Xing Danwen
(from On the Edge, Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West, by Britta Erickson, Cantor Arts Centre 2006)

As a photographer Xing Danwen (b. 1967) has shifted between the roles of photojournalist and artist, but is being pulled inexorably toward a deeper exploration of photography as an artistic medium. She shot her first rolls of film at Tiananmen Square, during the historic demonstrations there in 1989.1 From 1990 to 1993 she traveled the far-flung reaches of China, producing stunning black-and-white portraits of the people of Gansu, Xinjiang, and Tibet, and of the coal miners of Datong. Back in Beijing, fortuitously connecting with the newly formed East Village artists' community, she became one of the two important photographers documenting the germinating performance art movement (the other being Rong Rong). Her edgy style (fig. 62) perfectly complemented the attitude of the moment.'

From 1998 to 2000, Xing studied photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. There she moved away from documentary work to create the experimental Scroll series (fig. 63). Double-exposed and mounted in the traditional Chinese handscroll format, the photographs of the series evoke a dreamy nostalgia with an ironic twist. The nostalgia is derived both from the artist's distance from her homeland and from her increasing sensitivity to the dislocation between modernity and tradition.

This awareness was amplified when she moved back to China and traveled to Guangdong Province on assignment. Her task was to document the villages where imported electronic trash is recycled (fig. 64). Although a growing quantity of such trash is being generated by China's own electronics industry, most of it is imported from the United States, with smaller but significant amounts coming from Japan and South Korea., the world exports seventy percent of its electronic trash to China. In her artist's statement for the disCONNEXION series, Xing Danwen wrote of her trips to the area:
Along the coast, more than a hundred thousand people from Guangdong and migrant workers from Western China make their living by recycling piles of computer and electronic trash, operating in rough environment[all and social conditions.... Confronted with vast piles of dead and deconstructed machines, the overwhelming number of cords, wires, chips and parts, with the clear indication of the company names, model numbers, and even [names of] individual employees, I felt shocked....

Modernization and globalization shape urban development. In my country, I have experienced and witnessed the changes that have taken place under the influence of Western modernity. These changes have contributed to a strong and powerful push for development in China, but at the same time they have led to a big environmental and social nightmare in remote corners of China.

The trash is shipped to coastal distribution centers, where villagers buy the trash, process it, and resell what they can salvage. Typically, each village special­izes in one product, such as wires, cell phones, monitors, or circuit boards. This recycling provides a livelihood for a hundred thousand people. But those people do not understand the environmental degrada­tion brought about by the haphazard manner in which they reclaim recyclable materials: the drinking water in the town of Guiyu, for example, contains twenty-four hundred times the level of lead considered safe by the World Health Organization. But the side effects of burning plastic components to retrieve heavy metals are more immediately apparent than those of lead in the water: eighty percent of the children in some towns suffer from respiratory and skin diseases, a development not lost on the villagers. Xing Danwen completed her journalistic assignment over the course of several visits to the villages. Although shocked by the situation, she also recognized the allure of the homogeneous mountains of e-trash. Her disCONNEXION series photographs  (figs. 65-67) engage the viewer by presenting close-ups of materials that appear familiar, yet are somehow also strange-once-coveted high-tech consumer goods reduced to piles to be mined for raw materials.