Chen Shaoxiong was one of the founders of the contemporary art scene in Guangzhou. He initiated the Big Tail Elephant Group, with the purpose of dealing with political and social themes. In 2003, he and the group took part in the Venice Biennial. Since then his work has been seen in all of the large exhibitions of Chinese art in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere around the world.

Chen Shaoxiong realizes works about his theme—the rapid transformation of China’s cities—in different media and techniques, using photography as his basis. In his series Collective Memory, photographs of the Great Hall of the People, the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square, and of modern skyscrapers such as the Dawang Tower in Beijing are rastered, the pixels enlarged and then transferred to canvas or rice paper. The actual image is created in an action involving many people, thousands of whom dip their fingers into ink to blacken the dots with their inky fingerprints. Each individual fingerprint represents an individual memory of the urban architecture, and together, they form a collective memory of the city’s inhabitants.

The rapid process of urbanization is changing the familiar image of cities everywhere and every day in China. Today’s reality might already be a memory by tomorrow. Streetscape is Chen Shaoxiong’s reaction to the rapid transformation of his home town, Guangzhou. He photographs the streets: vehicles, pedestrians, benches, advertising, and much more. He carefully clips out people and things, and then rearranges them into new scenes, as if they were props on a stage. Everything is miniaturized, flat, theatrical: the pulsating tempo of the big city comes to a standstill