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Mountains and Skyscrapers Made from Maps and Books

Chinese artist Ji Zhou thinks cities are boring, so he made some of his own.
Maquette No. 4, 2015 Archival Pigment Print 43 3/8 x 74 1/4 inches

Blocky skylines made from stacked books dominate one side of the gallery in Chinese artist Ji Zhou's new show at Klein Sun Gallery and first U.S. solo show, Civilized Landscape, while crinkled maps become mountain ranges on the other. This dichotomy is at the heart of the exhibit, Ji Zhou tells The Creators Project. "My concerns lie in why more and more cities are becoming visually identical and boring in their cityscapes," he says.

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Ji Zhou specializes in capturing ephemeral ideas and moments in beautifully composed photographs. For example, after a fire in his Beijing studio coated it in ash, he responded with Dust (2010), a photo series in which every surface is colored with monochrome, ashy grey. In Civilized Landscape, he responds to the construct of civilization as a whole. Which is more civilized, he asks, a peaceful mountaintop with a thriving ecosystem, or the concrete jungle?

The Map No.4, 2015 Archival Pigment Print 53 1/2 x 98 3/8 inches

These questions were baked into every step of creating Civilized Landscape. The "Maps" portion was improvised and sculpted straight from Zhou's imagination, while the "Maquette" cityscapes are the result of meticulous planning. Zhou sees books as "channels to receive and accumulate knowledge," while maps are two dimensional repositories of information: "My opinions on cities and civilization mainly comes from books I've read," he says. In contrast, he explains, "Associating maps with landscapes is almost an innate relationship to me, a theory probably be caused by my teenage dreams about the world."

The questions left after Civilized Landscape are just as interesting as the images themselves. While he claims each scene is 100% imagined, I couldn't help but see the Empire State Building in Maquette No. 3, and Map No. 4 is so startling in its beauty that my gut wants to believe it's real. Thus, I have fallen into Zhou's trap, questioning what those words even mean. "This reflects the dichotomy between the fake and the real… and our subtle feelings between senses and imagination… which in turn is a reflection of my feeling towards the world nowadays," he says.

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Maquette No. 3, 2015 Archival Pigment Print 43 3/8 x 29 inches

The Map No. 2, 2015 Archival Pigment Print 39 3/8 x 29 inches

Maquette No. 5, 2015 Archival Pigment Print 43 3/8 x 74 1/4 inches

The Map No. 3, 2015 Archival Pigment Print 31 1/2 x 68 inches

Maquette No. 1, 2015 Archival Pigment Print 43 3/8 x 72 inches

The Map No. 5, 2015 Archival Pigment Print 43 3/8 x 40 inches

Maquette No. 2, 2015 Archival Pigment Print 43 3/8 x 60 inches 

The Map No. 6, 2015 Archival Pigment Print 36 1/4 x 63 inches

Learn more about Ji Zhou on his gallery page.

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