Sze Tsung Leong, Cities @Milo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 20 color photographs, framed in brown wood and unmatted/matted based on size, and hung in the main gallery space and back alcove. All of the works are chromogenic color prints, made between 2006 and 2010. The prints come in two sizes: 48x59 (in editions of 5+2AP) and 20x24 (in editions of 10+2AP). The show includes 10 images in the large size and 10 images in the small size. (Installation shots at right.)
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Comments/Context: Sze Tsung Leong's elevated images of some of the world's great cities add a new layer of deceptive conceptual rigor to the familiar genre of the broad expansive city view. At first glance, his images bring us back to the famous 19th century panoramas of San Francisco or Hong Kong harbor taken from nearby mountain tops, where impressive and vast industry were captured as history. But Leong's works go several steps further, placing diverse 21st century cities into a compositional framework that allows for easier side by side comparison, where a city is now simultaneously a very specific individual location and an iterative example of an abstract concept.

All of Leong's cityscapes have been composed using a similar formula, regardless of whether he was in Paris or Quito, Shenzen or Cairo. In every case, the camera has been positioned so that the breadth of the city is seen from above, with close up detail in the foreground of the image, and broader urban pattern and the larger geographical setting in the background, all in one self contained front to back continuum (the top quarter of the image is always undifferentiated sky with a generally flat horizon line). Each image contains a complete range of scales, from recognizable objects and buildings to more uniform geometries and textures of the overall aggregate architecture and site.

Seen in this context, each city has its own eccentricities and visual personality: the red tile roofs of Lisboa, the sand colored apartment blocks of Cairo, the peeling grey density of Havana, the modern glass and steel of Tokyo, the car culture flatness of Houston. Not all would qualify as beautiful exactly, but seen together, they seem like members of the same species, where quirks of geography, history, culture and zoning have created widely different endpoints; each city is like a formal natural selection experiment, where the underlying rules and constraints are generally the same, but the local conditions have forced the individuals to evolve in unexpected directions.

As a result, while I think there are several images in this series that offer the viewer an opportunity to get lost in their nooks an crannies (especially when printed in the large size), in general, I think this body of work will be more intriguing and instructive in book form, where the sequenced comparisons between widely divergent cities can be used highlight similarities and differences. Taken together, the project can almost be seen as the basis for an urban planning textbook, where lessons and variations from medieval to modern can be discovered from picture to picture. Most impressively, with a subtle sleight of hand, Leong has taken a cliche (the bird's eye city view) and remade it into an effective tool for exploring the evolution and ultimate meaning of our contemporary cities. All in, the series is a cerebral and quietly contrarian approach to a hackneyed photographic motif.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced as follows. The large 48x59 prints are available in ratcheting editions, starting at $12000, and moving up through $15000, $22000, and $25000. I'm assuming the smaller 20x24 prints also ratchet upwards, although they were all priced at $6000 on the checklist. Leong's work has not yet reached the secondary markets with any regularity, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.

My favorite image in the show was La Paz, 2010; it's on the left in the second installation shot. I liked the dense tactile texture of the city, nestled in the bottom of the valley. I also think this image was the most successful in capturing the impact of the specific local geography on the evolving sprawl of the city.

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Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Reviews: Conscientious (here), TimeOut New York (here), Time LightBox (here)

Sze Tsung Leong, Cities
April 2nd

Yossi Milo Gallery
525 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001

Snapshots from Paris Photo, Part 1

While we weren't able to visit Paris Photo this year, that doesn't mean we weren't dying to know what went on. With the help of a couple of intrepid correspondents armed with their snapshot cameras, we've been able to cobble together a thoroughly random sampler of highlights. From a larger pile of images taken in booths and around the fair, I've edited the group down to the small selection below (caption information is below each image). In the visual overload of an art fair, what catches one person's eye may be overlooked by the next person, so calling this "representative" of what was on display may or may not be entirely accurate. So why these and not others? Who knows, I'm just happy to get a glimpse of the fun.


Jaroslav Rössler at Howard Greenberg

Pierre Dubreuil at Barry Friedman

Baron Adolph de Meyer at Robert Klein

Daido Moriyama at Priska Pasquer

Margaret Watkins at Robert Mann


V. Dijon at Robert Hershkowitz

Ruud van Empel at Flatland

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Tina Barney and Lee Friedlander at Janet Borden. For those gallery folks out there who have heard me drone on about the tyranny of the standard white wall, check out the exuberant pink walls in this booth!

A fan in a gorilla suit at the Martin Parr book signing.

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Walker Evans at Edwynn Houk

Hamiltons booth


László Moholy-Nagy at Stephen Daiter


Toni Schneiders at Bernheimer

Sze Tsung Leong at Yossi Milo

Phaidon booth

Later this afternoon, I'll be posting Parts 2 and 3 of this series, a similarly eclectic gathering of pictures from some of the photo exhibitions around Paris during the fair.

Book: Sze Tsung Leong, History Images

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2006 by Steidl (here). 144 pages, with 80 color plates. Includes essays by Stephen Shore and the artist. (Cover shot at right, via Photo Eye.)

Comments/Context: In the past few years, if we had to choose one single symbol of the vast economic transformations that have been occurring in China, it would have to be the image of a half-built skyscraper, complete with a crane and wrapped in mesh covered scaffolding. Numerous artists have latched onto these newly constructed buildings as poignant metaphors for the societal changes that are taking place; we could probably rattle off half a dozen photographers who have made roughly this same picture, with variations in perspective, time of day, and specific location making each one slightly different, but in the end, much the same.

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Sze Tsung Leong's photographs of this same frenzy of construction are unique in that they are not so much about the building process, but about the changing context of the urban environment and the erasing of important history. Rather than looking up with awe at the endless geometries of the modern skyscrapers, Leong steps back and situates the buildings in their larger environment, showing the transitions between old-style neighborhoods and new planned communities and apartment blocks.

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His best images are those that have startling juxtapositions: old and new, construction and destruction. In several, ancient Imperial homes, highlighted by carved wood beams and tile roofs, are set amidst humongous piles of brick rubble and broken concrete, with new towers seen rising in the distance in the smoky grey sky. The old narrow alley lifestyle has been abandoned (even condemned) in favor of the new sparkling apartments with wide roadways and grassy boulevards. In some images, three layers of history are visible, with grubby Socialist housing blocks providing a buffer between old and new.

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These are powerful pictures, in that they show clearly how the world is being transformed before our eyes. The reforms of the market economy have made the land more valuable, and traditional single family homes and neighborhood warrens are literally being wiped out and replaced by rows of 30 story apartment buildings; the implicit question in the photographs is how the lives of the people will be changed, as they move to the new Westernized boxes and forget their old ways. (Yet another layer in the images is the question of class, and of which people will live where.) And finally, until the new has completely swallowed the old, the rubble and debris will continue to pile up.

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While these images are full of bustling activity and new construction, they are surprisingly low on optimism. They are a sometimes harsh reminder of what is being destroyed in the name of progress and a subtle warning that the new may not be obviously better.

Collector's POV: Sze Tsung Leong is represented in New York by Yossi Milo Gallery (here). Leong's images have not yet reached the secondary markets in any meaningful way, so gallery retail is really the only way to access his work in the short term. While several of Leong's images could fit into our city/industrial genre quite easily, I think the work is more successful in book form, where many more images can be sequenced into a larger and deeper narrative.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Interview with Guernica magazine (here)
• NY Times, 2006 (here)
• NY Times, 2008 (here)