798 Dashanzi | Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery

Chengdu-based artist Yang Yi’s “Uprooted” series imagines his hometown in 2009, in the wake of being flooded by the final phase of construction on the Three Gorges Dam, a controversial project that will result in the relocation of an estimated one to two million people. The digitally altered photographs depict some of the town’s remaining residents wearing scuba masks and snorkels, going about their daily lives amidst a deserted and dilapidated backdrop of a city submerged in water: A father sits on a chair next to his son, who holds an awkwardly large teddy bear; a girl in a summer dress sits on a blanket atop rubble staring towards sky; a butcher by a meat rack stands haplessly on a bridge; and a lone man on a sky bridge faces away from an advertisement that reads: “New City Center, High Class Life.” Strange and beautiful, Yang Yi's visual conflations of the past and future are elegiac and bittersweet rather than apocalyptic. Furthermore, the tinge of melancholy whimsy paired with masterful digital enhancement skills spare the series from feeling contrived. Instead of yet another series whose sole merit is its portrayal of stock members of the Chinese underclass left behind in China’s rush to develop, Yang Yi has created a commemoration to the lives of those who stayed behind in his hometown, portraying them with a dignity and intimacy few photographers are capable of. Perhaps it is poetic justice then, that technological advances should result in both the destruction of a way of life and the means to document and mourn its loss for current and future generations.

Xiao Hu