How Photographers Are Telling the Story of China's Warp-Speed Urbanization

I remember an early visit I made to see my father in Beijing. It was 1998, back when there were more bicycles than cars and the road out to the apartment building where he lived was still made of dirt. Elderly women perched by the side of it, peddling pork buns and ice pops; bicycles flashed in the heat, dragging carts full of watermelons for sale. In a shantytown across the way, young girls washed each others' hair with buckets and plucked chickens to ready them for dinner. When I next returned, two years later, the road was paved, and Starbucks had arrived in a shiny new location right around the corner from a dank public pit toilet.

It's strange to have nostalgia for a bygone era just a scant decade and a half past, but that is the head-snapping speed at which the beast has grown.

The time period between the last two zodiac years of the dragon is the subject of Rising Dragon, a new exhibition of contemporary Chinese photography at the San Jose Museum of Art. It charts the phenomenal urbanization of China from 2000 to 2012, during which the country left behind its largely agricultural roots to become the world's fastest-growing economy and home to many of its largest cities.

The show includes more than 100 photographs by 36 mainland Chinese artists who came of age during this period; through portraits, cityscapes, landscapes, and daily scenes from modern life, they document the erosion of millennia-old Chinese social traditions and the transition for millions to a fast-paced global society. One decade-long series by photographer Weng Fen, "Sitting on the Wall," documents the radical alteration of one city’s skyline—Haikou, on once-remote Hainan Island, the tropical "Chinese Hawaii"—with annual images that show steadily encroaching parking lots and tall buildings.