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Once Upon a Time in the East BAS PRINCEN: ECHOES OF A LANDSCAPE The small harbour town of Xiamen is one of China’s earliest Special Economic Zones (SEZ), installed in the 1980s as one of Deng Xiaoping’s experimental reforms that were to turn China into a ‘socialist market economy’. Xiamen and the surrounding countryside has since developed into a region with more than five million inhabitants, which draws ever more immigrants from the hinterland. The Dutch photographer Bas Princen stayed in Xiamen for four months and registered the further development of the SEZ, with extra roads, a cruise harbour, factories and lodgings for the masses of underpaid ‘fortune’ hunters that continue to pour in. Text by Veerle Devos Photographs by Bas Princen Courtesy Van Kranendonk Gallery, The Hague
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Future Olympic park, 2007
Future highway, 2007
Although Bas Princen’s visual vocabulary hits the topical nerve, he makes no claims to journalistic ambitions. Instead, the architect-photographer likes to fix those present-day landscapes that are reminiscent of vistas known from film, photography and paintings, and which are stored in our collective memory. ‘Showing 100 year-old photography in images of today is more important to me than showing presentday China,’ he says. Princen’s personal archive, which he has been assembling since his student days, contains thousands of images of landscapes. This collection is his starting point when taking pictures today. ‘We never think something is beautiful for no reason, it has everything to do with references of what we have been taught to find beautiful and have unconsciously stored in our memory.’ When Princen is in Xiamen and rides his bike past a site where a group of labourers are constructing a cruise harbour with primitive means, he involuntarily thinks about images that the pioneers of photography made of the American Far West around 1900. ‘Of course, the picture [in Xiamen] also tells the intriguing story of how present day China is finished practically by hand. Look at the men in their swimming trunks, ready to dive into the holes in the ground with a stick of dynamite. Despite the primitive means, this will turn into a luxurious cruise harbour...’ Often it isn’t quite clear where Princen’s image becomes artificial and where nature remains intact. To decode and decipher what exactly is going on in the picture can be opaque. Look, for instance, at the eerie picture of labourers working on a roof. Are they building the house up, or are they tearing it down? The 18
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Future harbour III, 2007
movements they make seem unreal. What the picture shows is how, by higher order, houses are demolished to make place for a new road. The dwellings used to belong to so-called ‘smart farmers’: they were the only ones allowed to own land. As soon as Xiamen turned into a SEZ, the smart farmers turned into slum landlords, who on their little plot of ground piled up floor upon floor upon floor, to get the most out of the ‘floating populations’ that moved from the countryside to the new urban environment. The increase in demand for houses made the farmers prosperous, a turn of events to which the Chinese authorities took great exception. It is therefore no coincidence that big roads are being laid right through these villages, causing the houses to be torn down. In many senses, it’s quite logical for a Dutchman to be so preoccupied with ‘landscape’. With around 40 per cent of its land under sea level, the Netherlands has experienced many dramatic floods, and it is only in the last decades that it has succeeded in mastering the sea and winning land back from its shores. ‘The landscape in the Netherlands is man-made. I grew up in an invented landscape, a landscape that had to be drained and won over,’ is how Princes explains his passion for an artificial reality. # The pictures of Bas Princen are part of the Utopian Debris series and were shown during Art Rotterdam 2008 www.artrotterdam.nl, www.vankranendonk.nl
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