Contemporary visual culture is saturated with images of ruins and dystopian fantasies. From photographs of derelict Detroit factories to films of Godzilla ransacking Tokyo, artists and writers seem to have no shortage of creativity when it comes to imagining ruination and destruction. In contemporary China, too, avant-garde artists have been using urban ruins created by economic change as a source of inspiration. Wu Hung, a leading art historian, critic, and curator, has done path-breaking research in this area previously. In his latest book, A Story of Ruins, Wu furthers his study of Chinese ruins by placing this topic in a wider global and historical context.
Wu begins by searching for lasting ruins in premodern China, a society that tended to use timber rather than stones. This could be a daunting task. Four decades ago, historian Frederick Mote already observed that the past in Chinese culture was “a past of...
