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Essay by Christopher McCall
96 pages
Hardcover
Full Color Offset
15 x 11"
ISBN : 978-1-952523-32-8
$65
From Deadbeat: Mother's Land is a collection of dioramas, of unscripted scenes in which we see a shifting 2010s China unfold before our eyes. It is, also, the result of a long, introspective journey that led Daniel Lee Postaer in search of a missing part of his identity—the one left behind by his grandparents who, more than fifty years earlier and fleeing the communist regime, could take along a daughter, but were forced to abandon another.
In search of this "other half," Postaer lived in China in the early 2000s, and returned several times in the second half of the 2010s, becoming a first-hand witness to the country’s contemporary developments.
In an all-encompassing portrait of urban China, in large-scale compositions embracing a multitude of characters and scenes, Mother’s Land shows us a country in the throes of economic and social transformations. A brutal country, too, that erases without scruple, without memory; which demolishes to rebuild further, bigger, higher. A country in mutation, where contrasts become apparent, where the smooth and shiny surfaces of glass and hypermodernity clash with the coarseness of rubble scattered among ruins. A country in which time moves violently fast, in which each year seems like five, and where the traces of Postaer's previous life seem to evaporate. Only the construction sites reveal, through the rubble, all the strata of time gone by—sedimentary layers unearthing vestiges of the past.
