China West

China West is a visual exploration of the impact rapid economic development has had on western China’s landscape. This work focuses on the dwindling interstice left between nature and urbanization, a space, which, perhaps more than any other, reveals the true process of change.

The transformation of our environment occurs in successive layers, at a different pace according to undefined cycles. Nothing is permanent, territories are unsettled, continually changing, transformed by natural causes or by human activity.

In western China, the pace of economic development has ushered in a new unprecedented period of transformation, one that has radically redefined the topography of the region while displacing significant parts of its population from rural areas to vast, newly-built mega cities.

In October 2012 the China Pacific Construction group began leveling seven hundred mountains in order to expand by 500 square miles the western city of Lanzhou, in the Gansu province. This controversial multi billion-dollar project is part of the fifth national development zone, a plan aimed at increasing the regional GDP to 33 billion dollars by 2030, which would make the province the fastest growing economic zone in the world.

Lanzhou is the starting point of China West: a journey that explores the urban and environmental mutations of western China, a vast territory that ranges from the Sichuan province in the south, to Inner Mongolia in the north.

During my odyssey, I have navigated, as closely as possible, the fine, and at times almost impossible to define border that separates urbanization from nature. This project delves into these ambiguous spaces, gray zones of development where semi-deserted landscapes carry a profound ambivalence, suggesting at the same time fecundity and sterility, a promise and nothingness. These gray areas, trapped between city and nature, are charged with opposing energies, and as such offer an aperture into a physical and cultural transformation occurring on a scale and at speed almost impossible to witness.