shashasha

Between 2018 and 2021, Chinese photographer Shi Yangkun photographed three of a handful of villages that still cling to the socialist dream of Maoist China: Huaxi Village in Jiangsu, Nanjie Village in Henan, and Dazhai Village (one of the model villages of the Cultural Revolution) in Shanxi.
In his clean, objective photographs of everyday scenes, Shi Yangkun captures the reality of these places and the people who live in them, at once rich and poor, optimistic yet stuck in the past, both isolated and in inevitable exchange with China's larger society. His series examines dreams (both personal and on a much larger scale) and visions and their dependence on the surrounding reality of the world, as well as modern China's tendency to write over its own memories of the past.

The book concludes with essays in Chinese and English by Shi Hantao and Deng Tuanyuan.

“Shi’s endeavor captures a series of fleeting portraits of a historical dream that went awry but struggles to continue to the present day either in corrupted or nostalgic form. The real-ness that these photographs offer is nothing short of and nothing more than a forced direct look at these marginalized memories and the current conditions of the people that carry these memories, which are shared among a much larger demographic than these villagers.”
― from Deng Tuanyuan’s essay “Vulgar Constructivism and the Dream that No Longer Was”