New Culture Movement by Han Bing
July 19th, 2010 Yanda
In Han Bing’s “New Culture Movement” series, laborer, families, and even school children, stand in front of half-constructed homes, construction sites, and schoolyards, bricks hefted in hand like little red books. Although repudiated by the “upwardly mobile” urban society as “backward,” the lowly brick is still the best most rural families can expect. With their painfully limited means, rural families must often decide between a marriage home or higher education for their son (daughters rarely get either)—signaling the rise of a new culture of construction at the expense of education, a fixation on private possession, an almost desperate attempt to cordon off a private space to call one’s own, and the perhaps illusory dream of becoming part of the propertied class in a “society of modest prosperity” that denies their claims of membership—betraying the distance between the official fantasies of China’s modernity and the majority’s experience of it.
During the 80s, brick constructions were a national symbol of modernity, a promise of a new life, and a society of modest prosperity (xiaokang shehui). But just as rural China was beginning to move from homes of straw, mud and stone, into homes of brick, bricks were declared outdated, and backward. The new standard became the steel, concrete and glass high-rise, unreachably expensive for the rural poor, and a reminder of their increasing marginalization.
http://xpia.com/showcaase/a7a_black/series.asp?aa_series_id=234&member_id=24195
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