An upcoming tome of polaroids by photographer Lukas Birk gets at the ethereal heart of the Middle Kingdom
Spurred by a sense of stagnation while living in Austria, photographer and multimedia artist Lukas Birk did what many a young, creatively minded expat has did in the aughts: moved to China to make his way. Based in Beijing, a heady, booming place that drew Birk for its ability to somehow “break with its past — to just fall completely into the new,” he founded the Austro Sino Arts Program in 2007. After rescuing a cache of expired polaroid film from his father’s trash, he came to realize its deteriorating imperfections were the perfect medium/metaphor to capture what he viewed as mix of nostalgia and melancholy in the rapidly developing country. Collected in a forthcoming tome, Polaroids from the Middle Kingdom: Old and New World Visions of China (out February 1, 2014), his images create a gorgeous and ethereal portrait of a nation and people in flux.
Or as Birk puts it, “this volume presents a sense of something from the past interrupted by modern motives, a collision of old and new world visions.”
