In answering the ”Speed Up” Campaign, the high speed railway is regarded as an essential infrastructure to strengthen the national wide economic connection in China. The landscape outside the train compartment keeps arriving as the train is either approaching the next city or leaving the previous one. The window of train compartment offers a new way to perceive the city that is reshaped by the high speed train construction in China. The arriving landscape is weaving between the railway tracks, the train station, the factories at the edge of city, the urban-rural residences, and rural arable land. The scenery is also juxtaposed with several other elements of railway infrastructure such as the noise barrier and the railway bridge under construction, which provided a particular foreground as a sign of a landscape tracing the railway of high speed rail development. Arriving landscape is a multilayered landscape that every element and various composition of those elements speak for an urban condition affected by the high speed rail development. My video works featured in this particular perspective through window of a train compartment is both a documentation and critical understanding of several aspects of the arriving landscape. The gradually changing content and the speed of the landscape together with the documentation of the people’s activity associated with this window constitute a representation of the political cultural landscape of the economic development driven by the railway infrastructure.
Qinqin Wu