Mathieu Borysevicz

The Yangtze River Delta (YRD) in China is one of the most urbanized places on the planet. In the 100,000 square kilometers between Nanjing to Ningbo there are over 90 million people inhabiting 16 mega-cities. This exhibition culls together the photography and video work from Mathieu Borysevicz, an artist from NYC who has been probing the heart of the YRD for many years. Borysevicz presents his allegorical Changning District Orchestra, a three-channeled video installation that uses the soundtrack of the city as a vehicle to expose the colorful contradictions of Shanghai’s contemporary urbanity. In this poetic work a plastic bottle becomes a metaphor for the cycles of life, love, reincarnation, as well as social discord and an environmental prophecy.

The exhibition will also feature the photographic montage work from Borysevicz’s critically acclaimed and award winning project Learning from Hangzhou. Part social investigation, part urban critique Borysevicz presents a developing city codified along the edges of its own physical utterances. Patterns of demolition and construction, architectural eclecticism, graffiti, expressions of cultural desire, rampant consumerism and the tenuous relationship between architecture and signage, all collide in an orgy of permissiveness—in a city once praised by Marco Polo as “the finest and noblest in the world.”