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China: Future Primitive

"The Proletariat Watches for Capitalist Roaders," by Ken Barnes and Rick Kleinsmith.

Rick Kleinsmith and Ken Barnes were two college friends who reunited to tour China in a month-long odyssey. In photographs and accompanying texts and mementos, for a book as yet to be published, they capture a nation forcefully lurching into postindustrial economic superpower status.

There is an undercurrent of agitation as preparations for the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics are underway. Approximately 1.5 million residents in Beijing and its outlying areas are being moved. Another 1.3 million are being forcibly resettled along the Yangtze River for the Three Gorges Dam. This means the displacement of entire communities that have existed for millennia. Populations uprooted, families separated, homes destroyed, traditions forgotten, livelihoods lost.

These are the dispossessed casualties of capitalism without democracy.

Although they convey the destruction of a rural way of life, theirs is not the romanticism of a Rousseau—no idealism nor nostalgia of a simpler time and place. The pace of development simply leaves no time to weep, wallow or despair. In the words of the artists: “There are no regulations, no rules, no feelings hurt and no hesitation. Only moving forward.”

What Kleinsmith and Barnes didn’t want to display were “photos of the Great Wall, rice paddies, men in straw hats or other images considered to be stereotypically Chinese.”

In Fengdu, the City of Ghosts, they discover: “Fengdu’s race toward oblivion is sanctioned by the government, under the blanket of progress. There are no streets anymore…buildings are being knocked down by men with sledgehammers. Amid all this dismantling women and children live in the hollowed out buildings which are missing walls and electricity.”

There’s a hole in his head and its eating his brain is an encounter with a meandering babbling madman who leads them on a sporadic tour of Fengdu as he races through its shells and alleyways. He is crazy with the despair of one who has lost everything. He is trying to cram his life’s story into the minds of anyone who will listen, even two foreigners who only understand a few catchphrases of Mandarin. His hand is outstretched as he rushes towards an open doorway, to an apocalyptic landscape strewn with bricks and rubble.

In The Proletariat Watches for Capitalist Roaders, a young woman wearing a white dress stands on a ferry gazing out over the hazy seascape. An older man a deck below is staring up at her with scorn and suspicion. In Western iconography her dress would symbolize purity and chastity, but in China white is a traditional funerary color. She is a metaphor of mourning what is past and anticipation of what is to come.

Dead Ancestors are Always Looming is photograph of a small child hugging a leaning tree next to a tomb in a graveyard. As the tree bisects the photograph, we have metaphors for the divisions of old and young, the living and the dead, nature and humanity, the playful and the somber, old customs and new norms.

The pain of displacement is most distilled on the faces of the mother and child in Warn Forward Go!—they personify the anxiety of impending destruction. The mother scurries with an infant on her back across the landscape of Fengdu, amidst empty buildings, carcasses of a city that was already a necropolis. She is racing ahead of the imminent flood.

Despite the dispersion, chaos and disquietude, there is also an emerging middle class. Tourism within China has become an industry. In You have acted correctly and done well #3, one glimpses a moment of tenderness as an old man is gingerly being led down the steps of a riverbank by his son. They are embarking on a riverboat cruise along a section of the Yangtze. The Chinese have a reverence for the elderly and a nostalgia for traditions that are now at odds with government policies.

In addition to Fengdu, the artists also toured Xian, Beijing and Shanghai.

Utopia Street is a moody, noirish, black-and-white photo which depicts a stand of bicycles lining an alley. They are slightly slumped over as though they were soldiers slouching at ease, idly chatting against a wall and enjoying a smoke.

Everyday touches of humor are seen in Enemies of the People—a sign in a Beijing park indicating 12 potential violations such as no bicycling, picking flowers, sitting on the wall, littering, rollerblading, etc.

In Robocop and Apple are done with the Letter “I,” a black-and-white photograph, we see in the background an instructor in front of a classroom where children sit obediently in a semi-circle. In the foreground are Robocop, a boy with a mischievous grin, sitting next to Apple, pouting, plugging her fingers in her ears to shut out the teacher. She has no use for school. The piece captures the universal sense of play and rebellion in children.

The exhibition conveys the sense of solitude and stillness of people dealing with an altered China, while also showing us touches of whimsy, resilience and humanity. Most of the photographs are hand-processed, black-and-white, silver gelatin prints. The show—at the Stuyvesant Gallery, 245 Elmwood Avenue (883-2071)—concludes June 18, 2007.