A feverish rush towards modernity

Some people's juxtapositions aren't as lighthearted as mine usually are.

In town last week I came across quite a shocking photography / film exhibition by a young Chinese artist, Zhenchen Liu, whose pictures document the pace of change in his home city, Shanghai. He says:

...when I go back to Shanghai I cannot recognize it. It does not seem to want to have a history, all I see is a feverish rush towards modernity ... producing a culture of speed, cost-effectiveness, technology, instantaneity, fragmentation, competition, ephemerality.

His still photos taken a couple of years ago show acre upon acre of devastation, where old tenement houses are being demolished for the sake of high-rise developments on an unprecedented scale. Shanghai's dispossessed former inhabitants have vanished from the slummy scene, or so one thinks until (in the video) the camera zooms in towards the few, desperate individuals who have refused to leave their homes and still try to survive there. There was one shot of an old woman simply lying in a broken bed in a broken room, wailing and sobbing, her sanity clearly shot to pieces. Another scene, shot through heavy rain, is of a solitary younger woman washing crockery in a plastic bowl in a kitchen without proper walls, in a half-demolished house. A squatter perhaps. They look as if they belonged to the populace of Berlin trying to survive in the rubble at the end of the 2nd World War. Meanwhile in the background the demolition machinery continues to swing around remorselessly and new tower blocks rise on the horizon. The artist leaves it to us to make our comments or draw our own conclusions. It's clear that ugliness and squalor must be done away with, but at what human cost? This process is not gentle and though this is a particularly blatant example, Shanghai isn't the only part of the world where it happens. As the exhibition notes put it,

...you realise that contemporary China follows the same capitalist model and is guided by the same concept of progress as western nations. The exponential speed and the scale of China's transformation simply create [...] an accelerated zoom effect on the capitalist system and its relationship with people.