CURATOR'S STATEMENT

The Chinese government always recognizes the importance of disseminating political ideologies through visual means in public spaces. During the Communist era, the portrait of and words from Mao, together with other communist symbols, were painted or hung on the walls of almost every kind of buildings throughout the nation to inform and reinforce the state-sanctioned political thoughts—a legacy still visible in some minor cites and the remote countryside. With China’s reform and opening up, the straightforward and steadfast communist imager-ies have largely disappeared in major cities and have been replaced by words and images that the government deemed more suitable for conveying its current political agendas and mobilizing the public. Without a doubt, China’s rapid economic development and its reckless urbanization in the past two decades have changed much of the country’s outlook and the lifestyle of Chinese urban residents. Nonetheless, the ever bigger and spectacular political billboards established in cities across the country demonstrate the government’s continuous efforts in using visual representations as a means to regulate a society under dramatic transformations and to pass on new political directives. If anything has changed, it is that the government used to have a monopoly on the urban public spaces, but now it has to compete for urban-ites’ attention with the ever-inventive billboards from various commercial brands in the age of consumerism.

To do so, the government has adopted the advertising strategies of the commercial world. While continuing its tradition of disseminating political edicts through the hierarchical power structures that organize policy study groups to reach every neighborhoods and every official institutions, the government has increasingly relied on the less authoritative, more diffusive, and creative visual representations to advertise its new political agendas. One may argue that under the condition of consumerist urbanization in the country since the 1990s, advertise-ments have assumed a commanding role and are utilized by both official and private sectors to promote all kinds of urban consumption rang-ing from concrete commodities such as high-end homes, beautiful neighborhoods, and luxurious goods to intangible symbols such as lifestyle, ideology, and cosmopolitan identity. Among all visual methods that have been employed to mobilize the public or evoke their desire to consume, outdoor billboards are a distinctive urban structure and an advertising form that reflects much of the political and economic transformations of the Chinese society. As a matter of fact, urban public spaces in Chinese cities are currently defined and occupied by gov-ernment agencies along with both domestic and international corporations, all of which compete for their presence with ever spectacular outdoor billboards. Originating in the United States for advertisement on highways, this advertising medium has now infiltrated much of the urban public space in China.

The omnipresence of outdoor billboards has shaped the urban characteristics of Chinese cities. Appearing everywhere, such as on rooftops, building fronts, streets, or subway paths, these flat and huge displays not only dwarf passersby but also create new grounds of imaginative spaces, complicating the visual experience of urban living. They are also the site where Shanghai artist Ni Weihua (born 1962) develops his conceptual-oriented documentary photography and engages with the urban public spaces from both critical and artistic perspectives. Through photographs and video works, this exhibition presents Ni Weihua’s two major series Keywords and Landscape Wall. It aims to explore how the advertisements of official urbanist ideologies in Chinese cities are renegotiated or challenged in Ni’s work through a close reading of selective pieces from his documentary photography of street billboards in Shanghai and other Chinese cities.

Ni’s Keywords, an ongoing photographic series that he began in 1998, addresses the promulgation of successive state policy concepts and slogans including “Development is the most important principle,” “Building a harmonious society,” and “Chinese dream” in urban public spaces and documents the increasingly spectacular visual presentations adopted by state agencies. Landscape Wall, another multiple-year series that he started in 2008, captures the penetration of the spectacle of consumerism in Chinese cities through street billboards of real-estate industry and contemplates the rising social inequality along with the country’s spectacular GDP-growth. Together, they represent Ni’s artistic effort to simultaneously document and deconstruct China’s official discourses of economic development and consumerist urbanization.

Dr. Meiqin Wang

Associate Professor of Art History

Art department

California State University Northridge