Urban Fictions
Richard Rowland
28 May – 27 June 2010
London Gallery West is delighted to present Urban Fictions, an exhibition of photographic and video work by Richard Rowland examining the emergence of simulated urban developments in Eastern China. The work documents a series of new towns being constructed in Shanghai based on different European architectural models, including English, French, Dutch, German and Swedish pastiches. These idealised reconstructions appear as hyperreal utopias that seek to create rather than reflect historical reality. The exhibition continues London Gallery West’s tradition of displaying photographic work of and from China, and builds on the School of Media, Arts and Design’s history of cultural exchange and collaboration with Chinese institutions including Guangzhou University, the Nanjing Normal University and the Summit College of Nanjing Arts.
Urban Fictions presents a complex social depiction of aspects of modern China, and its relationship with the West. Its focus is a broad national narrative involving consumerism and rapid economic expansion together with a certain spectacle in the form of the image. It offers us a way in which we might imagine and observe early twenty–first century China as a newly international imagined community.
Rowland’s work ‘documents’ its subjects, but is self-critical of what is involved in doing so, and acknowledges a certain artifice and ambivalence in what might be termed a ‘documentary aesthetic’. Its subjects are in a sense already images, even before they have become photographs. The use of both the still and moving image in Urban Fictions recalls the complex convergences that occurred during the origins of documentary photography as it developed out of documentary film. The moving image elements operate as a counterpoint to the still images, where the incidental spaces and moments absent from the still photographs are their focus, and human presence enters the work.
The relationship between visual documentation and artifice offered by Urban Fictions challenges our understanding of the photographic image as document. Through its images of modern China the exhibition also raises compelling questions about the complex, shifting and uncertain character of an increasingly international world.
Richard Rowland studied at the University of Brighton. He has participated in group exhibitions across Europe including 'This Crazy World', Kosovo National Art Gallery, Pristina and Exposicio de Fotographies, Escola Massana, Barcelona, and had a solo exhibition at Lighthouse, Brighton. His book, The Regency Project, was published by anotherpublication in 2007, and he is currently working on a book with FAR Architecture Center Shanghai. Urban Fictions is supported by Arts Council England, and will also be exhibited at the Light House Media Centre, Wolverhampton in November – December 2010.
Exhibition Opening Times:
9am – 5pm daily
Private View:
Thursday 27 May, 5pm – 8pm
London Gallery West
University of Westminster
Watford Road
Harrow
Middlesex HA1 3TP
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7911 5970