ISBN: 962-8783-18-1
Dimensions: 80 pp, 190 x 250 mm
color & B&W Photography throughout, casebound
Price: HK$224/US$28

Mao promised China steel. He delivered. The Handan Iron & Steel Works is a symbol of China's modernization. Established in 1958, it is now one of the world's largest integrated steel plants, producing five million tons of high-quality steel products annually and supporting on its own an industrial city that employs tens of thousands workers. A model state enterprise on the one hand, Handan is a grey, poisonous behemoth on the other. Invited by Handan's Communist leadership, Judy Chan, a young American-trained Hong Kong artist and photographer lived and worked at Handan for several months. Her mission was to bring art to the harsh industrial world of Handan's workers. Water & Wind is a personal explication of her experience there, crafted without compromise from the gritty reality of a technoculture that is both proudly contemporary and embarrassingly archaic. This book is photography as hope and publishing as art from a sensitive and talented seer who struggles to find a continuum between modern and post-modern worlds. Water & Wind is arguably the most finely made book Asia 2000 has produced. It is a profound meditation on a world that struggles with the contradictions of an industrial revolution grown old and an important addition to the library of photography on contemporary China.

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Copyright © Judy Chan

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