Hin Chua's Magnetic North

Before I arrived in Beijing, there was a period of a couple of days where I was feeling extremely apprehensive about returning to China. I had last visited Shanghai at the end of 2007, when my process of working was far less disciplined (it was almost completely free-form to be honest: turn up at a random location, walk around for several hours without any map or any idea I where I was going and then try to find my way back home). Since then, my practice has evolved considerably in terms of research: mapping of locations via Google Maps, utilising Street View for reconnaissance and plotting an appropriate path with suitable end point (so that I didn’t have to return home the way I came).

China doesn’t offer any of these luxuries. The maps are woefully incomplete: you have a satellite view but the accompanying text overlays detailing road and building names are missing. Transport is sketchier than the rest of East Asia and then there’s the language problem. As a result, I was coming in cold, far more unprepared than any other time I had been in the last five years. I had grown too accustomed to the comfort blanket afforded by the illusion of structure and preparation and its absence was unsettling.

But what escaped my memory was that unlike the USA, Western Europe  or pretty much everywhere else I’ve photographed, in China it doesn’t really matter. Just head in a random direction and things get naturally turn visually interesting. At the edges of cities, there’s this air of chaos, tumult, disruption and literally, transition. It’s not the organised graphic disruption of more developed East Asian countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan or Japan. It doesn’t share the air of fetid decay that much of my experience in India seemed to involve. It’s just uniquely Chinese.

Wide dusty roads filled with honking cars and electric bikes. Crumbling walls tattooed  with strange hand-written multi-digit numbers. The sky blanketed in a permanent ochre haze. Packs of small dogs eyeing you insouciantly across the street. And always without exception, the unending construction. Eventually I found myself walking out of the city into fog-shrouded hills that was a literal recreation of a traditional Chinese landscape painting.

I had forgotten how enjoyable all of this was. I needed to remember that China is all about the small details that you can’t plan for or research anyway. You just need to get out and go.