Xing Danwen looks at globalization and the
homogenization of
the urban landscape through her series of
monumental photographs
Urban Fiction. Xing’s images of architectural
structures
are photographed from corporate maquettes
created to promote
real-estate developments being planned in China
today.
Trying to imagine life in such spaces, Xing inserts a
cast of
characters, all of which she plays herself, creating
both playful
and poignant vignettes of social drama.

As Xing says, “The models of these new living
spaces are perfect
and clean and beautiful but they are also so empty
and
detached of human drama. When you take these
models and
begin to add real life – even a single drop of it – so
much
changes. The figures act out totally imaginative
roles as part of
different plots and in different spaces that I
visualize when I
look at these models. For example, ‘I’ am sometimes
a whitecollar
office worker brought to despair by job pressures
and
spiritual emptiness. Sometimes ‘I’ am a materialistic
woman
enjoying a life of pleasure and dissipation. Or ‘I’ am
a young
girl who has accidentally killed her lover in a mood
of anger.
Together the resulting pictures compose the
episodes of the
urban fiction.”

Exhibition co-presented with CONTACT, in
conjunction with the
public installation of Xing’s photographs in the St.
Patrick subway
station – see Public Installations.

Lecture Thursday May 11 – see lectures.