I've been living in Tianjin, China for more than a decade and have spent a good deal of time in Beijing, watching amid the din as both of these cities have amazingly—albeit often uncomfortably—risen. In recent years I have also been involved in the Qinghai province countryside in the northeastern Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau attempting to increase educational opportunities for Tibetan students in western China. I have documented much of the last five years through photography and writings, much of which is being prepared for uploading to this site. Here are a few links to some of my other links.
Over the last several years photography has become my primary artistic pursuit, and in 2007 I had my first photos published in One Night in Beijing, a dusk-to-dawn photo documentary of Beijing throughout the August 8-9, 2007 night, one year before the opening of the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Here is a link to some of the photos I shot for that project.
In June 2008 the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine (CAPA), Paris showed 129 of my photos of the CCTV Headquarters project in their exhibit Dans la ville chinoise,” which included a large exhibition on Chinese contemporary emerging architecture. The Center of Contemporary Culture, Barcelona (CCCB) exhibited several more of my photos in a show that ran from November 2008 through February 2009.
Other Sites
My blog, Absurdity, Allegory and China (AAC) is where I have done the bulk of the ‘heavy lifting’ over the last two years. Though nearly all of the entries are China-related, I do occasionally wander into other zones, baseball being one of them. Despite being 40 years removed from my native Philadelphia, I still follow the Phils, though now no longer as penance.
More of my photos can be found at my Rudenoon Flickr site. Though I am not happy with how Flickr presents photos, I do have nearly 2,500 publicly accessible photos at the moment. (I will be moving many of them into more presentable galleries on this website.) Most of my Flickr photos are licensed Creative Commons, and most were photos taken in China, though there are also some of Paris, Thailand, Tuscany and Wyoming. More than a quarter of the photos are related to the China Central Television (CCTV) Headquarters project (OMA/Rem Koolhaas) in Beijing, a construction project in the heart of the capital’s Central Business District (CBD) that I have been documenting since December 2007. The project has been a contentious one from the outset, and it seems as if everyone in Beijing—a tough crowd even on a good day—has an opinion about the main headquarters building with its formidable wedge-shaped beak of an overhang hovering threateningly over the East Third Ring Rd. Guanghua Lu flyover.
The short, though spectacularly odd, history of this project has included an unforgettable burning of the Television Culture Centre by the CCTV bosses during an illegal fireworks display (not only against the law, but also against the strong advice of the pre-fire, on-scene Beijing fire officials who couldn’t rein the TV guys in), which tragically cost a firefighter’s life. The project has become an appropriate symbol of the client, the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, whose main mouthpiece and public face, China Central Television, will sometime in the future take the keys, although the opening date keeps getting pushed back into the hazy “soon.” As long as the burned husk of the TVCC remains so obviously and indecisively rusting in limbo, I don’t expect to see the bigger wedge-headed loop in full-blown 200-channel propagandized action. I have written extensively concerning this project.
More will be added to this site in the very near future.
--September 28, 2009
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