couchprojects

• description: order online: http://www.blurb.com/user/store/angiewaller

  "Home of Tycoons," titled after a condominium complex in China, investigates real estate marketing in Beijing during 2004 – only moments before the old city would be completely demolished and replaced by high-rises, stadiums and suburban gated communities.

  Through photo documentation and sampling of poorly translated Chinese to English sales materials, "Tycoons" explores the fantastical side of home ownership in China. An example, the brochure for Beijing's Long Island community declares – "This isn't an age that dare not speak up wealth, this is an age that needs to use wealth to sublime one's life."

  Other residences studied include: MoMA, SOHO and The Home of Tycoons.

  10x8 inches (25x20 cm) 104 pages

Long Island Bedroom, 2004; Digital C-Print; 18″ x 24″

• description: Images documenting Beijing neighborhoods that sample from Western architecture.

video still

• description: Video loop for projection (1:30)

  New Babylon was inspired by Alexandre Medvedkin’s New Moscow (1939), where virtual renderings of Stalin’s Moscow were played in reverse so that the old city replaces the new. The source for my video, is a 3-D fly-through bootlegged from a Beijing real estate development sales office. The purpose of the original video was to celebrate decadence and to entice potential condominium buyers with Beijing’s modernization. My version plays the promotional video in reverse with grainy artifacts, producing an oppositional meaning by showing the destruction of a major highway and the collapse of a high-rise apartment building complex.