NYAB Event - Chen Jiagang "The Great Third Front"

Chen Jiagang "The Great Third Front"

Edwynn Houk Gallery

This event has ended.

At the beginning of the 1980’s, Deng Xiaoping initiated drastic economic reform emphasizing light industry and export-led growth. The sudden shift in policy hit the industrial zones of the “Third Front” hard, gutting the villages with the same speed at which they were constructed. Once a symbol of Maoist national pride, Xiaoping’s new economic policy rendered the “Third Front” obsolete. Factories were boarded up, and laborers driven back to their origin. The “Third Front” was now synonymous with industrial wasteland, a relic in China’s unflinching march towards modernization. Employing a distorted wide-angle lens, Chen Jiagang records the artifacts of the “Great Third Front” in a palette of neutral grays, purples, and blues. A self-described expressionist photographer, Jiagang’s photographs conjure a type of industrial fairy tale. With the digital addition of an element of the fantastic, a young girl elegantly dressed in the Maoist collar and dress (Qipao), Jiagang’s photographs allude to a former glory, a nostalgia for a period now lost to the more powerful forces propelling China into the future.

[Image: Chen Jiagang "The Great Third Front #17, Rotating Mine Pool" (2008)]