Travel

Slideshow: China under construction
 

Slideshow: China under construction

Travel

Made in China

Jonathan de Villiers, Paris-based photographer and Wallpaper* regular, doesn’t shy away from a challenge. Which is just as well because when we commissioned him for our Made In China issue, it wasn’t simply a case of a return flight to Beijing.

No, we charged de Villiers with the task of photographing our Eastern Promises story; a round-up of the construction sites across China that have our pulses racing. For de Villiers this meant going from the Yangshan Deep Water Port on a formerly uninhabited island in Hangzhou Bay to the Shanghai World Expo 2010 construction site then to the Shanxi and Henan border province to take in the soaring Shenxianhe Road Bridge. And it didn’t end there.

After the dizzying depths of the Shenxianhe gorge, de Villiers marched to the Inner Mongolian town of Ordos to snap the Ordos 100 housing project in the barren, lunar landscape. His final stop was back east in Beijing where he photographed our satellite office in Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid Building.

Alongside his stunning photographs for the Made in China issue, he took plenty of his own pictures too, 1,900 in fact, from which he's edited his favourites into a chronological slideshow, showing the bits around the edges of the construction sites, and the very many culinary delights he sampled on his travels.

See W* photographer Jonathan de Villiers' pictures of his journey across China

27 May 2009 | Travel