Abstract
Chen Ronghui (b.1989) is a Chinese photographer based in Shanghai. His work focuses on China's urbanization and de/industrialization, particularly the issues arising from the position of the individual within their shifting urban environment. While China's drastic urbanization since its 1980s’ economic reform has been examined by various photographers, Chen's “urban landscape” trilogy, completed over the past decade, offers neither a panoramic view of China's urbanization nor close-ups of specific social and environmental issues; rather, it captures China's uneven development in three distinct locations and moments in time: chemical plants outside Hangzhou after an acid spill, Shanghai after the opening of the first Disneyland in mainland China, and the shrinking cities in the northeastern Rust Belt. In this interview, Chen speaks on his transition from photojournalism to art photography, specifically his experiment with large-format photography, as well as the conundrum of depicting social issues while exploring photography as a universal language.
Chen Ronghui 陈荣辉 (b.1989) is a Chinese photographer and storyteller based in Shanghai. His work focuses on China's urbanization and de/industrialization, particularly the issues arising from the position of the individual within their shifting urban environment. Since its economic reform in the 1980s, China's drastically changing urban landscape has been examined by photographers through different lenses. For example, Zhang Dali and Weng Fen capture the transformation of China's cityscape and, consequently, the rupture of its social fabric.1 Yang Fudong, Zhang Hai'er, and Birdhead (Song Tao and Ji Weiyu) foreground the new and unpredictable ways of urban living.2 Others, such as Chen Qiulin, Han Bing, Lu Guang, and Tong Lam, focus on the cost of China's rapid development, such as displacement, pollution, and urban sprawl.3
Chen's “urban landscape” trilogy—Petrochemical China (Shihua zhongguo), Runaway World (Tuojiang de shijie), and Freezing Land (Kongcheng ji)—completed over the past decade, offers neither a panoramic view of China's urban development nor close-ups of singular social issues; rather, it captures China's uneven development in three distinct locations and moments in time: chemical plants outside Hangzhou after an acid spill, Shanghai after the opening of the first Disneyland in mainland China, and the shrinking cities in the northeastern Rust Belt. A former photojournalist, Chen combines journalistic ethics with his artistic acumen—experimenting with the vernacular style pioneered by Walker Evans. Many of Chen's photos are taken on the road with a large-format camera, with aesthetics evoking Chen's contemporaries such as Zhang Xiao and Zhang Kechun.4 In doing so, Chen captures recent, rapid social changes using an antiquated, dilatory technique, highlighting the time-space compression and social tensions under China's economic reforms. Alongside his landscape works, Chen also takes on large social issues with a distinctively “personally objective” approach in his portrait photography. His portraitures are both straightforward and objective as well as intimate and personal, in which “the aura of the era, a sense of human relationships both to each other and to the environment is conveyed through the mood of their subjects.”5
This interview, conducted by Dorothee Hou, took place over two sittings in late August and October 2022 over Zoom. All images are courtesy of the artist.
Dorothee Hou: How did you start practicing photography?
Chen Ronghui: I grew up in Lishui, Zhejiang Province, the home of the Lishui International Photo Festival and the China Lishui Museum of Photography. I actually later finished a project in that museum (“Reframing the Invention of Photography”). The festival and the museum exposed me to and fostered my interest in photography from a young age. My formal introduction to photography was in college when I majored in Radio and Television Journalism. After that, I interned as a photojournalist at a news agency.
DH: How did working as a photojournalist shape your experience as a photographer?
CR: Trained as a journalist, I'm more drawn to social issues as a photographer. The subjects I explore are mostly related to the public, rather than the private and personal domain. As a post-’90s (jiulinghou) photographer, I'm a bit “old-fashioned” compared to my peers.
DH: Some of your major projects focus on issues related to China's urbanization and de/industrialization in the past three decades or so, such as environmental pollution, urban sprawl, and shrinking cities. Petrochemical China is the first project of your “urban landscape” trilogy. Can you tell us more about this project?
CR: Petrochemical China was my first personal project. It was a side project that I did outside of my full-time job as a journalist. I started this project because at the time, Hangzhou, where I was living then, was experiencing a water crisis. People flooded the stores to panic-buy bottled water, because tap water was polluted by a petrochemical plant in the upper Qiantang River. It affected our daily life for almost a year. Journalistic reporting was restricted to avoid causing any further public panic. But as a citizen and a photographer, naturally, I wanted to document my city. So, I took my camera and photographed some nearby petrochemical plants (see figs. 1 and 2). I found the way that industrial sites blend into farmlands particularly fascinating. Nowadays, the actual process of pollution is often hidden away and invisible to the public. What, for example, Lu Guang documented in Pollution in China is less seen these days in broad daylight.6 What can be seen, instead, is the shifting landscapes, the land between agriculture and industry (fig. 3). I grew up in rural China before I moved to the city, so maybe that's why these clashing landscapes and liminal spaces are especially interesting to me.
DH: The second project of your trilogy, Runaway World, is completely set in the city. Unlike Petrochemical China, which consists only of landscape photography, you also included portrait photography. What went behind these decisions?
CR: At the time, I had moved from Hangzhou to Shanghai, where the Shanghai Disneyland had just opened. In just a few years, roughly between 2013 and 2016, theme parks have been sprouting up in cities like Beijing and Shanghai (figs. 4 and 5). They had become a popular pastime for urban dwellers, including myself. So, unlike Petrochemical China, where I mostly kept a critical distance, I moved closer toward my subjects in Runaway World and did portraits. With the landscape shots, I used a ladder and shot at a higher angle. Because of this, you can see newly constructed buildings peeking through the theme parks. In reality, many of the real estate developers were also behind the building of the parks (fig. 6). The title of the project came from Anthony Giddens's book Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. That's what I was experiencing and had captured in my work: a world in flux.
DH: In Freezing Land, the final project of your trilogy, you included even more portraits, giving a more intimate glimpse into individuals and their relationship to their environment—in this case, the “left-behind youth” in China's northeastern “Rust Belt.”7 What made you decide to shoot in the northeast?
CR: I'm a southerner. But I've long been fascinated by the northeast in literature by writers like Xiao Hong.8 As a journalist, at the time, I've also noticed a lack of nuanced representation of the northeast in media. It was out of my journalistic instinct, I guess, that I decided to shoot this project in the northeast (fig. 7). When I was shooting there, I also found spaces and objects that felt familiar and nostalgic to me that can no longer be found in the south. Time seems to pass just a bit slower in the northeast compared to the south. The karaoke bars, the decors of local restaurants, and scattered beer bottles in people's backyards—these are visual reminders of a time that has passed, not only in the south, but in China in general, for an entire generation. The northeast that I've captured looked quite different from the popular imagination of the region. Some even told me that it looked strange and unfamiliar. But it was familiar to me (figs. 8–10).
DH: And what made you decide to shoot the “Rust Belt youth”? How did you find and select your subjects?
CR: I found my models on Kuaishou, a short video-sharing mobile app popular among China's youth. The app allows geolocation sharing, so I managed to find video creators in my vicinity. Sometimes I would send them gifts in the app when they go live to get their attention. Some of them even included our shooting in their videos. So, behind the scenes, not only the physical but also the digital landscape in China have changed drastically (fig. 11).
DH: All three of your projects document the temporally and spatially uneven development of China's urbanization and de/industrialization. But with Freezing Land, you chose to shoot these landscapes with a large-format camera. This seems to be a turning point in your practice.
CR: When I was a photojournalist, shooting is all about speed. With Freezing Land, I wanted to slow down and explore my own artistic style, which is very much inspired by Walker Evans's lyric documentary. Shooting with a large-format camera, you can never see the whole frame. You focus on pure form—the composition and the color (fig. 12). This is a process that I call “decontextualization.” To me, photography is as much a language, or a lingua franca, as it is a tool to convey a particular message.
DH: By decontexalization, do you mean a purification, or distillation process that purges the image of any excessive expressiveness and forthright social or political messages?
CR: Yes, the message is inherent in the image.
DH: Like the gusts of wind that pare you down to the bones . . . hauling around a large-format camera in the frigid northeast, I imagine this artistic process is also a physically taxing one (fig. 13). Who are some of the other photographers that influenced your work?
CR: Before shooting Freezing Land, I studied works such as Stephen Shore's Steel Town and Joel Stenfeld's American Prospects.9 Together with Evans, they all had a profound influence on this project. I think the younger generation of photographers in China, including myself, grew up under these global influences. We are more self-aware and self-identify as photographers, rather than artists that work with photographic images. Freezing Land was my attempt as a photographer to experiment with Evans's vernacular style in the Chinses context. Like my other projects, it focuses on social issues particular to China while using a universal language. In the West, discussions on Chinese photography tend to foreground China—its culture, society, and politics—rather than photography itself. The starting point of this project is primarily my reflection on the photographic art itself, not on “Chineseness” or Orientalness. One of the photos in Freezing Land was shot in a hotel in Longjing, Jilin Province, at the border between China and North Korea. The hotel provided telescopes for visitors to observe life in North Korea through the floor-to-ceiling windows. What is a photographer? The voyeur or the voyeuee? What is a subject? Are they in front of or behind the lens? These are the questions I had in mind when working on this project (see fig. 14). Interestingly, I've gotten some backlash from China for exposing a certain “darkness” in the declining Rust Belt, or as they put it, “airing China's dirty laundry.” My photos are quite colorful [laughs]. But I made no mockery of my subjects. I shoot my subjects at eye level. We're all very much alike. This is the vernacular style that I'm trying to explore.
DH: What is your next project? Will there be a fourth urban landscape project?
CR: Yes. I visited Youngstown, Ohio, when I was studying at Yale and found the landscape there very intriguing. I had to stop the project because of COVID-19. But I've been wanting to go on a road trip and shoot the American Rust Belt.
DH: Thank you for this interview.
Notes
Zhang Dali's Dialogue shows Beijing's changing cityscape. The series consists of photos of Zhang's self-portrait graffitied on the walls of demolition sites, an effort to engage the city in a dialogue with the artist himself. Hung, “Zhang Dali's Dialogue.” For works on China's rapidly shifting cityscape, see also the discussion of Weng Fen's Sitting on the Wall (2002) in Wang, Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art, 76–89.
Song Tao and Ji Weiyu, working under the collective name of Birdhead, photograph the city of Shanghai and their experience of living in the city. Gladston, “Conversation with Birdhead.” For an analysis of Yang Fudong's Don't Worry It Will be Better and Zhang Hai'er's Bad Girl, see Roberts, Photography and China, 154–68.
A renowned photojournalist, Lu Guang's work consists of large documentary projects highlighting economic, environmental, and social issues in China. See Grey, “Lu Guang.” Tong Lam's series Where There Is No Room for Fiction focuses on the precarity of life by zooming in urban slums in Guangzhou, China. See Lam, “Dark Side of the Miracle.” Chen Qiulin's Hometown (2002) explores topics such as displacement and loss. Han Bing's Urban Amber (2005–11) documents pollution in urban areas. For an analysis of Han and Chen Qiulin, see Wang, Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art, 89–105.
Zhang Kechun's Yellow River, also shot with a large-format camera, reflects upon drastic social changes that took place near the Yellow River, which is dubbed as “Cradle of Chinese Civilization.” See Zhang Kechun, “Yellow River.”,Zhang Xiao's Coastline, shot between 2009 to 2013 as he traveled along the coastline of China, captures the rapid urbanization of coastal cities. Kathy Zhang, “Zhang Xiao's ‘Coastline.’” The three young photographers were featured together in “Social Geography: Ten Journeys with a Camera,” an exhibit at the Shanghai Center of Photography, December 8, 2018–February 19, 2019.
Personal: A New Form of Documentary Photography, Shanghai Center of Photography, April 8–July 29, 2023.
Lu Guang's project Pollution in China, shot in various locations in China, exposes the grave environmental and public health consequences of the country's rapid industrialization.
China's Northeast, the former bastion of state-owned heavy industry during the Mao era, has been in decline after the country embarked on an economic reform program under Deng Xiaoping. Many state-owned enterprises filed for bankruptcy and closed their factories due to declining profit. With limited job prospects, many young people have left the region. Some, however, stayed or were “left behind.” For more information on the subject and Chen's portrayal of the “left-behind youth,” see May, “Young People Left Behind in China's Snowbound Rust Belt.”
Xiao Hong (1911–42), or Hsiao Hung, was a Chinese writer known for her novels and stories set in China's Northeast during the 1930s. Her works, such as Shengsichang (1935, The Field of Life and Death) and her semiautobiographical novel Hulanhe zhuan (1942, Tales of Hulan River), depict the lives and struggles of ordinary northeasterners. Hong, Field of Life and Death.
Stephen Shore's Steel Town documents the lives of ordinary people and local landscapes in America's Rust Belt (New York state, Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio) in 1977, amid the region's industrial decline. Joel Sternfeld's American Prospect offers a snapshot of 1980s America. Shot in various places in the United States, from water parks in Florida to air force bases in Texas, from the Yellowstone National Park to post-tornado Nebraska, Sternfeld explores the complexity of the collective American identity.
