| | | Chen Jiagang
The Great Third Front
During the 1960s, faced with an unstable foreign policy as well as a high demand for resources, the People’s Republic of China was forced to delocalize most of its heavy industry and armament factories. Originally situated on China’s coasts and in the Northeast, close to the Russian border, these factories were relocated to the heart of the nation, hidden away and better protected.
Over a short period of time, millions of workers were encouraged to move to the mountainous regions of Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunman, where hundreds of factories were quickly constructed, in turn stimulating local economies. Such a large-scale relocation effort was unprecedented in China, and the "Third Front" was born. Villages transformed overnight into dormitory towns to house the influx of laborers, and former hamlets boomed into prosperous industrial zones.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping initiated drastic economic reform emphasizing light industry and export-led growth. The sudden shift in policy hit the industrial zones of the "Third Front" hard, gutting the villages with the same speed at which they were constructed. Once a symbol of Maoist national pride, Xiaoping’s new economic policy rendered the "Third Front" obsolete. Factories were boarded up, and laborers driven back to their origin. The "Third Front" was now synonymous with industrial wasteland, a relic in China’s unflinching march towards modernization.
Employing a distorted wide-angle lens, Chen Jiagang records the artifacts of the "Great Third Front" in a palette of neutral grays, purples, and blues. A self-described expressionist photographer, Jiagang’s photographs conjure a type of industrial fairy tale. With the digital addition of an element of the fantastic, a young girl elegantly dressed in the Maoist collar and dress (Qipao), Jiagang’s photographs allude to a former glory, a nostalgia for a period now lost to the more powerful forces propelling China into the future.
Born in 1962 in Chong Qing, Chen Jiagang began his career as a celebrated architect and real estate developer before making the transition to photography. In 1999, he was named one of twelve "Outstanding Young Architects" by the United Nations. Jiagang is the founder of the Sichuan Upriver Museum, the first private museum in China and the author of Third Front (Timezone 8 Limited, 2007). He currently lives and works in Beijing.
[Press release - Edwynn Houk Gallery]
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