China [Sur]real
by Mark Henley
Timezone8, HK$320
A migrant worker in silhouette clasping a bunch of white plastic bags emerges from an underground walkway, with the Oriental Pearl TV Tower looming. It's one of those Shanghai days when someone seems to have forgotten to include the weather - a neutral day with a dull white sky. The man is climbing the steps, his raised leg suggesting progress, determination. He's going forward, but the blank horizon and the threatening aspect of the TV tower hint at uncertainty.
Many of the photographs in China [Sur]real, by long-time Hong Kong resident Mark Henley, have a compelling literary quality, like scenes from a short story or a novel. The book is a narrative, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and the characters are the people of the mainland. The slight girl in Xian in 1996 wearing a T-shirt with the message 'Bust Conscious' tells a story of a changing China and is humorous, like many of the photographs in this vivid book. But the pathos is combined with a sense of continuity, a feeling that as the girl walks out of the picture with her companion, their story will keep going beyond the frame. The images are not static, but lively and insightful episodes.
There are elements of the propaganda images of the Cultural Revolution in a photograph of a young man watering fields in Shenzhen in 1993 - the tilled green fields and his blue shirt are so vivid they look hand-tinted, while the entire backdrop is taken up with bamboo scaffolding on construction sites.
