published on in blog

Naked city:lost in Shanghai with Liu Tao in pictures | Art and design

Naked city: lost in Shanghai with Liu Tao – in pictures

The famed Chinese street photographer trains his lens on the bored and the dispossessed in his rambles through city streets challenged by the relentless march of progress

Main image: 刘涛 – A Weak Road n°1 – 2012, by Liu Tao. Photograph: Liu Tao

Thu 17 May 2018 02.00 EDT Last modified on Wed 19 Oct 2022 10.18 EDT

  • Shanghai Tian Wai n°11, 2014

    This 2014 series Shanghai Tian Wa saw Chinese photographer Liu Tao train his lens on two distinct districts in Shanghai. Liu Tao is exhibiting at the ON Gallery booth at Photo London, from 17-20 May at Somerset House, London

  • Shanghai Tian Wai n°17, 2014

    The project takes its title from these two districts, on either bank of the Suzhou river: Tian refers to Tian Tong Lu, the name of a street that runs through this popular district under construction…

  • Shanghai Tian Wai n°5, 2014

    … while Wai refers to Wai Tan, which encapsulates the Bund, central Shanghai’s famous waterfront

  • Shanghai Tian Wai n°26, 2014

    This series was an attempt to document an ever-changing city and the things it loses, as working-class neighbourhoods give way to ever-more modern urban development

  • Shanghai Tian Wai n°24, 2014

    Liu Tao spent days and nights, traipsing through these neighbourhoods, seeking out fragments of the lives lived there, and appraising how they relate to his own childhood

  • Shanghai Tian Wai n°3, 2014

    These images underscore how Tao has grappled with China’s relentless modernisation, and the uprootedness – both geographical and psychological – it has wrought on its people

  • Hungry Beijing n°2, 2013

    An earlier series, Hungry Beijing, saw Tao stage naked self-portraits, in a poetic meditation on power and human fragility

  • A Hungry Beijing n°72, 2013

    ‘Power is like pollution: it’s everywhere,’ Tao told Fish Eye Magazine. ‘Being naked dissolves this pollution’

  • A Weak Road n°1, 2012

    Nakedness is a recurrent theme in Beijing-based photographer’s work. ‘When I was a kid, in China,’ he has said, ‘I learned that to humiliate someone, you needed to undress him and to expose him in public’

  • A Hungry Beijing n°10, 2013

    For Tao, dressing is an attempt to hide a person’s fragility, whereas undressing reconnects us with nature – it’s a return to the dust the world is made of
Topics

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJmiqa6vsMOeqqKfnmS0orjLnqmyZ2Jlfnl7zJqwaGlnZLuit8SdZJyhpK56rbvSrWSipl2otaK6xqGYomWnnsGpecuirGaskaR6qrqMqaCcrKWnsrQ%3D