The Yellow Leaves of a Building: Urban Exploration in China and the Cooling Plan Photography Project

Abstract

Ruins and rubble have become a ubiquitous feature of the urbanising Chinese landscape. They have also become key motifs in Chinese visual culture, and artists have used the ruin image to critically comment on post-reform urban development. This article, however, seeks to bring an overlooked dimension of ruin representation to light: the creative culture of China's “urban explorers,” who infiltrate obsolete architecture for their own recreational purposes. It shows how the derelict spaces portrayed by the explorers’ visual and textual accounts have a ludic potency of their own, with the urban ruin depicted as a site of embodied and aesthetic pleasure. The article ends by discussing the example of urban explorer Zhao Yang and his Cooling Plan photography project, which frames the ruin as a creative retreat from the pressures of the lived city.