| ABOUT |
 |
 |
 |
Blessed are the night crawlers, land sprawlers, and outlaws, jumping through the plumes of shadows along the walls in the dead of time. In abandoned junkyards they ban recklessness, in wrecked buildings they outlaw abandon, and so on and so forth, and the youngsters press on into the depths of midnights and moonlights to the underbellies of train bridges and innards of gutted factories. Liu Dao takes a panoramic photograph of Shanghai’s ultimate living graveyard, 120 Moganshan Lu, where the leftover bamboo set of Japanese-occupied Shanghai used in Ang Lee’s Lust and Caution rests next to island6’s old headquarters, and where pre-World War industrial buildings dangle in a moment of their historical fate. Some are risen from the dead, surgically reconstructed under dark veils of scaffolding and construction spotlights. Others are covered with weeds and mold, left decomposing in the rocks, waiting for the city’s undertakers to sweep them away. These buildings are outlaws, condemned and damned, praised only by the artists that come paint them wild colors in the night or grasp them and place them onto lambda prints like here, where a lightbox behind the image shows the inverted silhouette of an old lady wandering in circles with a shovel, helplessly lost, digging and searching everywhere for things that are lost as well. [Pete Bradt] |