The China Series

The Boca Raton Museum of Art is pleased to announce the opening of Documenting China: Contemporary Photography and Social Change and Edward Burtynsky: The China Series. These exhibitions will be on display through June 18.

Edward Burtynsky: The China Series
The large format color photography of internationally-acclaimed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is awe-inspiring. Exquisitely detailed and exactingly rendered, these large scale (5 x 6 feet) photographs document modern day Chinese industrialization. Drawing from his most recent trips to China, this exhibition includes Burtynsky's images of industrial factory workers, the attempts at recycling, and the abandoned manufacturing plants, showing the behind-the-scenes working of the world we hardly see, even though we come into contact with its results on a daily basis. The sheer numbers of seemingly identical workers and the mass quantities of discarded parts create images that are at once arresting and unsettling. Also included are images from the controversial Three Gorges Dam project, by far the world's most extravagant and environmentally-altering hydroelectric engineering feat. Burtynsky's images are meant, in the artist's own words, "as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and feat." Edward Burtynsky: The China Series was organized by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.