New Chinese Industrial Space – Pinghu

Industrial Park, PingHu 2008 copyright Douglas Stockdale –

My assignments in China have taken me to three new industrial buildings within three new industrial parks. The facility in PingHu was probably the largest facility and in the newest & largest industrial park. I did not get into the city of PingHu, except for one large group dinner at a hotel restaurant next to the lake, while I did not take any photographs on that one occasion.

What I found on this third trip into China is that ideas for projects or mini-series just kept popping into my head. During the second week of working in this facility, another idea; New (Chinese) Industrial Space. So I started taking some photographs, out windows and on the way to the various workshops, to see if this might work, using this facility and surrounding area to be representative of the new Chinese Industrial Spaces in development. And it was working for me as a very different kind of urban landscape and one that I would have some unique access to, from the inside of the facility.

Next step was to receive permission to continue making photographs throughout the facility site, which turns out the project manager is a photographer and gave me realatively unrestricted access to the facility, with the exception of the dormitories that are on site. The dormitories are where the vast majority of the 1,000 operators, mostly women, live on-site at the facility. In exchange, I had to photograph a ‘industrial’ fashion show that was going on in conjunction with their Lunar New Year company party within the week. No problems (as I thought: another potential series!).

So for me, I had a very narrow view of PingHu, most of it of the industrial park. I am sure that there is a lot more.

On reflection, I did not experience anything in the industrial park as far as the buildings that gave me the impression that I was not in an industrial park not unlike anywhere in the U.S. This picture, above, could have been taken in the industrial parks of Norco or Valencia, California. The building signs were of course in Chinese, but the design of the block type industrial buildings were not unique. Perhaps the one visual characteristic that I did find in China were the blue tinted windows. My only guess at this time for the blue tint windows may have to be the overcast and gray days that are consistently occurring through out the year, having seen blue skies only one morning in the three weeks. Another characteristic was the lack of car parking space (what you see in this photo is just about the entire parking space for cars at this huge facility), and the large quantity of parked scooters.

Now I continue editing my images of this site and finalize the name for this mini-series ;- )

Best regards, Doug

Follow-on Note: and yes, it appears that this series may be in partly in color as well.