Workers return home after a days work at a nearby coal power station and steel plant. Behind in the distance is a new cooling tower that has just been erected, the station is increasing its capacity. Tonghua, China.

China’s Massive Changes Chronicled Over 15 Years

Ian Teh on the Red Dragon’s exploding industry and environmental deathscapes, the beauty of images (for advertising) and why Facebook is like bad TV

By Alisha Sett

As a young photographer in search of his identity Ian Teh traveled to the hinterlands of China. It was 1999 and the country was celebrating its 50th anniversary as a Communist nation with much fanfare. Under the leadership of then-President Jiang Zemin, there was a renewed commitment to Deng Xiaoping’s program of economic reforms. Capitalistic growth would skyrocket in the coming decade. From long travels among industrial towns, Teh intuited that the country lay on the cusp of immense change. So he made a promise to himself — to keep returning to these spaces that were to become the source of China’s global power.

15 years later, the promise has been kept. As China has sashayed onto the world stage with great aplomb, Teh has become part of a small group of photographers, writers, journalists and artists that have traveled and lived far beyond the lights of Shanghai and Beijing and have attempted to capture the daily lives of those fueling China’s “growth story”.

Teh has put out two monographs on China — Undercurrents (2008) and Traces (2011). His approach changed dramatically between the two bodies of work. From the raw and visceral vision showing chance encounters and rambling journeys of Undercurrents he switched to the more formal presentation of large static panoramas in Traces. These newer panoramic landscapes are sites of environmental erosion and industrial invasion. Teh’s use of colour has remained unfailingly subtle — a palette of greys and pastels that was far ahead of his time when he first began to work with it.

I sat down with Teh to discuss his evolution across two decades.

Waitress. Hunchun, China.

Alisha Sett: Let’s talk about your first book — Undercurrents. Why did you choose to work in China?

Ian Teh (IT): When I first traveled to China in 1999 I had seen enough news to know that the country was going through colossal changes. You had had the Tiananmen Square Massacre but you also had evocative documentary stories showing the indigenous tribes’ unique way of life. There were so many things that fascinated me about that country.

Even before I knew how to use the camera properly, I wrote down what I was trying to achieve. I had this grand scheme about showing the growing wealth gap, the changes that were occurring from the countryside to the city.

Those themes are universal. So why China? Because I sensed this massive energy and massive change.

The destroyed old city, soon to be submerged upon the completion of the Three Gorges dam. Wanzhou, China.

AS: Could you talk more about that? For those of us who only know China through the media we have, broadly, two competing or coexisting visions — a state without any sense of democracy and a deep history of human rights abuse as against the shining modern towers of Shanghai and a booming economy towards which other developing economies should aspire.

IT: What connected with me was the palpable sense, through the people I met and the communities I went through, the towns that I went through, that people were really curious, people were really hungry.

If you think about China’s recent history, the 90s represented some shift from a state controlled communist society. Economic shackles were loosened and that created a burst of energy.

I tend to compare it to America. The fundamental difference between China and America and how they grew is that in America there was a shortage of labor and so there was a need to innovate. The industrial revolution represented a way of somewhat doing away with labor or making the mass production process easier to manage. You can also say that about Britain.

China doesn’t have that problem. It has a huge amount of labor and so there was less innovation for a period of time. The initial growth was very much about factories and producing for the West. It’s only in the later stages that they thought about innovating. Now when you look at China, you see these spurts where China is competing on a world-class level on several fronts.

But I’m describing an era that’s still ongoing. When I was there, as my ignorant self with very little knowledge, I sensed that pace and that hunger, and that made me want to keep coming back. And I didn’t have any answers to what I was really looking for.

1. The Yangtze River. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the largest in the world will displace 1.5 million people and submerge the cities, towns and villages along a 700km stretch on China’s longest river. Chongqing, China. 2.An old passenger boat on the waters of the Yangtze River by the Three Gorges. Hubei, China. 3. A woman, one of the last inhabitants, crosses the oldest bridge in the city a few days before it is due to be demolished. Wanzhou, China. 4. A displaced family relocating by boat. Yangtze river. China. 5. The Three Gorges before the dam was completed and the water levels raised by 180 metres. Yangtze River, China.

AS: Why was the visual language — photography in particular — your choice of exploration?

IT: Photography is largely evocative in the way we use it. Not enough is said about the fact that we rely on people’s ability to project their own emotions, their own ideas and their own experiences to help fill out the rest of the story. The ability to evoke a sense of the story is an invitation to understand the story deeper. An invitation to create an awareness about something that maybe someone would never want to pick up a book or a dense article to actually read. It’s the introduction.

I always struggle with the idea, when you look at photojournalism, or you look at documentary photography, most of these things imply the ability to disseminate information. But I think photography is actually a very poor disseminator of information. To think that photography is a way to communicate a story in depth… I think we’re deceiving ourselves. But through evoking, it connects with the emotional part of one self and it’s for that reason that it’s such an effective tool for advertising.

If you really want to create a comprehensive sense of what that subject is about you need something else to support photography. The medium has been around for over a 100 years. The way of disseminating has evolved. In the early years people were less exposed, the way they connected to a photograph was visceral.

“Photography is actually a very poor disseminator of information. […] But through evoking, photography connects with the emotional part of one self. For that reason it’s an effective tool for advertising.” — Ian Teh.

The constant experience of video changes that because it is how we experience life. It tends to pass. You never really see all the details. What photography does, which is very unique, is to explore a single moment. A photographer sharpens his ability to see all the crucial elements that are within a frame. He captures that moment to create an opportunity to explore — something that you can only do in video if you freeze frame.

I spend a lot of time pondering about how to use what I understand about photography to better tell a story, to express an idea, to communicate an issue. One of the most unfortunate things about the fact that there is less money now is that there is less of an ability to explore. In order to experiment you need room to play and not to worry about where the funds are coming from.

AS: So what would you say to younger photographers still coming to grips with the medium?

IT: When you’re starting out your perception of the photographic world is like a small room whose walls you can touch. Perhaps what you become connected to — the thing that immediately attracts you — may be a type of light or a type of subject. And so you pursue those images because that’s a gut attraction.

But… when you really try to understand the meaning of a word, can you know it by reading its definition in the dictionary? The word has so many nuances that you never learn through a dictionary, you learn it through the context. You may understand how language functions if someone explains it but that understanding will be narrow. You may sense its wider capabilities but you won’t know it till you’ve experienced it and used it in its many different contexts — that’s when it becomes a part of you. Through that process you start to own the language, it becomes instinctive.

Ngoring Lake. Sanjiangyuan National Nature Reserve, Qinghai, China. 2014. In the 1990s, China’s Yellow River began to dry up, and in 1997 it failed to reach the sea for several months. In an effort to address the problem, government officials launched a scheme to protect the river’s source, a region about the size of Illinois called Sanjiangyuan (“Three River Source”) in northwest Qinghai province, which is also home to the sources of the Yangtze and Mekong rivers. The Sanjiangyuan National Nature Reserve was established in 2000. Since then, Ngoring Lake, the largest of the lakes in the Reserve, has seen its water levels rising and is now larger than its historical average. Local officials claim this is proof that the government’s environmental preservation efforts have been successful, but recent research by climate scientists suggests a more worrying explanation for rising water levels: not only is climate change thought to be responsible for increased rainfall and snowfall in the area, it has also caused, by some estimates, up to a fifth of the permafrost which covers 80% of the plateau to melt.

Mountain Range. Anemaqen, Qinghai, China. 2014. The Tibetan plateau stretches north from the foot of the Himalaya Mountain Range. Even so, the plateau has an average elevation of more than 5,000 meters. Scientists call it “the third pole” because of its influence on the earth’s climate. This land mass rising high into the earth’s atmosphere, governs the Asian weather system, with its lakes, glaciers, and wetlands acting as a huge water tower. Millions of people get their water from the great rivers — the Yellow, the Yangtze, and the Mekong — that are linked to the plateau. Over the past forty years, the plateau has been warming much faster than the rest of the world, at a rate of 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. The glaciers of the Himalayas are melting at an accelerating rate and the permafrost across the plateau continues to warm. These problems are not China’s alone, as internationally shared water basins intensify the already strained hydropolitics of the region.

Cityscape. Lanzhou, Gansu, China, 2011. The expansive cityscape of Lanzhou cloaked in a polluted haze. Since 1949, the city, once a former Silk Road trading post, has morphed from the capital of a poverty-stricken province into the heart of a major industrial area. It is the center of the country’s petrochemical industry and is a key regional transport hub between eastern and western China. Among the country’s 660 cities, more than 400 lack sufficient water, while over 100 suffer from severe shortages. Lanzhou is the largest and first city on the Yellow River but is often better known for its massive discharge of industrial and human waste. According to recent reports by the Chinese government and international NGOs like the Blacksmith Institute, Lanzhou is China’s most polluted city and one of the 30 most polluted cities in the world.

Banks of the Yellow River. Hejin, Shanxi, China, 2011. A couple sits by the banks of the only remaining undeveloped section of the Yellow River on the outskirts of the small city of Hejin. Although China has roughly the same amount of water as the United States, its population is nearly five times greater, making water a precious and increasingly sought-after resource. The heavily industrialized area around Hejin contains some of the most polluted waters in the river. In 2007, after surveying the river, the Yellow River Conservancy Commission stated that one third of the river system had pollution levels that made the water unfit for drinking, aquaculture, industrial use, or even agriculture.

Yellow River. Sanmenxia, Henan, China, 2011. The Yellow River viewed from the top of the controversial Sanmenxia Dam. Heralded as a great engineering feat, the dam was built in 1960 to tame the river. Its image was subsequently printed on the country’s bank notes. Yet within four years of opening, the dam had lost 40 percent of its water storage capacity because of silt, and its turbines were clogged. Despite renovations, the dam currently has less than 10 percent of its original storage capacity and generates only about 25 megawatts, compared to the expected 1,160. The dam has failed to prevent severe flooding upstream and still prompts much controversy, including government arrests of the project’s most outspoken critics.

AS: What is the process that led to your choice of landscapes as the primary mode of expression for your latest projects — Traces and Confluence? The serenity of the scene combined with the knowledge that it is a site of erosion or devastation — when did you begin this juxtaposition?

IT: There is a process there that has been crucial in my development. When you look at a photograph your ability to empathize with a person in it is natural. But it often connects on a very basic level. By connecting to the individual you don’t always ask the questions that I need people to ask. It’s important to me that people ask the larger questions.

For every physical manifestation there is in the landscape there are invisible threads that lead up to that manifestation. You can photograph a landscape that you know was a death camp during a war but you see it as just an empty landscape and it looks very innocent. The moment that you know what that innocent landscape was, that creates a jarring realization.

As a photographer, I have to be aware that there are certain visual languages that are used so often within the public sphere that they no longer actually function the way I would desire them to. Many images have now become stereotypes representing certain states of emotion or feeling.

AS: So you’ve chosen the landscape to sustain and yet subvert the gaze.

IT: The job of the photographer is to make people look at the image for longer than one second. The longer you sustain that gaze… that gaze represents some form of intellectual engagement. The person who is looking at that work is either travelling, dreaming or asking questions and it’s that moment that you can make some kind of meaningful connection.

“Public space is no longer public — advertising and corporations impose their message upon the individual and there’s a loss of that space. There is less time and it takes even greater discipline to dial those things out.” — Ian Teh.

Especially with my recent landscapes, many of the things I’m talking about are not in the image — there is just a trace of it. The initial connection to the landscape is its beauty, its silence. The Yellow River, which I have been photographing for 5 years now, is the Chinese stereotype of the beautiful landscape.

This mother river represents 5,000 years of civilization and so it has importance to the public psyche within China. By photographing, by looking at the changes in this landscape that are largely the result of modernization, you start to see the price we pay for our material desires.

What I’m trying to say with my images is perhaps no different than what previous photographers have but the delivery is different. The disruption of perception is what creates connection with the work and through that, hopefully, people start to engage.

AS: What was the first project in which you sensed this potential for disruption?

IT: Undercurrents dealt, in part, with the birth of a coal power station and Linfen (top image). Linfen is China’s most polluted city. I had gone to those sites to complete my work on ‘Dark Clouds’ — a project which is largely about the experience of being in a mining industry, seeing how China’s development was being fueled from the perspective of a miner or the people living in the places that were crucial to powering the massive cities.

I got there close to the Chinese New Year, before the Olympics. There was a huge amount of pressure on the government to ensure that no disasters happened during that time. They have a terrible reputation for mining accidents. Major disasters in the news would not have gone down well with the general public and to maintain social stability is essential for a government of that type. That’s always been paramount in terms of how they govern. So they closed down a whole bunch of mines right before the New Year. I arrived and there was no one there. These landscapes were empty.

“The job of the photographer is to make people look at the image for longer than one second. The longer you sustain that gaze… that gaze represents some form of intellectual engagement.”

I thought, ‘This is not what I came for’. But over the days… something clicked. I realized that what I was looking at told another story. It took away your focus from the people and started being about how we relate to the land, what we do to the land. In fact, the relationship and the questions asked when looking at that work became much larger and you traveled much further into the subject. That’s when I started this approach.

It was my grey series. Everything in there is related to coal so it was shot in a particular way.

1. Miners return home after a shift in the coal pits. The journey back to the surface is made by train and takes about 40 minutes. In general, safety standards in the large government owned mines have a higher level of safety standard. Shanxi, China. 2. Workers working at a coking plant. The production of coke releases highly toxic substances into the atmosphere that are often carcinogenic. Workers in these industrial plants are often directly exposed to the fumes that are emitted from this industrial process. Benxi, China. 3. Coal miner in a communal bath at a colliery. Linfen, China.

AS: You seem to have found a soothing colour palette quite early on.

IT: I started shooting colour in 1998. It began with a group project I wanted to shoot with a friend, he was already shooting black and white, and he had evolved to that from colour. He said to me, ‘I’m not going to change again so it’s down to you to change to colour’.

I thought I’d do a test trip. I’d been practicing photography for 3 years, not paid at the time, and everything I was doing was funding that work. I chose Hong Kong — I imagined it to be a very colourful place.

But if I was to shoot it in colour, it was important that I could make colour an integral part of the photograph. Up to that point, without having much experience, because that was pre-internet — I didn’t even have an email account –colour was generally just this loud noise in magazines that happened to be there as opposed to something that was considered. When I went to Hong Kong, my mission was to make colour another element that would speak to the viewer.

AS: So what was your process of experimentation?

IT: In art school, they made us tie a piece of charcoal to the end of a stick so we were about 5 feet away from our piece of paper and then we weren’t allowed to look at that piece of paper while we drew. Everything was about deconstructing that experience of control that you desire.

In a book I read later, I understood why. In the introduction he said, ‘I’m going to teach you to experience drawing. Not to learn academic drawing. Not how to create a good drawing that everyone else has created before. What I want you to do is connect with the subject through the skill of drawing but not necessarily drawing well’. That was a leap for me — in understanding.

I would go around sketching, gestural drawings done in a minute that create energy. You could sense the chair, or a woman sitting down. You sense the weight of that physical form but not the actual detail.

What I did was try to translate that in Hong Kong. I tried to break rules, and not follow an idea of what was right and wrong, actually break every rule there was to break with the way I shot. Sometimes it was blur, sometimes I didn’t look through the camera, but through that whole process I recognized what I could do with colour in photography.

AS: And you put yourself through this regimen solo? There was no workshop, no mentor standing behind you guiding this journey?

IT: I did it myself.

AS: Do you think there is too much pressure on younger photographers now to do everything else before they’ve crossed these hurdles? Whether it’s investing time in Facebook or Instagram or networking?

There are two things — different sides of the same coin. Photographers now have access to photography that I never had. On the other hand, if you have no direction, all of this is just distracting, it’s like TV.

In the old days, when you walked through a public space, you’d have less advertising. You had more space to contemplate ideas. Now, public space is no longer public — advertising and corporations impose their message upon the individual and there’s a loss of that space. There is less time and it takes even greater discipline to dial those things out.

I think it’s important that you understand what these tools can do for you — how they’re effective. But perhaps its like a slow courtship. At least with me, it was through small investments of time that my own perception and understanding developed. Maybe you need to know how to use it first, to understand it, maybe engage it on some level but you don’t have to be a part of it full time — that should be saved for your craft.

AS: It’s about calibrating your use of technology.

IT: Yes. And that’s true even going back to when I used a very simple camera — completely manual — just you and a few dials. It required you to understand it because if you didn’t, everything would come out wrong.

I realized at an early stage that I had to dial out all the white noise and concentrate on essentials. What was important was how connected you felt with your subject and not how much time you spent fiddling around with your equipment.

“Pollution is one of the epic challenges that China faces today. Pollution’s medium to long term effects put China’s health and economy at a precipice.” — Ian Teh.

At a workshop in Malaysia last year, at the Obscura Festival, I had a student who didn’t like shooting with big cameras and she said, ‘I’d like to shoot with my phone because I feel comfortable’. I thought that was fine because what I was trying to teach was authorship — the ability to communicate with images.

AS: You have authored two monographs on China now. Is the desire to go back each year the same as it was that first trip? How has your personal relationship with the country changed?

IT: Certainly the desire is not the same, in the early years the country was very much a mystery to me and many of my projects and travels were made up out of a simple desire to explore and understand the country. Over time my focus has narrowed and my work takes on an even more environmental perspective. I’ve become interested less in the individual stories I encounter but more in the forces that affect the environmental direction of the country — the politics, the legal system and the economy — essentially a helicopter view that might give me an answer to the landscapes I observe on the ground for my work.

I believe that pollution is one of the epic challenges that China faces today, and its effects — medium term to long term — puts the country’s health and economy at a precipice. China’s ability to survive, perhaps even overcome, its environmental woes and the costs involved are some of the questions that continue to influence my relationship to the country today.

Worker in a small coal mine. China is the largest coal user in the world and has the unenviable record of the highest number of coal miners with lung problems. Datong, China.

AS: Even as you’ve moved from representing the individual story in your work, can you tell me about a person whose story brought the reality of the environmental disaster home to you?

IT: One memory is very clear — a poor farmer walking down a steep dirt track to his simple little house with its small vegetable plot. As he walked through the entrance, into his bricked courtyard whilst pulling his cart, the rumble of the tractors moving coal above on the hill could be heard.

Behind in the distance lay the river… murky brown. The silver gas pipe that traveled across the width of the river was covered in a grey dust that came from a belching cement plant next door. Its an important source of water for both agriculture and heavy industry… its why there were so many industrial plants near the banks. And in the middle of it all, right on those banks, surrounded by the black coal dust, lay the farmer’s home.

I took many pictures of the area but I could never convince him. He was upset, scared and angry when I met him and he was unsure as to whether he could trust me or if giving me permission would get him in trouble. He told me how he chose to stay when developers approached him to sell up, he didn’t feel the offer was fair and preferred to stay. At that time he hadn’t imagined his surroundings would change so dramatically… without any consideration for him.

Copyright for all images: Ian Teh. This interview was first published on Obscura.

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