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From tai chi to Taoism, China has a rich cultural and spiritual heritage. It boasts the world's oldest written language, one of the world's oldest civilizations, and some of the world's finest examples of ancient art and architecture.
For the past couple of decades, China has also seen one of the most unprecedented periods of economic growth anywhere in the world. It's pretty much common knowledge that the influx of money into the Chinese economy has essentially rendered China's heritage of communism irrelevant, but there have been other, less publicized effects as well. China's ancient art and architecture, for example, has been getting bulldozed by the acre.
Photographer and writer Elizabeth Gill Lui, an alumna of Colorado College and the University of Denver, wants to change that. In her new book, Open Hearts Open Doors: Reflections on China's Past and Future, Gill Lui painstakingly documents those examples of China's ancient culture that remain through pristine, beautifully framed photographs shot during time she's spent in China since 1995.
The book features a number of essays on culture and the role art and architecture play in it, but the main attraction is Gill Lui's photography.
As a matter of personal preference, I generally find pictures of people more visually engaging than pictures of things, but Gill Lui's work reverses that for me. Gill Lui has a gift for framing a shot, for catching a thing at precisely the right moment in time, at the right angle, in the right light, to capture every modicum of fleeting beauty in a thing.
And though her human subjects are interesting, she somehow can't make me care about them as much as I care about her buildings.
Her scenery shots are heartbreakingly beautiful, and made more so considering their context: the beauty on display here is seen in the light of impermanence. It's a reminder not only of what Lui intends it as-that preservation is important, even in the face of progress-but also of the inherent transience of what we see-and what we are.
Nevertheless, Gill Lui's point is somewhat more pragmatic: "We can choose to do things so that they may endure," she says, "even in the commodity-driven times in which we live."
It's a big undertaking, and the current figures are dramatic: "Since 1994 in Shanghai alone," says Zheng Shiling of Tongji University in the prologue to the book, "over 30 million square meters of historic infrastructure, comprised of countless old buildings, have been demolished." Shiling acknowledges that there are laws in place to prevent this to some degree, but points to poor enforcement and few economic incentives toward preservation.
For Gill Lui, the book is as emotionally centered as it is goal-driven. In spite of the book's "historical roots," Gill Lui says, "This is not a historical primer, but a work that is meant more as poetry than prose.
"This book is my effort to sort through these issues and make sense of the complexity of what China has come to mean to me," she says.
Not that Gill Lui's hopes for her subject matter and her emotional connection to it are two separate things; her cry for preservation stems from her love of what's to be preserved. And indeed, Gill Lui is passionate: "I feel justified in calling such misguided annihilation of historical relics a crime against humanity," she says.
However melodramatic pronouncements like that might be, Gill Lui's photography is powerful enough to make you believe she's right.
Her photography will be on display at the Camera Obscura Gallery at 1309 Bannock starting March 6, when there will be a reception for the artist and a book signing.
Gill Lui hopes that people will see the book as an invitation to embrace and protect our common heritage as human beings: "Humanly created things are precious," she says. "Those that are exceptional are few and far between, and when they are gone, they are gone forever."
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