Contemporary visual culture is saturated with images of ruins and dystopian fantasies. From photographs of derelict Detroit factories to films of Godzilla ransacking Tokyo, artists and writers seem to have no shortage of creativity when it comes to imagining ruination and destruction. In contemporary China, too, avant-garde artists have been using urban ruins created by economic change as a source of inspiration. Wu Hung, a leading art historian, critic, and curator, has done path-breaking research in this area previously. In his latest book, A Story of Ruins, Wu furthers his study of Chinese ruins by placing this topic in a wider global and historical context.
Wu begins by searching for lasting ruins in premodern China, a society that tended to use timber rather than stones. This could be a daunting task. Four decades ago, historian Frederick Mote already observed that the past in Chinese culture was “a past of words, not of stones.”Footnote 5 Wu Hung thus painstakingly searches for traditional textual and visual sources that articulate the sentiment of loss and nostalgia. He shows rather convincingly that even though there were no Chinese ruins similar to those of premodern Europe, there were still plenty of expressions of the feeling of huaigu (lamenting the past) in traditional Chinese poetry and paintings.
Having carefully examined the absence of ruins in China in earlier times, Wu then discusses the birth of ruins by examining the circulation of ideas and images of the ruin between China and the West from the eighteenth century through the end of World War II. First, as picturesque ruins became a prominent feature in the Romantic sensitivity of late eighteenth-century Europe, a large number of European pictorial representations of Chinese ruins, from crumbling pagodas to decaying temples, began to emerge and circulate globally. The general history of how Western travelers and observers “Orientalized” China, rendering it as exotic and inferior, is of course well known by now. Nonetheless, Wu uses many fascinating images to illustrate concretely how picturesque aesthetics enabled European artists to imagine and visualize Chinese ruins.
Meanwhile, by the second half of the nineteenth century, the advance of photographic technology as well as the intensification of imperialist assaults on China also gave rise to new photographic images of war atrocities and destruction. Indeed, if the earlier European depictions of Chinese ruins were mainly fabrications, this later wave of visual representations of Chinese ruins was based on a new reality created by colonial violence. For example, the Yuanming Yuan (Old Summer Palace) was destroyed by Anglo-French forces during the Second Opium War (1856–60), and its ruins quickly became one of the popular picnic destinations for European and American sojourners in China. Significantly, Chinese thinkers across the political spectrum, as diverse as Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Li Dazhao (1889–1927), all referred to the Yuanming Yuan ruins as a symbol of foreign aggression and national humiliation, a theme that continues even today. Also included in Wu's discussion are images created by Chinese artists and Western observers that depict the destruction inflicted by Japan during World War II. Here, one wonders whether the inclusion of some war photographs by the Japanese military and media would help to move the discussion beyond the China/West dichotomy, and enrich the author's analysis of the circulation of images and ideas of ruin. In any case, Wu Hung effectively demonstrates that colonial violence was absolutely central to the creation of modern Chinese visual culture. He also shows that the rise of Chinese ruin aesthetics was linked to the artist's self-appointed patriotic duty of using visual arts to witness the destruction and suffering of the nation.
In the final section and the coda of his book, Wu reflects on how the visuals of ruin and destruction have come to represent the transient nature of a rapidly changing nation. This includes the sense of despair and hope in China immediately after World War II, the anxieties triggered by large-scale demolitions as a result of urban renewals in recent decades, and even the commodification of former industrial spaces by converting them into art and heritage districts in major cities today. Some of Wu's observations, especially those on the contemporary period, are built on his previous seminal works, including his influential analysis of the Chinese avant-garde art scene of the 1990s.
All in all, this is a well-researched, ambitious, and important book that should appeal greatly to anyone interested in Chinese visual culture as well as ruins in general. As always, Wu's reading of images is thorough and perceptive. This book is a real gem also because of its beautifully reproduced images from a great variety of visual sources, including paintings, prints, films, photographs, and architecture. If A Story of Ruins does not break new ground in a significant way, that is only because the author has already accomplished this in his previous work on related topics. Finally, the ongoing development of the study of modern ruin culture requires more than an analysis of the “presence and absence” of ruins and ruin culture in the visual realm. Our contemporary obsession with modern ruins or even apocalypse in general urgently calls for a new interdisciplinary understanding of this global phenomenon. Wu Hung's new book provides a useful starting point for such an endeavor.
