Word: shek
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...only natural to want to glimpse the lives behind those concrete façades. Wolf addresses this in the companion volume Inside, subtitled OneHundred by OneHundred, which hones in on Shek Kip Mei Estate, Hong Kong's oldest public-housing complex. With the help of a social worker, in April 2007 Wolf gained access to 100 residents of the estate's soon-to-be-demolished Mark I blocks - accommodation of 1950s vintage designed to house the greatest number of people and to be built in the quickest possible time in response to a burgeoning city's housing crisis. He then...
...Wolf's Inside is not the first book to contain such images. In 2007 Hong Kong photojournalist Vincent Yu published Our Home, Shek Kip Mei 1954-2006 - a work that included a collection of formal portraits of estate residents in their cramped dwellings, albeit in black and white. It is hard to see what, if anything, Wolf does differently. His images are not the result of an intimate rapport between photographer and subject, but of an almost unbridgeable distance: the sitters are showing their best face to a foreign visitor, with many of them smiling for the camera. The result...
...accuse Beijing of nursing a grudge. Diplomatically overlooking the fact that Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek took 2,972 crates of the very finest imperial treasures with him when he fled the mainland to Taiwan in 1949 - priceless items that have never been returned - the People's Republic has shipped another exquisite cull of artwork to the island. There are just 37 pieces this time (comprising Qing dynasty paintings, vases, seals and other artifacts), and they are strictly on loan from Beijing's Palace Museum. But the gesture is unprecedented, emotionally charged and heralded as one of the fruits...
...early 1949, China's in the endgame of its civil war and Mao Zedong's communist forces are poised to take Beijing. Just south of the Yangtze, in Nanjing, Mao's archfoe, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, holds court as the leader of the Republic of China and its Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government. But Mao believes that winning Beijing first will deal a mortal blow to the morale of the KMT. En route to what will be the future People's Republic's capital, he and his top lieutenants pause in a town that has been deserted by shopkeepers and merchants...
...Political rulers everywhere rewrite and use history for their ends. But as China looms ever larger in the global consciousness, anything we can glean about its leadership is especially valuable. There's one moral in Founding, however, that Beijing probably did not intend. Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek's son, is briefing his father about his fight to rid the KMT of corruption and injustice. Chiang praises his son's idealism - and gently advises him to desist so as not to undermine the KMT at a critical juncture in the civil war. "If you go ahead," says Chiang...