-- Artist statement
A series of images documenting life during Shanghai’s strict lockdown. Taken in the final weeks of March and early April 2022 when the city phased in district lockdowns at the end of March and then in April when the city was put under a complete lockdown. The majority of the images are around Huangpu district and Shanghai’s iconic Bund area while its residents endured the first weeks of a lockdown that has continued on long after anyone could have possibly imagined. The lockdown coincided with my departure from Shanghai after many years living there so it was a sad end to a memorable experience. I left wondering if the city I knew and loved would ever return.
Anthony Reed is an English born photographer and filmmaker who works and lives in Shanghai. His practice broadly explores the subjective interpretation of the built environment and the rapid processes of change in China. In his artworks we sense the city's dense urban fabric. Tightly packed apartment blocks, recently demolished lots, abandoned interiors, isolated individuals, towering neon clad skyscrapers. All combine to reveal the cities’ multifaceted nature. People are transforming the world but also simultaneously being transformed by it. Reed enjoys to present the transformation of ‘the physical matter’ through time, and also the never-changing intangible loneliness and solitude that is attached to the people in the great metropolises.
For him, cities are where lonely people stay crowded together. He captures this contrast in his pictures and explores abstract emotions with figurative imagery. Walking like the ‘Long March’ is his usual methodology, as it takes him to the clearest state of mind. Searching without a destination with a camera is his own therapeutic way of photographic practice. The world is a thriving, promising, and sometimes depressing place. Photography is his optical meditation and reaction mechanism to deal with the world in the vortex of turbulence. With millions of people living in one place, the extensive walking, exploration and documenting is a way of recording these multiple facades of the world in drastic transition, no matter if it is progressing or regressing, as they carve marks in history, the imagery represents slices of moments of the collective memories.
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