Weng Fen at Canton-Sardine
Through a rusted metal gate plastered with various paper signs, into a creaking elevator, thumping as it takes you to the designated floor, and lastly traversing through a dimly lit hallway, lights flickering eerily in a way that reminds one of an abandoned mall in a video game, you will find Canton-Sardine, an independent gallery in Chinatown run by two émigré art professors and curators from Guangdong province.
Once inside however, the space opens up into a high-ceilinged maze-like gallery with an elevated loft, the owner Steven peeking down from upstairs to say hello to the incoming visitors. Entering feels like exploring a secret club, the uncanniness of the space adding an additional layer of wonder.
Selected for Capture Photography Festival 2022, the exhibition showcases the work of Weng Fen, a Chinese conceptual photographer collected by the likes of the Met, MoMA, and M+ Museum. Weng first came to attention through his series Sitting on the Wall, in which a schoolgirl overlooks different rapidly industrialized landscapes from a distant wall that is sometimes dilapidated or under demolition, representing a liminal stage of transition between the past and future.
In this new series, The Vanishing Landscape, the gallery has transformed the space into a miniature golf course, with photographic works displayed along the walls, speckled with incisive captions that state as a matter-of-fact the unbridled destruction of local communities in Hainan. Weng documents the transformation of his hometown, Dongjiao Town in Wenchang County, Hainan as it develops into a large-scale satellite launch center. Weng has been invested in examining the conflicts and lived experience of the locals of the town since the beginning of the town’s modernization in 2007.
Similar to his Sitting on the Wall series, the human figures in the photographs have their backs turned towards the viewer, instead facing out to observe the changing landscape. The resignation and hopelessness felt by the local citizens can be felt through their silhouettes, the tragedy of the environmental destruction and also of their means of livelihood captured through the dramatic comparisons between the foreground and background. The golf course installation further satirizes Hainan’s status as a popular vacation destination for China’s wealthy, building elaborate and beautiful resorts on the backs of the basic livelihoods of the local citizens.
This displacement of building irrigation systems, highways, and commercial complexes that disturb the pre-existing communities, not only have an environmental impact but also represent a “loss for place in place” – a loss felt as distress produced by environmental change while the residents still reside in their home environment. Dongjiao Town’s residents are not being forcefully evacuated by any government measures, but in depriving them of irrigation water, fertile land, and displacing farm land and orchards, they have similarly become dispossessed of their home. Looking into the distance at the blue skies and shimmering high rises, the barren and parched grounds that the residents stand upon question what is traded in the name of globalization and progress.