CIEL VARIABLE 81 - Made in China
EDITORIAL - Dusk, storm, flood
By Jacques Doyon
In this issue, we bring together images testifying to the impacts of accelerated modernization in today’s China. The photographers who made them have varying degrees of professional experience linked to commissions for the media, corporations, or advertising.
PORTFOLIO - Greg Girard : Phantom Shanghai
Until recently, a former resident of Shanghai from the 1930s or 1940s, returning to the city decades later, would have a good chance of being able to locate his or her old home since urban development for profit was suspended for nearly a half century.
Accelerated Ruins
Greg Girard ’s recent monograph Phantom Shanghai describes the urban vestiges of communist-era Shanghai as they are swept away in the city’s recent wave of economic development.
PORTFOLIO - Benoît Aquin : Chinese “Dust Bowl”
In November 2008, Benoit Aquin won the prestigious Prix Pictet for his series on desertification and dust storms in China. One of the greatest environmental disasters of our time, the Chinese “Dust Bowl” is probably the largest conversion of productive land into sand anywhere in the world.
Fire & Ice
For twenty years, Benoît Aquin has travelled widely, armed with a global vision and the determination to construct a global project. From initial forays into the Caribbean in the late 1980s
PORTFOLIO - Yang li : Uprooted
In 2009, the Three Gorges Dam will have flooded hundreds of square kilometres in central China. Chinese artist Yang Yi will see his hometown, Kaixian, being submerged during the last phase of the project.
Art and Submersion Memories of a Chinese Dream
Have you heard of Kaixian? It’s a charming tourist site if ever there was one! But to visit, you’ll have to replay it, since the town is now under the waters of the Yangzi.
Remains and Disappearances The Work of Oscar Muñoz
We live in an age of disappearances, a time of loss and change, with mass extinctions and vanishing eco-regions.
The Private Photo Albums of Hugh Le Caine
“… a change in time is enough to re-create the world and ourselves.”
– Marcel Proust
VOICES - Antoni Muntadas : The Construction of Fear
By Jacques Doyon
The internationally known artist Antoni Muntadas will present a new exhibition titled The Construction of Fear at Galerie SBC art contemporain in Montreal, from 28 February to 18 April 2009.
