During the 60’s, when sino-russian relationships were deteriorating, Mao decided to relocate the majority of the huge industrial and military complexes originally situated on the coasts and in the north-eastern provinces to the more remote and moutaineous areas of the Sichuan province so as to make them impervious to hypothetical aggressors. Millions of workers followed these factories, dormitory towns rose from the ground in the space of a night and it became one of the biggest population relocations in the 20th century. In a few years, what was then called “The Third Front” became the industrial pride of the People’s Republic and the symbol of national unity.

Less than a decade later, when Deng Xiaoping opted for China’s transformation into a market economy, the productivity of these factories gradually declined and one by one they were closed and abandoned.

Chen Jiagang, former architect, museum director and a native of « The Third Front », naturally took it as the subject of his first major photographic work.

In his photography, he makes deft use of his innate understanding of space and form, capturing with total mastery the colossal scale of these deserted industrial landscapes .
Presented in monumental formats obtained through the biggest photographic chambers in the world, his sumptuous images reveal, not without a tinge of nostalgia, the story of one of the greatest wastes of the last century, the waste of these cities that were once the incarnation of the socialist ideal, the glory of a nation and that are nowadays no more than vast industrial cemeteries.

In a country with one of the highest growth rates in the world, Chen Jiagang underlines the absurdity of this mad pursuit towards development that human kind has undertaken for decades.