Zhang Dali. Demolition: Forbidden City, Beijing, 1998.

 

I recently came across images from the artist Zhang Dali, who spray-painted his profile -- often as a demolished "cut out" -- across Beijing.  I find the images strangely provocative.  Writing in the journal Visual Studies, Adam Yuet Chau observes that Chinese artists have increasingly used scenes of demolition as part of an emerging iconography of modernity, noting that "demolition is the very basis of capitalistic development."

More on Zhang Dali at the cool blog Fans in a Flashbulb.