On the third floor of the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum is the now-famous scale model of the urban area as it should look by 2020 — a full decade after the World’s Fair. As outsized and surreal as the city itself, the model is popular with locals, who encircle the waist-high exhibit on elevated walkways, seeking out their present or perhaps future living quarters, often exclaiming in delight when they locate a facsimile of their apartment. The model has proven such a hit that a smaller version — a model of the model of the evolving reality outside the front doors — has been constructed in the lobby below.
While meta-fictionist Italo Calvino would have enjoyed the museum, its natural literary analogue may be Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The model allows Shanghainese to strut like the giant Gulliver among Lilliputians for a few moments, before stepping back into the land of the Brobdingnags, where they are once more tiny and helpless. Unless, that is, those people don’t consider themselves as being either one size or the other. In Gulliver’s Travels, whose subtitle “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World” was understood by eighteenth-century readers to refer to the Far East, Brobdingnags appear grotesque for the simple reason that their huge dimensions magnify what are otherwise ordinary human flaws. “Nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison,” Swift writes of this perceptual irony.
Many Chinese may well feel dwarfed by their mammoth nation, including its still-massive inequalities and the use of coercion and control to keep its citizens in step. Many will certainly share Burtynsky’s concern about how the development of China — a pattern of growth that will see as many as 400 million additional people pour into cities in the next couple of decades, all seeking better lives — will impact their environment, and the planet as a whole. But a country that built the Great Wall and the Grand Canal probably isn’t going to find the Three Gorges Dam, or the transformation of Shanghai, particularly daunting or strange. Citizens accustomed to social engineering on a scale at once mythic and commensurate with real needs may accept and even take pride in developments that outsiders view as distressing. What is missing in Burtynsky’s China are its people; what defines Wang Gangfeng’s photos are the individuals he sees everywhere. What defines Burtynsky’s Shanghai, in turn, is destruction and sterility, nearly the opposite impression Feng Zhen gives of the town where she happily works and eats and lives, at street level.
After decades of ideologically imposed sublimation, Chinese like Wang and Feng are asserting the re-emergence of the private self. To be sure, such privacy must still be reconciled with the non-self of collective and generally colossal endeavour, once the exclusive state-approved narrative of socialist China. But even under this sometimes-oppressive umbrella, the prevailing view is to feel good about how well some things are going. Taking the next step, toward finding aspects of all this somehow beautiful — the sprawl, the enterprise, even the spasms of heedless progress and degradation — is not such a leap.
At a show of Edward Burtynsky’s China photos in Toronto last year, guests were invited to record their thoughts in a notebook. Most praised the work and shared its presumed critique of the subject, using words like “disturbing” and “chilling.” But one entry was written in Pinyin, a Westernized form of Mandarin, by someone who signed a Chinese name. “Such beautiful pictures!” the visitor proclaimed. That particular guest wasn’t looking at different photos. He or she may just have seen things differently.
