TRACES (China, 2010)
In a country that is undergoing as furious a development as China is, the landscape itself is an ex-pression of that change. Great swathes of land that have been used for agriculture for millennia have fallen prey to industrial forces. In seemingly extraterrestrial, almost abstract panoramas Ian Teh’s TRACES lets us see how the Chinese landscape is being recreated. These are images without the presence of man – at first sight epic, cinematographic and breathtaking – but at the same time they reveal what awesome power man has to reduce the landscape to a slave of his undertakings. The layers of recent history are exposed, as in an archaeological dig. In this way Teh puts his audience in an ambiguous position. Will they be seduced by the beauty of the image, or will the real signifi-cance push its way through?
