China obscura
Mark Leong

Travelling by chance to mainland China just a day after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, young Chinese-American photographer Mark Leong decided to stay and explore in photos the fascinating contradictions of a rapidly-changing, but still very traditional, Chinese society. Living in Beijing and travelling across China for the past fifteen years, he has captured images that astonish both with their power and with the access that he has found to both official and underground Chinese society: a young graffiti artist named ‘AK-47’ plies his trade, a government official tends to an abandoned park, teenage rollerbladers hope for Western corporate sponsorship, a nervous stockbroker with his black-market handgun, migrant workers sleeping in train stations, police officers barricading the U.S. Embassy against street demonstrators, a drug addict snorting heroin off a bill bearing the image of Chairman Mao. In more than 150 photographs (with illuminating captions at the back), along with an introduction by the photographer and essays by Chinese dissident poet Yang Lien, and author Peter Hessler (whose book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtzee won the prestigious Kiriyama Prize and was excerpted in the New Yorker), CHINA OBSCURA captures this most massive of mass societies as we’ve never quite seen before, poised at the edge of old and new.

Foreword by Yang Lian, Afterword by Peter Hessler