![]() ![]() Equally outlandish is the claim that BRICS expansion marks a major victory for China, Russia, and their attempts to build an anti-Western bloc among the countries of the global south-or that BRICS is the core of a new Non-Aligned Movement.Īll these potential interpretations take little heed of the internal dynamics of an expanded BRICS and their implications. An expanded BRICS will not turn the world upside down, nor does it herald the rise of a post-Western global order. Together, the 11 BRICS states will have a higher share of global GDP based on purchasing power parity than the G-7 industrialized countries.ĭepending on where you stand, you might celebrate a more powerful BRICS bloc or worry about it-but neither reaction is warranted. If economic weight is a measure of power, this will be a singularly potent group. In January, the group will add Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. ![]() At its annual summit in Johannesburg, the BRICS forum of five major emerging economies-Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa-announced a major expansion by inviting six new members. The fellowship is a joint initiative of Asia Society’s ChinaFile and Magnum Foundation.Those who believe that the world is moving to a post-Western global order saw their belief confirmed last week. Ian Teh_ photographed “Traces: From the Frontlines of Climate Change Along China’s Yellow River” as a 2014 Abigail Cohen Fellow in Documentary Photography. In removing “man” from the land, if only for an instant, he has struck a quiet blow in favor of the China it aspires to be. Teh has chosen to depict the world’s most populous country as devoid of people. The Chinese describe that as renzhi_-_“rule by man”-the invidious real-world substitute for the elusive “rule of law” that they have sought, for so long, to create. In practice, those rules are often ignored, because of corruption, cronyism, and abuses of power. One of the contradictions in China today is that, on paper, the government has a raft of stringent environmental regulations, intended to protect the air, water, and soil. ![]() This series is an alarm, an announcement of terrible beauty, heralding the advancing threat that we pose to our planet. It might be tempting to see Teh’s work as a retreat from our moment, a search for timelessness. In a country that is clamoring to get ahead (the first foreign advertisement in the Chinese press after the Cultural Revolution was for a wristwatch), these are images with no markers of fashion, no slogans or brand names to signify when they were made. Amid the throbbing of construction cranes and car horns and the bleating of cell phones, his work reminds us of a haunting silence. In the age of the selfie, Teh has returned to the classical monumental landscape. To those who know what they are seeing, these are images of protest. At Ngoring Lake, in China's western Qinghai province, he captures a moment of stillness and reflection, a perfect horizon-which is undermined by the discovery that the water level in the lake is rising because of melting permafrost and increased rainfall and snowfall due to climate change. There is, often, a harsh dissonance between the images and their captions. The farther Teh has ascended into the hills, the more fundamental his critique has become, even as his images have grown deceptively more serene. (Teh is one of two inaugural Abigail Cohen Fellows in Documentary Photography, a fellowship organized by the Asia Society and Magnum Foundation.) Eventually, he went to the origins, to the river’s source, depicted in his latest work here and in an exhibit, “Traces: Navigating the Frontline of Climate Change,” on view at Photoville, in Brooklyn. He travelled along the Yellow River, “the soul of a nation,” as he called it, which was running so low that, in 1997, it failed for the first time to reach the sea. He found a new visual register (a nearly perfect inverse of the world he had once documented)-a China of subtle grays and pale chemical yellows, and sweeping, battered landscapes. The color calmed down, the movement slowed. He was looking, he told me, for a way to capture “the price we ultimately pay or will eventually pay for our collective ambitions.” He left the industrialized eastern third of the country and ventured out to the places where people were trying to reëngineer their land in service of a new life: the construction sites and power plants and slag heaps. The more he travelled, the less he sought to focus on the individuals swept up in the country's transformations. In the years since then, Ian Teh’s images of China have changed. ![]()
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