Yang Chen

A Window to the Future: China's Modernization

Yang Chen

“China” means "the central country" literally in Chinese. For centuries, the Chinese people consider their country as the center of the world which is most developed and civilized.

The dream was broken by the failure of the war in 1840, and the country was forced to started its modernization and westernization. Being interrupted times and times again, the process finally become irreversible.
The last round of modernization which is also called “Reforming and Opening up” started in late 1970s. I was born in 1984, a blooming year of the “Reforming and Opening up”. When I was a child, I was educated to establish a life-long struggle for the communist ideal. However, after entered my middle school, the western pop culture was getting popular and influential. Even though the education and propaganda kept the same tone of communist, no one believes it anymore.

It is not my single case to become confused and lost during the years. Traditional Chinese philosophy of life and value has been destroyed during the culture revolution and people have got tired to the communist believe. What is in the empty spiritual space? Many people adopt pragmatism and materialism. The economic growth is everything and the only thing, to the government, and to the masses.

In each of my returns to China, when I look at the landscapes that are familiar but somehow alienating, I always find something puncturing, revealing to me the residue of changes hidden in the scenes, as well as the struggling of people's seeking to a new life and keeping their civil rights in the dictatorship.

This is the reason I started to document the moments of the changing. I was seeking the conflicting and compromising elements. The project opens a window for me to look back home with my own perspective, and it is also a glance of the window which China opens to the world and uncertain future.

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