4 - Shadow of the Spectacular: Photographing Social Control and Inequality in Urban China
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2021
Summary
Abstract
Focusing on Shanghai artist Ni Weihua's conceptual photography, this chapter examines his critical response to the saturation of officially sanctioned visual presentations for both political and commercial purposes in urban public spaces. It argues that advertisements have assumed a commanding role in urban China, a phenomenon captured in Ni's photographic series Keywords and Landscape Wall that deal with street billboards in Shanghai and other cities. Analysing Ni's work in relation to the promulgation of official slogans, the penetration of the spectacle of consumerism in Chinese cities, and rising social inequality, the author contends that Ni advances a critical visualization that simultaneously documents and deconstructs China's official portrayal of economic development and urbanism.
Keywords: Ni Weihua, official ideology, consumerism, billboards, social control, inequality
Introduction
The government of the PRC recognizes the importance of disseminating political ideologies through visual means in public spaces. During the Communist era, the portrait and words of Mao, together with other communist imageries, were hung on the walls throughout the nation to inform and reinforce state-sanctioned political thoughts – a legacy still visible in some minor cites and the remote countryside. With China's reform and opening up, the steadfast communist imageries have largely been replaced by words and images that the government deemed more suitable for conveying its current political agendas. 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 more 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 urban public spaces, but now it has to compete for urbanites’ attention with the ever-inventive billboards from both domestic and foreign commercial brands in the age of global consumerism.
To do so, the government has largely adopted the advertising strategies of the commercial world.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary ChinaUrbanized Interface, pp. 115 - 146Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018