Shanghai Concession Camo
2007
Installation with photographs and 4-channel video, 14 minutes and 40 seconds, standard-definition, colour, silent
Produced with support from the Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China
Video preview link is available upon request.
Shanghai Concession Camo (la longue durée) is photo and video installation comprised of images of plane trees planted in the French Concession district in Shanghai. The video component is a four-channel digital animation of the trees’ camouflage-like bark patterns morphing imperceptibly from one to another. The photographic panels are grids of snapshots of the trees in situ throughout the concession. Concessions in China were colonial enclaves ceded to foreign powers through unequal treaties for political and economic activity. The Shanghai French Concession was a 66-hectare parcel of land annexed by the French in 1849 following China’s defeat in the First Opium War. The concession expanded over time and was built up into an exclusive residential and commercial area of the city under French control. Plane trees were planted systematically throughout the concession beginning around 1900, trees that still stand today among the district’s villas and public buildings, making the leafy, tree-lined neighbourhood popular among Western expats and affluent Chinese. The French Concession remains conspicuously intact despite Shanghai’s vast urban redevelopment projects, a sharp reminder of how segregation persists in oblique and liminal ways.
Exhibition history
Transit Forces, National Museum in Poznań, Poznań, Poland, 2007. Curated Biljana Ciric and Shen Qibin
Common Love: Aesthetics of Becoming, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York, United States, 2011, curated by A.E. Benenson, Kristen Chappa, Donald Johnson-Montenegro, Tomoko Kanamitsu
Installation view, Transit Forces, National Museum in Poznań, Poznań, Poland, 2007.
Installation view, Transit Forces, National Museum in Poznań, Poznań, Poland, 2007.
Video stills, Shanghai Concession Camo, 2007. 4-channel video, 14 minutes and 40 seconds, standard-definition, colour, silent.
Video stills, Shanghai Concession Camo, 2007. 4-channel video, 14 minutes and 40 seconds, standard-definition, colour, silent.
Detail, Shanghai Concession Camo, 2007. Inkjet print on archival paper, 60 inches x 40 inches
Detail, Shanghai Concession Camo, 2007. Inkjet print on archival paper, 60 inches x 40 inches
Detail, Shanghai Concession Camo, 2007. Inkjet print on archival paper, 60 inches x 40 inches