In the mid-1980s, just 30 years after it began, the curtain fell on China’s grand experiment with collectivization. In the decades since, life in the nation’s vast countryside has become defined by terms like marketization, privatization, and individualism. Yet, not every Chinese village abandoned the collectivist dream. Village holdouts such as Nanjie, Dazhai, and Huaxi, in central, northern, and eastern China, respectively, never fully de-collectivized. In their own ways, each stands testament to the ideals that once animated a nation — islands of red in China’s ever-expanding capitalist sea.
“Retrotopia” explores the fundamental tension between the utopian visions that lay beneath these communities and the reality of life lived inside a time capsule. Through nostalgia-tinged landscapes, quiet portraits, and evocative still-lifes, it seeks to tell the story of places that are at once radical and conservative; grand, yet mundane; relics of China’s past and ambiguous symbols of its often paradoxical present.
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