Building China: Landscapes of Change

What does it mean to build a country? Beyond its dams, roads, housing developments and rapidly changing cities, China's landscapes are shaped by the everyday lives of the people who inhabit them.Building China: Landscapes of Change brings together paintings, photographs, drawings, films and objects spanning more than seventy years of transformation.

From artistic visions of socialist reconstruction in the 1950s and a British architect's photographs of China in 1975 to contemporary research into streets, markets, parks and infrastructure, the exhibition explores the relationship between what is planned and built and how places are actually lived in.The works take visitors from the changing neighbourhoods of Shanghai to the bustling food markets of Nanjing, the public parks of Shenzhen and the layered transport infrastructure of Chongqing.

They reveal how new developments reshape established ways of living, but also how people continue to make places their own through work, exchange, care and everyday encounters.Rather than presenting China's transformation as a straightforward story of high-speed urbanisation and development, the exhibition offers different perspectives on the making of its landscapes.

It invites us to look beyond monumental construction and consider the less visible relationships and practices through which spaces acquire meaning, communities sustain themselves and the work of building continues.The exhibition is part of the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the Confucius Institute at The University of Manchester.Contributors include Rujin Wang, Ziqiu Ren, Qiwei Peng, Xin Li and Deljana Iossifova from the the Urban Studies Lab, among others.