Seven Years in the Making, Civilization: The Way We Live Now Is the Beijing Photography Show You Shouldn't Miss

Globalization is under fire. How are photographers thinking about what it has done to human civilization and contemporary life?

"At a moment when globalization faces all kinds of skepticism, it is necessary to negotiate global civilization visually," said Philip Tinari, director of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), at the exhibition's press conference.

From March 9 to May 19, a large-scale contemporary photography exhibition called Civilization: The Way We Live Now will be on view at UCCA's main Beijing venue, just rebuilt by the Dutch firm OMA (tickets: 100 yuan). It brings together more than 250 works by over 120 photographers from Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa and the Americas, seven years in the making from first idea to production to curation. The executive director of the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (FEP), one of the co-producers, called it the most ambitious contemporary art exhibition the foundation has ever mounted.

"Historians and philosophers define the word 'civilization' differently. German scholars stress what gets built — bridges, roads. French scholars value cultural achievement — literature, art," curator William A. Ewing explained at the press conference. "A planetary form of civilization has been taking shape since the mid-20th century, and its clearest examples are aviation and the Olympic Games. They are tightly organized, they run reliably, and they reach nearly every country on earth. Under the control of a global system, two million people can be in the air at the same time — the combined populations of San Francisco and Vancouver. Even in the most remote village, people share the same wish to jump higher and run farther."

But calling the exhibition ambitious is not only because "civilization" is too large a concept.

In 2016, William A. Ewing noticed that many of the photographers he followed had turned toward the contradictions and changes in human life under globalization: everyday life and crisis, work and leisure, migration and settlement, reflection and creation.

That was also the year opinion on globalization swung from near-unanimous support to argument on several fronts. Only a few decades earlier, the American journalist George Packer had compared rejecting globalization to rejecting the sunrise. Globalization runs through services, capital and ideas alike, and though it is hard to define precisely, most of the time it has meant lowering the cost of cross-border trade. People believed that cutting tariffs, loosening regulation and moving industry to countries with cheaper labor would give markets more vitality and more room for free competition. Because it drove global economic growth so hard, its political, social and environmental consequences went ignored for a long time.

That belief is now shaking. Dambisa Moyo, an economist and a well-known supporter of free trade, said at the Davos forum in January 2017 that everyone should admit globalization has caused enormous losses. "I don't know that we have the capacity, within the existing framework, to compensate for those losses." Europe's far-right political groups have questioned the free movement of people and goods around the world, arguing that unchecked globalization threatens human civilization.

Against that background, what photographers around the world record, express and think through in images offers a more direct and more approachable way to look at what globalization has done to human civilization and contemporary life.

William A. Ewing thinks photography and civilization compare in a subtle way. "Like civilization, photography is global, collective and accumulative. Photographers are everywhere, and nothing escapes them. They work in every kind of medium, building on those who came before. Together with publishers, curators, drivers, photo-paper makers and producers, they make up a single creative collective. And photography is itself one of civilization's achievements — one with a history of less than 200 years."

Civilization: The Way We Live Now takes "civilization" apart into eight core concepts, one per gallery, and uses photographs to show and probe how photographers around the world think about them: Hive, Alone Together, Flow, Persuasion, Escape, Control, Rupture, and Next.

The galleries are laid out as a maze. In the words of the other curator, Holly Roussell, they wanted visitors to feel, as they walked through, "the poetry and unpredictability of a human life, and of human civilization itself."

At the center of the maze is a reading room. Four pale-yellow discs each hold a different kind of material — artists' photo books, United Nations global reports, the theoretical texts that sparked the curators' research, and objects donated by the public that the donors thought reflected contemporary civilization — all of it to be read sitting on cushions. Comments from participating artists are written on the walls: "As an aging woman, I have struggled hard with that identity" (Cindy Sherman); "Consumerism is the backbone of globalized civilization. I try to place the promise of instant happiness alongside every possible catastrophe" (Patrick Weidmann).

Depending on how you choose to look — at the level of photography, or at the level of civilization — different visitors will come away with different impressions, though what the curators are after is a dynamic fusion of the two.

1. Hive

The hive is really a metaphor for how people live together. "The novelist Tom Wolfe once used the word 'hive' for New York's clamorous social life. In fact, any large gathering of people can be likened to a bustling swarm," reads the gallery's introductory text.

"The countryside was our home for a very long time, but the 21st century has brought that history to a definitive end. For the first time in the 200,000 years that modern Homo sapiens has existed, more people live in urban centers than outside them."

This gallery deliberately sets wildly different ways of living, and of looking, side by side. Roger Eberhard visited Hilton hotels in 32 countries across four continents, shooting the room's interior and the view from its window at each one. The photographs became the series Standard: Hilton rooms around the world look much alike, while the views out their windows could not be more different.

On the wall facing Standard, Benny Lam photographed, from a vantage point at the ceiling, the inside of a subdivided flat where a family surnamed Leung lives in a Hong Kong slum. The unit measures 4.64 square meters, split into a single multi-purpose space that is bedroom, dining room and kitchen at once; a child doing homework and a father reading the newspaper are wedged into the upper and lower bunks. The series is called Trapped, and it drops viewers who have just taken in the standard middle-class business trip of a Hilton room straight into another reality.

2. Alone Together

Different communities make up different classes, and different classes make up human society. The work in this gallery is about individuals inside communities, or communities made of individuals.

For Settlement 2007 B, part of his My Things series, Hong Hao scanned every consumer product he bought that year. The riot of colored goods becomes a three-dimensional record of consumption, and shows what a personal life looks like when it is broken down entirely through the eyes of consumer society.

Wang Qingsong's 2012 work Work! Work! Work! shows a crowd of workers in a high-rise office. The space is brilliantly lit, but the clothing, the furnishings and the color scheme make it look like a hospital. "Numb, manic, sick," Wang Qingsong said while walking through the show.

Beside Wang Qingsong's piece, Michele Borzoni says everything he wants to say in the title: Foligno, 2014. 7,672 People Registered at This Recruitment Center in Foligno, Italy, for a Public Competitive Exam Offering 860 Non-Active-Duty Officer Positions. It belongs to his Workforce series. There are many ways to photograph a classroom; Michele chose a very formal angle, and what emerges is an order built out of individuals — vast, solid, grave and also suffocating.

3. Flow

In the world globalization built, the systems that move people and goods are not perfect, but they are remarkably stable and reliable. You never worry that black tea will fail to arrive from Sri Lanka, or that you will wake up with no Ethiopian coffee to drink. In this gallery photographers try to catch that world in motion.

Jeffrey Milstein's Airport series looks down on terminal buildings from far overhead. The aerial view yields a geometric beauty, and it also makes you see that this ordinary place is at once a giant machine run by tens of thousands of people and one small rivet in a global system.

4. Persuasion

The cognitive revolution is taken to be the moment Homo sapiens parted ways with other animals. "What separates humans from animals is that humans can tell stories, whether fictions or gossip," said curator Holly Roussell.

In contemporary consumer society, one of the main ways people know and conquer the world is persuasion. On one side, Hollywood stars and fashion brands persuade consumers in pursuit of higher profits. On the other, consumers' sense of the world is reshaped again and again by being persuaded. Truth, much of the time, becomes something that can be invented. Photographers take part in this machinery and witness it at once.

Robert Walker has lived next to Times Square for more than 40 years. The pieces from his Times Square series shown here use collage to stitch together Times Square at different moments: the anxiety of one second, the pleasure of the next, baffled passersby, and the unending bombardment of information.

To bring out the delicate relationship between the two sides of persuasion, the curators hung Alec Soth's Grand Palais right next to Brian Ulrich's Chicago, Illinois, from his Retail series. The Grand Palais in Paris is the house runway venue for the French luxury brand Chanel; Soth shows Chanel's creative director, known in China as "the Kaiser," being bathed in flashbulbs on set, with a camera poking in from the left edge of the frame to hint that the scene was arranged. Brian Ulrich, for his part, shows ordinary people in a shopping mall passively taking in and consuming those arranged scenes.

5. Escape

Escape usually means getting out of some closed situation or some unpleasant state, physical or mental. Drifting off without meaning to, deliberately moving your attention elsewhere, and contemporary leisure and entertainment are all forms it takes.

Zhang Xiao's Coastline No. 216 photographs a group of people fishing by the sea. The coastline carries another meaning for him: "the gap in step between material civilization and spiritual civilization."

Matthieu Gafsou's Trace 3a and Richard Misrach's Untitled (November 9, 2013, 9:49 a.m.) present two kinds of escape: humanity escaping the ground to rule the open sky; and one person escaping industrial society and the human collective to find a moment of quiet and solitude.

6. Control

The machine of human civilization keeps running through tight control. A part that works is kept; a part that does not is thrown out at once.

William A. Ewing thinks Giles Price's Opening Ceremony, London Olympic Stadium. E2012 Under Construction catches the essence of a social machine running under control. Instead of showing the finished, flawless stadium the way a news picture would, he shot it from above half-built, showing how, after millions of dollars went in, it rose from nothing to stage a spectacle for four billion viewers.

Andrew Rowat photographed another kind of control in Dongguan. The day was so hot that his camera shut itself down from overheating. At his prompting, the golf course ordered its caddies to line up in a neat column under the blazing sun for a "foreign magazine promotional shoot." They obeyed and stood there for 10 to 20 minutes, until one of them fainted from the heat. Dressed alike in red shirts and white caps, the individual vanishes into the collective — a collective under control.

7. Rupture

Human civilization cracks in many ways: people driven from their homes, sunset industries dying off. Photographers use images to force us to face civilization's failures and blind spots, putting people in front of situations that look grand and are in fact tragic.

Idomeni, from Richard Mosse's Heat Maps series, offers a rare vantage point. Using military-grade thermal imaging equipment, he photographed a group of refugees from 30 kilometers away. They had no way of knowing they were being photographed. Through that cold lens they look less like people than like targets with no privacy left, liable to be hunted down at any moment.

Francesco Zizola and Daniel Berehulak take a more human view: a group of Libyan refugees packed onto an overloaded rubber dinghy, just picked up by Médecins Sans Frontières' search-and-rescue vessel Bourbon Argos, some still badly shaken, others visibly relieved;

and at Quezon City Jail, inmates sleeping on the prison's crowded basketball court, where they can only rest in that open patch in shifts. It is one of the most crowded prisons in Quezon City, the Philippines: built 60 years ago to hold 800 people, it now holds more than 3,500.

8. Next

As the name says, Next looks ahead. Some people remake nature for their own pleasure; some are more interested in the human body, and ask how a person might become immortal, or whether new methods could set new standards of beauty; others look out at the cosmos and consider the possibility of life beyond Earth.

"The world of the future will more and more be the result of collective effort," Holly Roussell said.

In Untitled (Mannequin II), Valerie Belin imagines the standard beauty of the future. The figures sit in large frames hung high on the wall, looking down on visitors like deities.

The Singaporean photographer Robert Zhao Renhui's series A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World looks ordinary at first, but the label on every item carries a streak of the fantastical. There is the painted molly, in fact an ornamental fish tattooed with patterns, colors and lettering by dyed lasers; a Japanese company that made unbreakable eggs by adding banyan-tree plant protein to chicken feed; and the square apples sold by a Korean department store, stamped with words like "pass the exam" or "success."

On the 12th floor of a Brooklyn high-rise, Edgar Martins built a camera obscura to his own design. Two sheets of photographic paper hung behind it, with a small hole cut through; the view outside was projected onto the negatives to make the final image. The window frame reads like a ring of Roman numerals on a clock face, and through it stretches the New York cityscape.

"The meaning is double. Roman numerals go back 2,000 years, which is also how long human civilization has existed. This is a contemporary New York street scene, but most of the buildings are 19th century. However much human civilization changes, time does not change — but the ways we measure and sense time keep changing," said William A. Ewing.

Cover image: Hong Hao's photograph Settlement 2007 B, courtesy of UCCA.