China! Which China?

Whereas in Europe the future of the city is the subject of discussion and at the same time the city centres degenerate into museum-like establishments, major cities in Asia grow into mega-urban structures which seem to have lost any kind of human dimension. The visions of science-fiction-films like “Blade Runner” have already taken place here. More than 5000 sky-scrapers have rocketed upwards explosively in China, particularly in Shanghai in the last few years. This results in irreversible changes to everyday life.

The challenge of the encounter with this unfamiliar world is to transform the personal experience of the highly complex and interlaced parallel worlds of the “Megacities” into an individual picture language which should not keep the unknown in the realm of the exotic but which discovers the nearness in the strange. The life in these cities seems to us like a too dense collage of signs, people and structures, a kind of semiotic overkill that is hard to decode at first. It appears at first glance that individual needs of human beings meanwhile lack space in these anonymous seeming metropoles.

In my photographs I want to take a closer look at details and structures in everyday life which can tell of an approach towards harmonisation in this utopic seeming world.