Broken Pieces of China: Polly Braden / David Campany

About

Broken Pieces of China presents a sample of the photographs and films made by Braden and Campany while on a recent artists' residency in Xiamen, China. Polly Braden's China Everyday is a suite of photographs made in and around the cities of Xiamen, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Braden has lived in China and visited regularly over the last decade, watching the changes. Most of the time her photographs come out of very specific projects or commissions. However the recent work is the result of shooting in a more open-ended, improvised way. The images deal with the depiction of daily urban experience. ‘The West' is in the midst of a rush to document the economic boom in China with its epic scenes of industry and leisure. These are the representations that form the West's new understanding of the country. But in this rush the grain of everyday life is being overlooked. And it is in the grain, in the small details, that we can feel something of the human significance of those bigger changes. David Campany presents two projections, Einbahnstrasse in China and 122 Colour Photographs. Limiting himself to a basic digital camera he combines still images and rudimentary single-take films. Using the structure of a daily diary, Campany completed a small body of work on each of the seventy days of the residency. The resulting films are cumulative assemblies of observations and philosophical reflections on the representation of China's recent transformation.