Go West Went South

Sometimes, you have to take a break. So where do you go on holidays when your job is already called ‘Go West’? Not west of course. You go south!

The high speed train takes you with almost 250 kilometres/h in 7,5 hours from Shanghai to the nice port city of Xiamen (one of China’s Special Economic Zones). And back of course. In those hours you blast through the economically most developed zone of China – with cities like Hangzhou, Ningbo, Wenzhou and Fuzhou as the stopovers. What kind of landscape do you see during this train ride? In other words: what does China’s most developed area look like? The answer: a highly fragmented landscape, in which the urban and the rural dissolve, in which farmers build small skyscrapers and where you see a clash of top-down and bottom-up planning. A landscape in which man tries to rule over nature by cutting away mountains and where history and concrete meet.

The following  is a random selection of pictures we took every five minutes between Xiamen and Fuzhou, at a speed of 247 km/h. The Chinese landscape with an interval of 20,5 km.

Kill your darlings!

Ruben at work selecting photoseries in his studio at CAFA

Together with photographer Ruben Lundgren, we worked on the selection of photoseries for the book…a great process in which one has to make decisions….!

11 reasons to love Chongqing

There are a lot of reasons to fall in love with the city of Chongqing, this seductive mixture of Beijing, Hong Kong and L.A. …

1. Not all buildings are finished

2. Disc shaped buildings on top of other ones

3. The city combines flyovers, skyscrapers and neon in an unpolished way

4. Double elevated highways constructed over buildings

5. Mountains with Swiss villas

6. Super elevated highways!

7. That in some views, without too much effort, it is possible to see only concrete, and a pool

8. …or only concrete..

9. ..and more …

10. ..and even more..

11. That the bridge over the Jianling river seems tiny but is in fact huge.

Today we were back in the city we liked from the very moment we saw her…take a look…need we say more..?