Newshufa’s Weblog

Went last night to Manufactured Landscapes , a documentary about the work of Edward Burtynsky. (There’s a trailer of the film on the movie’s website)

Incredible images of China & the impact of development & then we dissolve neatly to the opening of an exhibition of these beautiful prints of ugliness and waste, with nice concerned people, as we all are, & I’m filled with a sense of the immensity of contradictions, sitting in the agnes b cinema at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, in a program called ‘Reel Asia’ organised by the Asia Society with a grant from JP Morgan .

All these monumental images of the disasters of capital, from Salgado to Sekula , from Darwin’s Nightmare to Workingman’s Death !

Towards the end of the film, there’s a troubling juxtaposition between an old woman in Shanghai, resisting real estate development & a younger woman who’s clearly profited immensely from it, as she walks us through her fabulous house & huge garden, requiring three gardeners and now taking up the space where a whole community would previously have lived. The old woman is presented in an empty building, a kind of shell, a decidedly unhomely space, while the real estate developer lives in this gloriously comfortable home (even though the audience laughs & sneers at her, as the image of rapacious development) – but we’re really torn between the two women, because we can admire the old woman’s resilience & resistance, but the emptiness of her surroundings doesn’t suggest any future, while the real estate developer’s contention that Shanghai is a place for young people is hard to deny. The image of woman still serves to condense the contradictions – plus ça change.