Sze Tsung Leong Livres

Since 2002, Sze Tsung Leong has been photographing the dramatic changes that are transforming the cities of China, revealing a process that begins with the destruction of traditional neighborhoods and ends in the mass construction of new urban environments. He travels with a large-format view camera, visiting cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Nanjing, Pingyao and Xiamen, and the resulting highly detailed images portray the immense scale of the upheaval and of the contradictions created by its uncertain and fluctuating environment. Traditional buildings in the process of being demolished are juxtaposed against the glass walls that are about to replace them; seemingly abandoned buildings on the verge of destruction, or in the midst of construction, reveal clues of habitation; historic areas survive as a result of neglect and isolation rather than intent; and obscured in the midst of expansive, culturally ambivalent spaces, small Chinese script on indistinct signs serves as the only hint that these environments are in China. Collectively, the photographs in "History Images" capture the erasure and subsequent absence of history, and the moment of anticipation for the new future to unfold; it is an urban reality caught in the tenuous period after the end of one history and at the beginning of another.

A widening of our horizons: in his Horizons series, the British-American artist Sze Tsung Leong (*1970 in Mexico City) combines wide-angle photographs of landscapes from throughout the world that exhibit fundamental, formal similarities and rhythms by connecting them with a common horizon line. Unconventional juxtapositions allow the viewer to transcend distances and boundaries and to leap from the glacial lake of Jökulsárlón in Iceland to the tropical Indian Ocean, from the Israeli separation barrier to the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, from the suburbs of California to the plains of Kenya. More than ten years in the making, Horizons gives an unfurled view of the surface of the globe.Thought-provoking and witty, poignant and playful, the series is above all a cumulative reminder of the complex and perpetually transforming relations between regions, cultures, and nations that constitute the planet we live on.