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Thread: Just came across the amazing work of Zhan Youbing, a Chinese assembly worker & security guard-turned photographer. Here're some moments of alienation captured in his collection "The denseness of being a migrant worker". This is a dorm for factory workers
A factory-wide field day in 2014
Factory keychain shelf. Workers are numbered
Discarded IDs after a factory shutdown last year
A fire drill in 2009
Factory switches and buttons
Lunchbox cabinet
Dinner party
In the past few decades, mainstream arts and literature in China have gone through a major shift to cater to the middle class and urbanites ("Labor literature" was once a popular genre in the late 70s-80s written by, for, and about workers).
But artists like Zhan Youbing are a reminder that there are nearly 300m rural migrant workers whose voices are constantly dismissed. The other case is Xu Lizhi, a 1990-born Foxconn worker and one of my favorite Chinese poets in recent years. He committed suicide in 2014.
His most well-known piece: "I swallowed a moon made of iron", translated by Nao project
Xu's story in English, and more of his poems https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry
Again, anyone who's interested in learning about a more nuanced China should follow the coverage @SixthTone, which published an article about Zhan a year ago. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1004785/the-worlds-factory%2C-on-film
