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Hocus focus

Chinese photographer Wang Qingsong is standing in front of his large-scale work Competition. This comment on China's consumer society features a massive warehouse covered in 600 posters for businesses such as Citibank and Electrolux. When asked how long it took him to find and collect the posters that adorn the warehouse walls, he looks confused.

'I didn't find them - I drew every one of them myself,' he says. 'It took me a week. I created the building in the photograph and I wrote all of the posters and stuck them up. Everything in the picture is staged and created by me.'

Wang, whose solo exhibition When Worlds Collide is showing at New York's International Centre Of Photography (ICP), works in the field of manipulative photography. Like others in the field, such as Jeff Wall, he stages and art directs his photographs in the manner of a movie director. A former painter, Wang's methodology is as far away from photojournalism and Henri Cartier-Bresson's famed 'critical moment' as it's possible to get.

Manipulative photography often leads to works of surrealism and fantasy - and that's where Wang is different. Although staged, the Beijing-based artist's photographs are tough, sometimes brutal, comments on modern Chinese society. The ICP show features large works that illustrate his artistic development over the past 15 years.

'The photographs in the exhibition throw a fresh light on present-day China, emphasising its new material wealth, its uninhibited embrace of commercial values, and the social tensions arising from the massive influx of migrant workers into its cities,' says curator Christopher Phillips, a long-time follower of Wang's work.

'One of the questions he asks is: what kind of unimagined hybrid culture is going to emerge from the collision of China and the West?'

Like any good artist, Wang is as concerned with the aesthetics of his work as the message. The content of his pictures is intricate, the staging meticulous and the colour of the prints powerful and lively.

Dream Of Migrants (2005) focuses on a large brick house set against a darkening sky. The windows and foreground are crammed with migrants and the paraphernalia of life on the move. Sentry Post (2002) is a more brutal realisation of the same idea. Depicted like a battle scene, it features a group of migrant workers trying to fight their way through a checkpoint to find work in the city. Follow Me (2003) features Wang sitting in front of a blackboard covered in basic English-language phrases. The title references a CCTV show which gave elementary English lessons to viewers.

Filmmakers often restage real events to accentuate their dramatic effect, believing, rightly or wrongly, that sometimes the truth has to be distorted for people to see it. But Wang says that wasn't his aim in staging his photographs.

'It's really more of a matter of scale,' he says. 'I travel around China a lot because that's where I find my inspiration. I observe the changes that are disrupting China. My works are inspired by memories of things that I have seen in real life.

'When I start work on a picture, I always want to put a lot of the things I've seen into it. That's why I stage the pictures - that way, I am able to get everything that I've seen into them. I make one picture so everyone can see all the things that I have seen in one place.'

Wang's pictures are not only crammed with people and objects, they are large - the bigger pictures at the exhibition measure 4 metres by 1.7 metres. It's a matter of having a big enough canvas to work on, he says: 'My work has developed from small to large. That is also true of China because Chinese modernisation has meant that things in the country have gone from small to large, too. As the Chinese economy has expanded, the scale of everything in China has got much bigger.'

His large works are usually made in one shot, he adds. But some earlier works were composites: 'Dream Of Migrants is one single shot. But some are made from five shots that I composited together.'

Wang is no dilettante when it comes to social issues. His father died in an accident in the oil fields of Daqing, and Wang took his place on the oil-drilling platform to support his family. He worked in the oilfields for eight years.

It was tough for him to get into art school - he finally managed to win a place in the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute - and hard for him to make it as an artist in Beijing. He began to make a name for himself as part of the Pop-influenced Gaudy Art movement of the mid-1990s. He decided to change from painting to photography because: 'It is easier to disrupt China with a photograph than a painting.'

Three more recent pieces at the ICP show - Skyscraper, 123456 Chops and Iron Man, all created in 2008 - herald a new direction for Wang - they are video works. Skyscraper is his comment on the Beijing municipality's decision to extend industrial development to the outskirts of the city. Wang erected his own gold building on a parcel of rural land and filmed the construction taking place.

'The resulting fast-motion film portrays the dreamlike tower - a hollow promise of a golden future - shooting up like a tiny weed in a barren landscape,' says curator Phillips.

Video would seem a good fit for an artist so adept at staging and image manipulation.

'I think it is the next stage for me and my work,' Wang says.

When Worlds Collide. Until May 8 at the International Centre Of Photography, New York

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