and a country scarring its people.

Although it was never my intention to make documentary pictures, the sociological context of this project is very important and ever present. The displacement of 3 million people in a 600km stretch of the River and the effect on humanity when a country moves towards the future at pace are themes that will inevitably be present within the work. A Chinese man who I became friends with whilst working on the project reiterated what many Chinese people feel: “ Why do we have to destroy to develop?” He explained how in Britain many of us could revisit the place of our childhood, knowing that it will be much the same, it will remind us of our families and upbringing. In China that is virtually impossible, the scale of development has left most places unrecognisable, “Nothing is the same. We can’t revisit where we came from because it no longer exists.”

China’s landscape both economically and physically is changing daily. These are photographs that can never be taken again.

… Yuan gradually took over the government, building from the support base of his military power. He dissolved the national and provincial assemblies. The House of Representatives and Senate were replaced by the newly formed “Council of State”, with Duan Qirui, his trusted Beiyang lieutenant, as Prime Minister. Yuan quickly reorganized the provincial governments and laid down the foundations for the warlordism that would cripple China over the next two decades.

With his power secure, many of Yuan’s supporters, notably monarchist Yang Du, advocated for a revival of the monarchy, asking Yuan to take on the title of Emperor. Yang reasoned that the Chinese masses had long been used to autocratic rule, and that China’s situation longed for stability that only a monarchy would ensure. Yuan held a carefully selected political convention which unanimously endorsed monarchy on November 20, 1915. By December 12, he proclaimed his reign as Emperor of the Chinese Empire under the era name of Hongxian to begin on January 1, 1916.

These photographs of Yuan Shikai’s coronation as “Great Emperor of China” are taken by John Zumbrum: