“The new-style traveller: curious, good with colour, energy to spare. A new vision of Asia!”
Raymond Depardon
 
China, Cities Are Like Oceans
The photographs presented here are an extract from my first personal project, carried out in China in 2005. Wandering the country’s major cities, I sought only a subjective urban vision that would reflect my architect’s eye. What is shown is the place of the human being in cities steadily becoming more chaotic, where the slow accumulation of tradition is being irrevocably undone by a modernity dictated by the laws of an uncontrolled free market economy. In a situation where all that remains of communism is its authoritarianism, man as a social being is losing his place. There is no longer any human scale. The person with an individual future is being lost in the urban ocean. Houses are demolished, skyscrapers go up, the ground is laced with communication networks. China is advancing, building the way France built in the ’60s: too hastily, in response to demographic pressures and a rural exodus. Meanwhile, invoking a difference in lifestyles, we close our eyes to the potentially disturbing consequences of this kind of urbanisation.  Setting the human scale in the eternal urban palimpsest, I looked in these cities for a poetics of fatalism. The lights are those of dawn or dusk, of neon signs and storms: a way of dramatising a shift that seems ineluctable. The photos are from Peking, Shanghai, Canton and Honk Kong: these are either emblematic places or urban features that can be considered archetypal.
Cyrus Cornut