Young Men, Red Pavilion, Yanliuqing, Tianjin City, China (PRC)

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Artist Philipp Scholz Rittermann(American, born Peru, 1955)American, born Peru, 1955

CultureAmerican

Titles

Young Men, Red Pavilion, Yanliuqing, Tianjin City, China (PRC)

Date2010, printed 2011

Place depictedTianjin City, China

MediumInkjet print

DimensionsImage: 21 5/8 × 39 in. (54.9 × 99.1 cm)
Frame (outer): 22 7/8 × 40 3/8 × 2 in. (58.1 × 102.6 × 5.1 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Photo Forum 2011

Object number2011.962

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

Provenance[Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco]; purchased by MFAH, 2011.
Published References ArtForum, August 22, 2011: "Philipp Scholz Rittermann: 05.28.11 - 09.05.11 Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla" by Russell Burge http://www.artforum.com/archive/id=28782 Text: In 2002, the Chinese government began refitting the Grand Canal, a two-millennia-old artery and one of China’s major industrial channels. In 2009, Philipp Scholz Rittermann, a German-born, San Diego–based photographer, traveled the waterway and documented the activity along its banks. The results are images of a country in flux: In Young Men, Red Pavilion (all works cited, 2010), a group of youths face the camera in modern attire; behind them, two figures look out at the waterfront in Qing Dynasty vestments. In the nighttime Hutong Neighborhood and Huaneng Coal Fired Power Plant, leviathan smokestacks of a coal plant loom over alleyway residences, while through extended exposure Rittermann has ghosted a man and his dog emerging from an older-looking stone structure. The crispness of these high-res images contrasts with the soft focus of their visual poetry: In the canal-for-country synecdoche, exactly what past is lost, and to whom, remains outside the frame. Artists like Edward Burtynsky have given form to the anxious superlatives through which the West articulates Chinese modernity, and Ritterman’s travelogue is writ with these fretful metaphors. Vastness and change, industrial speed and industrial power: These take precedence over the concerns of the local. See, for instance, High-Rise Apartment Blocks Under Construction, which captures a sky sculpted by the tiered contours of an ascending residential complex, and Train Station Construction and Street Sweeper, which reveals a spiderlike superstructure taking form behind a dilapidated cityscape. The political contests that have framed discourses on the canal––questions of development, water allocation, and environmental damage, questions that throw into doubt the nationwide South-North Water Diversion Project––are themselves ghosted, murky but persistent in teams of barges loaded with dredged sand, in factories and smokestacks along the waterfront, and in the flow of water inexorably north, toward Beijing. Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Inscribed on verso center in black ink: YOUNG MEN, RED PAVILION, YANLIUQING, TIANJIN CITY, CHINA (PRC) 2010 / Print # 2/10 IMAGE DIMENSIONS 21.5" x 39" / 2010:29 S(2/10)11 / ARCHIVAL INKJET PRINT MOUNTED TO DIBOND

Signed verso center right in black ink: P.ScholzR / PHILLIP SCHOLZ RITTERMANN / www.rittermann.com

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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