This is a bit of an oddity. I would go so far as to call it an accidental music video. Last September I ended up on The Bund at dawn in Shanghai. This should happen at least once in your lifetime. Ostensibly I was there to photograph a performance by the talented and capable Olek, whose crocheted work I first encountered in New York City this past summer. After she failed to initiate a crocheting enterprise, thanks to the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, I stuck around and watched the sun rise in all its glory over the imposing Pudong skyline. Slowly but surely the entire city awoke around me. My favorite part are the old guys walking backwards for exercise. I find their physicality a strangely fitting metaphor for the urban development occurring around them. It was a beautiful sight. I mashed up the video from that morning with a live performance of White+ recorded at the now defunct D-22. Check out the results below.

One of my photographs from the amazingly ridiculous Kangbashi district in Ordos was featured in Conde Nast Traveler this past month. The building shown is the Ordos Museum designed by MAD architects, one of the preeminent Chinese architecture firms founded by Ma Yansong who previously toiled as a project designer for Zaha Hadid Architects. The building itself remains a wonder to behold as its irregular shape clashes with the geometrical grid that binds the rest of the newfangled district. Whether or not it will see any use is the real question now that it finally opened. The municipal government can barely get people to stay put in the Kangbashi residential developments, let alone consistently fill up over 40,000 square meters of exhibition space. The flagship cultural center of Ordos will probably accumulate more sand from the Gobi desert than actual visitors. Anyway, I will be featuring more photographs of MAD buildings in the near future thanks to my first assignment with The New York Times Magazine. In the meantime, you can check out some extra photographs I took of the unfinished interior.

I’m sorry I’m so late with posting these clippings, but I have been traveling a lot recently. Last month Time Magazine featured my photographs from The Ordos Real Estate Bubble: An Empty Chinese Metropolis series in a piece on China’s precarious real estate market. Property prices have been skyrocketing over the past three years thanks to mass speculation by developers and government support of infrastructure development. For some time it was easily one of the best investments in the country and people would camp out on streets in order to buy apartments in especially hot markets in Shanghai and Sanya. Now it seems like the tide is finally going to turn. The real question is whether or not there is going to be a soft or hard landing for property prices. The China real estate sector might be most important financial market in the global economy, and a sudden pop would send international markets into a downward spiral. I don’t think this is going to happen, but people are starting to wake up and realize how overheated housing and commercial markets are in major urban centers. Many of these newfangled luxury developments remain empty and prices are starting to drop. It’s going to be interesting to see how this story unfolds over the next few months.

This place is well documented, but fits into my Counterfeit Paradises series as Shanghai remains one of the fastest growing cities on the planet. In order to keep up with demand, the municipal government must supply housing for up to 400,000 new residents every year. In an effort to provide a bit of flash and diversity to the monotony of Chinese urban sprawl, developers broke ground on Songjiang New City which included nine satellite villages utilizing design elements from various European countries. Thames Town, modeled after quaint English hamlets, was the centerpiece and eventually the largest debacle after failing to attract permanent residents. The English-themed restaurants and stores remain shuttered while the streets only see the passing of young couples posing for wedding photographs. Far from the hustle and bustle of downtown Shanghai, the Thames Town Church seems poised to continue without a congregation for the foreseeable future.

The arid landscape around Ordos was never a forgiving place. Its remoteness and lack of ground water always kept growth in check. Now the Inner Mongolian mining center produces a third of China’s coal and the municipal government decided to use the extra revenues to literally build an entire new city. Located 25 kilometers west of the old town, the Kangbashi/康巴什 new district sports a museum, opera house, library, cultural center, sculpture parks, malls and endless rows of megablock housing. Designed to accomodate a population upwards to a million people, only 30,000 have decided to make the move into the newfangled developments. For now the strange new city that popped out of the sands remains largely deserted. Only a handful of locals walk amidst the abstract shapes and glass-covered malls of Kangbashi. It is one of many locations in China that point to a real estate bubble just waiting to pop.

As new cities continue to spring up across China almost overnight, real estate developers are taking architecture and urban design in wildly different directions to tap into the lucrative luxury housing market. Tianducheng/天都城 was one of those hopelessly trying to set a bold new precedent for modern and cultured living with it’s fake Eiffel Tower overlooking Parisian townhouses. The knockoff of the 13th arrondissement, however, remains sparsely populated and only draws well-heeled clientele to its adjacent resort and villas modeled after Fontainebleau Palace. For now, many of the apartments are occupied by groups of migrant laborers working on surrounding megablocks, while other locals have gone so far as to appropriate the green space surrounding the Eiffel Tower for private ad hoc farming plots. Otherwise Tianducheng along with the attached French-themed village park is mainly used as a backdrop for wedding photography companies hoping to give young Chinese couples a taste of The City of Light while balancing their desire for traditional nuptial observances.

As many of you may know, I am a huge fan of the CCTV Tower in Beijing’s Central Business District. In my excitement that they finally turned on the lights in the soaring loop of a skyscraper, I scouted out locations and posted shots of it igniting the skyline. A few months later, as fortune would have it, I received an assignment to photograph Ole Scheeren, the former parter of Rem Koolhaas at OMA and mastermind behind the design and construction of the CCTV Tower. Basically I got to sneak around the new offices of Ole Scheeren in Jianwai Soho and then pose him in front of his awesome edifice. In the end, I used the same locations from the night shoot to photograph Ole Scheeren with the CCTV Tower. Unfortunately I was not allowed to photograph any models of his upcoming projects which were amazing. Ole himself was very affable during the shoot and is no stranger to the camera thanks to his high-profile, paparazzi-trailed relationship with actress Maggie Cheung. A looker and dresser, Ole made sure he was properly attired for the occasion and rocked a formidable Blue Steel. The clippings are from the article in the newly minted Port Magazine out of London.

The Shanghai World Financial Center (SWFC) is a marvel to behold. Rising above the equally impressive Jin Mao Tower, its graceful arches reach 101 stories, the second-tallest building in the world. The SWFC also ranks as number one for the highest occupied floor in the world, beating out the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and sports the world’s tallest observation deck. The Observatory Bridge runs along the top of the trapezoidal opening near the apex of the SWFC and offers generous views of Shanghai on all sides. During my trip earlier this month, I picked a particularly clear day to visit. The light hitting the Pudong side was the best and offered uninhibited views of the vast urban sprawl that now characterizes the edges of Shanghai.

Last month I contributed both video and stills for a New York Times article on the potential redevelopment of the Gulou area immediately surrounding the Drum and Bell Towers (see my previous post for more details). Fortunately it seems like the project has been shelved. While newspapers like the Telegraph report that the project was halted due to pressure from preservation organizations such as the Beijing Cultural Heritage Project, it was most likely stalled due to the Chongwen and Dongcheng district governments merging this summer. Although this part of Gulou might be safe for now, the northwest corner pictured above was already destroyed this past year to make way for a new transportation center. This problem will not go away as many development projects still threaten the last remaining hutong areas in the city.

It seems that my recent photo essay on Chongqing for Foreign Policy is getting mixed up with a surge of attention focused on the fastest growing city in the world. Both James Fallows and Wired’s Raw File mentioned my work, and there is another excellent piece posted by Caixin entitled Chongqing’s Call to Urban Conversion. Chongqing is easily one of China’s (if not the world’s) greatest experiment in urbanization. How these fledgling city slickers decide to dwell in their newly minted megablocks will set new precedents for living standards across western China. It’s going to be interesting to see whether or not such rampant growth will hit a wall by 2020 when the population of the city center is supposed to reach up to 20 million people. Also, see fellow INSTITUTE artist Nadav Kandar’s photo essay Yangtze, The Long River – easily some of my favorite imagery of the beast that is Chongqing.