Ideas of “place” and “space” are crucial to the production of collective experience and cultural memory. They are products of the interaction between individual body – with all its historical and cultural infusions – and the surrounding world, entailing various symbolic, narrativist, power, historical, political economic relations, as well as any phenomenological treatment of our experience. Seen in this light, it can be concluded that no place could exist independent of human behaviour. However, the role it plays within everyday cultural acitivities has been largely taken for granted and consequently overlooked.
In his article “The Spatial Turn of Contemporary Photography”, critic Gu Zheng remarked: “the most drastic transformation, occurred as a result of social upheaval within Chinese society, can be observed through a concept of space.” His idea revealed an intimate relatinship between spatial planning and urban dwelling, and emphasized the fact that the concept of space not only consituted a stage on which social reality took place, but also took part in constructing reality. Thus, Gu’s idea of “the spatial turn of contemporary photography” can be understood as reaction and reflection of a generation of Chinese photographers to the rapidly urbanizing and capitalizing Chinese society.
The development of urban planning as a discipline during the heydays of Industrial Modernity took on an utopian vision of progress and crowd control. Urban planning renders the individual body a matter of statistics and probablities, and divides the city into various managerial districts, generating surplus value from an endless movement of urbanization, suburbanization and gentrification. On the micro-level, as a new form of social mechanism emerged during the Second Industrial Revolution, city works to reconsitute the perceptual technique of the modern observer. The development of mass communication technologies challenges a traditional view of place, and suggests an incrasingly loosened linkage between space and medium. Yet, the question remains: in an era of media-saturated representation and digitalization, how should we reconceptualize the difference between virtual and real spaces, between body and media?
In her ground-breaking book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006), Anne Friedberg examined the relationship between space and ways of seeing, and noted that “virtual windows”, such as the screens of movies, televisions, computers, and massive outdoor LCDs, eletronic billboards, and light-box advertisements, became incresingly an inseparable architectual component in urban environments. These giant, flashy “virtual windows” marked a break in which we understood time and space in a sequential way. They opened up multiple spaces and allowed the passer-bys to travel in an imaginary flanerie through an imaginary elsewhere and elsewhen.
Construction site billboards provide us yet another example of the “virtual window”. As the rush of pre-Expo urban construction, along with the nationwide boom in supply of real estate sector, turning the city of Shanghai into a giant construction site, billboards along the wall surrounding the construction can be found everywhere in the city, replacing the destructive, noisy, and frustrating scenes of urban development with a carefully-depicted Utopian future.
Ni Weihua, in a photography series titled Landscape Walls, turned his attention to those giant and forgettable billboards. Starting from 2007, the artist started a field-research-like process of date collection and selection, travelled all over the city, and recorded thousands of construction site boards with their immediate urban environments. He cut off the margins of the billboards in his frame, leaving no visual paths out of the images. The virtual space within the billboard is rendered boundless and therefore ever-expandable. They form an indistinguishable whole with the surroundings. The work blurs the line between virtuality and reality. Glamourous images on the construction site boards constitute a dreamy background to the mundane everyday life.
The most interesting and provocative aspect of Ni’s work lies in its interpenetrating and juxtaposing of multiple spaces. The space within the billboard is a classless, non-hierarchical myth of utopia. The space in front of the billboards, on the contrary, is a dystopia composed of architectural ruins, cheap labours, dust, pollution and noise. It is, indeed, a dystopia of social chaos and temporal disruption. In Ni’s work, spectacular billboard images replace real urban landscapes. The difference between fantasy and reality become indiscernible. The virtual images painted on the wall transform into a marginless world that is perpetually expandable. Such technique emphasizes an inter-transplantation between the virtual space and the viewers. Utopia and dystopia are caught in a dialectical contradiction. The presence of the passer-bys situates the utopia in a local discourse and historical context, while the contradiction between the moving people and the static landscape on “landscape walls” overlaps and merges onto one another, and creates a Foucauldian heterotopia.
In Landscape Walls, the space that opens up within the billboard is, after all, “a placeless place”. The spectacular landscape and luxurious lifestyle promised within the space of billboard are, to a certain extent, unreal, creating a similar artificial effect as achieved by the fabric background paper in a photo studio. However, the passer-bys that inadvertently stepped into the frame also remind the viewers of the existence of a mundane reality, that this was by no means a staged scene: the two-dimensional space within the billboard is both physically and phenomenologically present in its three-dimensional urban context, creating a relational aspect both within the site and between sites.
In a lecture given by Michel Foucault in 1967, the French scholar described a similar spatial experience. He defined the mirror as a heterotopia, for “it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.” In other words, the space occupied is at once completely real and unreal, forming an utter dislocation of place. Foucault’s reference to the mirror illustrates the disruption of space most explicitly. Although the mirror is like a utopia, a ‘placeless place’, it is also an actual site that completely disrupts our spatial position.
In this respect, construction site billboards can also be considered as a heterotopia in so far as they do exist in reality. The two-dimensional, virtual world depicted in the “landscape wall” exert a sort of counteraction to the chaotic urban reality, and, in turn, reconstruct its discourse. By utilizing juxtaposition, Ni Weihua’s work put together two mutually irrelative, if not contesting spaces: the official and the underground, the noble and the pervert, the public and the private, the humanistic and the non-humanistic, the sacred and the profane. The heterotopian juxtaposition explicitizes the disordered, contradictory and absurd elements hidden under the surface of daily life. The presence of people of various backgrounds and professions in the photo highlights the idea of “labour” that is inseparable from the rapidly capitalizing urban centres. In the endless process of the appropriation and production of urban spaces, the gathering of people led to the gathering of capital. They remind us of the necessity of constantly reexamining the exploitative path we take to urban development, questioning the spectacular utopia promised by the “landscape walls”.
Sept. 2009, Shanghai