Killing Time: A Landscape of Leisure
The city of Dalian in North East China is a city stuck between vast natural beauty and the ever-present human condition of commercialising nature, resulting in an often-bizarre landscape that aptly represents China’s rapid surge for progress. The development of theme parks alongside this natural beauty perfectly illustrates the global culture of advertising tourism to beautiful unspoilt areas that in reality come under threat through the increased visitation and development of the landscape. Much like in the 1950s in which we saw the sprawl of the growing middle classes in the West, China is now experiencing the this same phenomenon and where better to witness it than through how a culture spends it’s leisure time?
Whilst on the one hand this body of work challenges our preconceptions of the visual aesthetic of modern day China, the images also highlight global trend of the subtle destruction of nature for reasons mostly linked to financial profit. There has been much press on China’s environmental record whilst avoiding issues of domestic destruction of nature in the West. By making this series of images almost ambiguous as to location the goal is for Western audiences to question their own role in the perversion of nature.
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